UncategorizedForty-Two Lawyers in Line

Earlier this year, more than forty immigration lawyers of twenty different nationalities boarded a bus in San Diego bound for Tijuana. We were attending an international immigration law conference, and that afternoon the program had something different in store: crossing the border ourselves.
Entering Mexico was more or less what many expected, though not entirely. There were questions, a few nerves, the unavoidable anxiety of anyone crossing a border even with every document in order. In under thirty minutes, forty-two lawyers had made it to the other side. In that direction, the border felt manageable.
The way back was another story. Two hours in line on a Sunday night, at the San Ysidro pedestrian crossing, one of the busiest border points in the world. More detailed questions, closer inspections, the uncertainty of not knowing how long it would take or what each of us would find at the end. Around us were faces we knew well on paper but rarely see up close: the astonishment, the exhaustion, the fear of someone with no control over what comes next. We had passports, documents, Global Entry, and even so, we felt something. The last of our group took longer than expected, and for a moment we thought they had been pulled into secondary inspection. When they finally appeared, the relief was collective. It wasn’t funny at the time. Eventually it became the story we all remember: the one who simply wanted a passport stamp as a keepsake.

Tijuana gave us more than we expected. We spent time with Adolfo Dávila, a Mexican documentary filmmaker who has spent years chronicling life at the border. Listening to him while we looked at the wall up close was a different experience from reading about it. And we ate Caesar salad, which was born right there, in Tijuana, in the 1920s. Not everything at the border is drama.

The context could not have been more charged. We were in the middle of the 2026 World Cup, with Iran’s national team training in Tijuana because it could not stay on U.S. soil, a direct consequence of the conflict between the two countries. This is not merely a sports footnote; it is the most concrete image of what happens when immigration policy, geopolitics and sport collide at a single physical point. A national team that had qualified for the World Cup, visas in hand, forced to cross the border every day to play in a tournament that is supposed to celebrate the world coming together. Its players could enter; its fans could not. Its coaching staff, in many cases, could not either. For a group of immigration lawyers standing before that same wall, this reality was not abstract. It was our daily work, turned into an image.
What stayed with me was not the wall or the statistics. It was the distance between what we know and what we feel. Those of us in that line have spent years explaining immigration law, drafting arguments, building case files. But spending two hours in that line, surrounded by people who make that same journey every week because it is the only way to their work, their family, the life they have built on both sides, shifts something.
It was not the first time I crossed a border, and it will not be the last. But there is something about living it surrounded by colleagues who spend their lives advising others how to do it, in the middle of one of the most tense moments in U.S. immigration policy, that refreshes your perspective and brings you back down to earth. It is one thing to give the advice; it is another to stand in the line.