'The Situation Was Not Different': For Afghan Refugee in California, Ukrainian Crisis Hits Close to Home

From Ukraine to Afghanistan, Mexico and beyond, KQED Live's "Finding Asylum in California" event touched on asylum broadly as well as the U.S. immigration court system, the role of social media, and art.

Aiming to see the path of asylum-seekers to California through different lenses, KQED Newsroom host Priya David Clemens interviewed on stage Fouzia Azizi, director of refugee services at Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay, as well as Fresno City College professor and artist Caleb Duarte and KQED Immigration Senior Editor Tyche Hendricks.

Azizi helps find homes and support for those fleeing war-torn counties. That's here and now. But when Azizi saw photos and videos of the war in Ukraine, it brought her back to her time growing up in Afghanistan, she told a virtual KQED audience on a livestream last week.

"It's [taking] me back to all those memories that I had when I was in Afghanistan as a young girl seeing Russian soldiers all over the city," she said. "What I see and witness right now with Ukraine, my heart goes to these people. But the situation was not different in Afghanistan."

Caleb Duarte, who grew up in both Mexico and the U.S., is known for painting, public sculptures and community performances across the globe in places like Cuba, Honduras and India. He said his work tries to explore the human condition while empowering others to exercise art: political prisoners, children, people in disability centers. His aim is to go past the hopelessness, to see evidence of power, resistance and survival.

"We as artists, our tool is the image, the painted image, the ability to tell stories through simple actions that are kind of sometimes absurd actions that really change, can possibly change someone's perspective," Duarte said.

A 2021 project he worked on called "Burning Houses" saw Duarte and asylum-seekers in Tijuana create small, symbolic houses with the families of refugees camping at the border to highlight the hope they have for their children: to seek a new life. Duarte said he considers the project "invisible theater," with the audience being asylum-seekers.

"We decided to carry the houses through the camp and straight to the U.S.-Mexican border as a symbol as evidence of resistance, of survival, also evidence of joy," Duarte said.

The community artists then burnt the homes at the U.S.-Mexican border.

"Generally, we think of the idea of burning as such a destructive act, but it seems like you were really working to reclaim that. Why burn them?" KQED's Clemens asked Duarte.

Duarte pointed to a statement made by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who told Guatemalan immigrants at the time, "Do not come." The artists hoped to point to intervention from the U.S. into Central America throughout history, Duarte said.

"This was kind of a way of mirroring that violence," he said.

The KQED Live event also explored the policy side of the same asylum and refugee struggles. Hendricks, the KQED senior editor, joined the stage to talk about her work tracking dysfunction in U.S. immigration courts.

That may touch close to home for KQED's audience. "There's 1.7 million [immigration] cases backlogged in the U.S. San Francisco has a big court and one of the worst backlogs here as well," Hendricks said.

Understaffing and underfunding are realities for the immigration court system, Hendricks said. But the Trump administration also began prosecuting "a lot more people." The backlog can be felt keenly by individuals trying to navigate the system.

"The delays lead to these effects where, people that I've met who are preparing to make their asylum case, they prepare and prepare, if they have a lawyer, and their cases are rescheduled and canceled. And there's sort of a trauma to going back through this," Hendricks said.

And that's if a person is fortunate enough to get representation at all: There isn't a right to appointed counsel if someone can't afford a lawyer — and when they can't, that's when things can take a turn for the worse.

Hendricks said she did a recent story on a Honduran woman, Rosa Díaz, who came across the border with her children, fleeing violence and seeking asylum. But a clerical error recorded her wrong address — listing her contact info as Los Angeles, instead of the city of Maxwell — and she wasn't notified of her hearing time.

When Díaz didn't show up, immigration officials ordered her deported in her absence.

"She went to her next [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] check-in and they said, 'We're going to deport you today.' Her children were back home some 50 miles away. She walked out of the office and burst into tears," Hendricks said.

Immigrant advocates and nonprofit legal services were able to help the woman, saving her from deportation. But it was a lucky break, Hendricks said, and not an opportunity all will have.

"That, to me, speaks to the dysfunction in the courts and the lack of due process," Hendricks said.

Watch the full virtual event from KQED Live, 'Finding Asylum in California,' on YouTube.