Alice counseled rescued women at border shelters and scouted rickshaws for trafficking victims disguised as relatives of their captors.
In Tapachula, the largest city near the Guatemalan border, shelters which once served transient migrants hoping to find work in the US are now full of frightened asylum seekers.
As the Trump administration expands the number of people detained at the border, shelters and detention facilities are ramping up their roles as makeshift schools, teaching English and civics classes, offering cooking lessons and setting up field trips to art museums.
The vocabulary they used included the words boat, camp, dinghy, crisis, border, shelter, journey, sea, desperate, safe, flee, travel, and trek.
Elder and Merkt are employees of Casa Oscar Romero, a border shelter at San Benito, Tex., for Central Americans that is sponsored by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville.
The border shelter where Muniya stopped, Sacred Heart, saw the number of migrants arriving drop at the end of last year only to increase recently, said the director, Sister Norma Pimentel.
Living within secure borders, sheltered by their country's immense military, economic and cultural power, they show little interest in exploring the connections between other societies and their own.
Kobane, a major Kurdish city on the Turkish border which shelters a population of at least 200,000, has been the scene of battles between Isis and fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG), bolstered by hundreds of Turkish Kurdish fighters and FSA battalions.
Some 1,500 people had fled their homes along the disputed border to shelters, they added.
It was during this time in the Cambodian border refugee shelters that my family was injured by errant RPG explosives.
We wave across desultory barbed wire at bored border guards sheltering from the sub-tropical rain.
