Hobart and William Smith Colleges

A Walk Across the Bridge

A grassroots organization led by Andrea Morris Rudnik ’82 is on the front lines of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Professor of English Melanie Conroy-Goldman traveled south last summer to lend a hand.

By Andrew Wickenden '09

There are three international bridges in Brownsville, Texas. Since 2019, Andrea Morris Rudnik ’82 and a small group of colleagues from the local school district have been back and forth countless times, offering aid to asylum seekers who have nowhere else to turn.

Team Brownsville is a small but mighty all-volunteer nonprofit, founded and managed by Rudnik and other current and former Brownsville special education teachers. In the wake of the 2018 U.S. family separation policy, they began asking friends “to buy cases of water” and other “things we could easily carry across the bridge,” Rudnik says. “Yoga mats to go under people so they wouldn’t have to sit on the hot concrete. Tarps to tie to the fence for a little bit of shade.”

By the height of the pandemic, Team Brownsville was managing infrastructure and resources for a camp of more than 1,000, just over the border in Matamoros, Mexico. Their work — which was recognized with the Anti-Defamation League’s Kay Family Award in 2020 — has morphed and evolved, adapting to influxes of asylum seekers, the pandemic, political shifts, mercurial U.S. immigration policy and intermittent funding. As Rudnik says, “The picture has changed, but it’s still people in need.”

Professor of English Melanie Conroy-Goldman joined the volunteers at Team Brownsville in August while researching her next novel, in which migration is an “important condition of the world I’m writing about.” She arrived in Brownsville, toured the area with Rudnik and began orienting recently arrived migrants to prepare them for the next steps of the asylum process.

“It took a while to understand the scope of what they’ve done and how incredible it is,” Conroy-Goldman says of Team Brownsville’s work. “They’ve obviously had volunteers, but there was no U.S. government help, no U.N. presence, no Mexican government help except in policing. The core group is these teachers who felt moved by misery they saw just a walk across the bridge.”

Conroy-Goldman’s novel is set in a near future but in many ways mirrors current real-world challenges. “The dystopian future is already here, it’s just that some people are insulated from it,” she says. “Migrants in particular live the dystopian future — it’s their present.”

Rudnik notes that issues fueling migration aren’t going away any time soon. Political repression, violence, climate change and other challenges persist in the countries that migrants are leaving for the U.S. Only a fraction of a percentage of asylum claims are granted, and despite some recent changes in policy, “there really is no good asylum system in place,” Rudnik says.

Meanwhile migrants continue to arrive, though if “the work never stops” for Rudnik, it does pay off. “To see people we had worked with for a year, now crossing into the United States — to be able to greet them, to give them a hug, it’s incredible.”