Dignity in the desert—Proximities seminar hones students’ moral imagination

Dignity in the desert

Proximities seminar hones students’ moral imagination

April 15, 2026

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in Tucson, six Notre Dame students witnessed a jarring contradiction: a judge who treated each defendant with kindness and care while presiding over a legal process that felt to the students as more routinized than substantive. Watching 23 people in orange jumpsuits and shackles being processed simultaneously through the streamlined system, the students were struck by the impression that such proceedings did not constitute full justice.

*Students in the Justice at the Mexico-U.S. Border seminar* *walk along the border fencing (courtesy: Luke Santoni ’28)*

In a conversation after the hearing, the judge challenged the students to look beyond the bench and toward immigration legislation, urging them to consider how their own future vocations—perhaps even running for office—might one day refine the laws and regulations that he is currently bound to uphold.

That encounter served as a pivotal moment for the Justice at the Mexico-U.S. Border seminar, one of several Proximities seminars offered by the Institute for Social Concerns this spring. Now in their second year, these one-credit courses bring together students from a wide application pool to engage in rigorous analysis of pressing issues of justice.

While one cohort navigated the Sonoran Desert, other Proximities students pursued parallel examinations of structures of justice and injustice across the country: examining healthcare access in Minneapolis, analyzing environmental health and industrial policy in New Orleans, and exploring restorative justice and the use of arts to promote dignity in Philadelphia. Grounded in the conviction that understanding injustice requires getting proximate to those most affected by it, the seminars bridge interdisciplinary inquiry with immersive witness.

Engaging injustice in the desert

In Tucson, the students identified structures of injustice that define the borderlands, while also spending time with local humanitarian groups working on the front lines. Each visit challenged students to reconcile the dictates of national sovereignty with the demands of human dignity.

For Samara Jacobo ’26, a computer science major and daughter of an immigrant, the seminar collapsed the distance between academic study and lived reality. “You read about immigration justice, but the seminar allows you to witness the procedural reality for yourself,” she said. “We weren’t just observing from the outside. We were right there in the courtroom, seeing how these systems impact human lives in real time.”

At the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office, students stood among the remains of over 700 unidentified individuals. To political science major MJ Barajas ’28, this reality exposed the lethal outcomes of enforcement strategies that redirect migrant flows into remote, dangerous terrain—a policy innocuously termed “prevention through deterrence.”

*Proximities group with Catholic Worker staff members Brian Flagg (back row, third from right) and Laura (first row, second from right, from Catholic Worker)*

For Barajas and her peers, the work of the medical examiner to identify the human remains exemplified a central tenet of Catholic social teaching: the inherent dignity of each human person that is not contingent on legal status or geography. The seminar guided students to see that when policy results in the systematic loss of life, it necessitates a response rooted in the sanctity of every individual.

To process their profound encounters and experiences, students turned to the seminar’s core readings. They explored Simone Weil’s concept of rootedness—the fundamental human need for place and community—and how the loss of roots creates the stark conditions they witnessed at the border. They also reflected on their experiences through Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality as the world-engendering power of love. These readings complemented public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s reflections on the power of proximity, which anchored the course and inspired its name.

Luke Santoni ’28, a PLS major, found Arendt’s description of love especially significant. Arendt draws on St. Augustine’s phrase Amo: volo ut sis (I love you: I want you to be) to argue that love means willing another’s existence as a good in itself rather than as a means to an end. Instead of letting fear drive discussions of immigration policy, Santoni reflected that policy rooted in love begins with a recognition of the inherent worth of every human and their right simply to be.

Finding reservoirs of hope

While the reality of the desert was often sobering, the students found that their encounters with those working for justice also revealed deep reservoirs of hope. For political science and history major Dario Romero ’29, this hope was found in the workers at the Kino Border Initiative and the Tucson Samaritans who devote their lives to protecting those crossing the desert and the Catholic Worker volunteers in South Tucson who successfully advocate for the city council’s support to provide housing and health services.

*MJ Barajas ’28* *presents her final project in Andrews Auditorium*

“Yes, the system is broken,” Romero said, “but meeting people who care so deeply was heartening. It showed me that people are organizing in their own communities to help, and that makes a difference.”

Back on campus, as the four Proximities cohorts gathered to present their final projects, they found striking commonalities among the structures of justice and injustice they encountered. Students shared about detention centers they encountered in Philadelphia, and others recounted the impact of the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on communities across Minneapolis. “It’s powerful to see that even though all of these trips were so incredibly different, there were so many issues that were common and consistent throughout,” noted global affairs major Colin Gibbons ’29. “Having listened to all the presentations, I think that we all, in our own way, went to a border.”

As the seminar concluded, the students came away not with easy answers but with a developed awareness of the complex structures of injustice, a more informed perspective on how others are working to address them, and a refined understanding of how their vocations might contribute to the work of justice.

“Notre Dame calls us to be a ‘force for good,’” Romero said, “and this course strengthened my resolve to do just that in my future career.”