When she sees migrants in the parched land around her home in Jacumba Hot Springs, Karen Parker stops her SUV, gets out and distributes bottles of water and fruit bars and treats minor cuts and bruises. She also scans the crowd for what she calls solo kids, children really, usually teenagers, unaccompanied by an adult. One month, she helped a 12-year-old boy from Egypt. The boy's father had sent for him. She didn't ask about his mother. She may have died or stayed behind. Whatever the reason, it was probably something bad, Parker assumed, and didn't ask questions. The boy followed her around until an older woman agreed to look after him. Solo kids try to blend in, Parker said. They appear awkward and always look around; they gather in groups and smoke, ask where they can charge their phones and connect to wifi.

Up until June 4, when President Biden issued an executive order with new asylum restrictions, this rural area was the hottest spot in California por people from around the world to cross the border and then petition for asylum. The number of crossings has dropped since then, but this desert still sees groups of migrants illegally crossing, even with the threat of fast-tracked deportations.

“Everyone thinks they're from Mexico,” Parker, 61, said. “That is not the case. Every day is different. Sometimes I see a lot of people, other days I see none.”

Her involvement began in May 2023 when she woke up one morning to a woman screaming in the middle of a road near her house. Looking out her window, she saw people gathered around her. They spoke Spanish but she didn’t understand them. Parker hurried outside. She was certified in CPR and First Aid and worried the woman might be hurt, but a quick inspection revealed no injuries. A faded bracelet on the woman's left wrist showed a name, Meryem. Turkish, Parker realized, when she looked it up on her phone. Together they used Google translate to communicate. Meryem explained she left Turkey after her house collapsed in February 2023 from a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. More than 55,000 people had died. She was trying to reach family in Connecticut.

“Facebook?” Meryem asked Parker.

Parker tapped her Facebook app and Meryem found her homepage. She showed Parker photos of her two children, one 19, the other 20. They became separated after crossing the border near Jacumba. Using video call app FaceTime, she and Parker located her children in a camp not far from town. Parker drove her to them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Meryem and her children for four weeks. After their release, they traveled to Connecticut. Parker never heard from her again.

“Most people reach out afterward but then stop,” parkers said. “They go on with their lives. I don't blame them.”

Parker was born in San Diego but grew up outside of the city in Alpine, about 40 minutes east of Jacumba. She became a social worker and counseled addicts in Kings County, Wash. During the pandemic, Parker cared for her mother in Phoenix. Now retired, she lives just outside of Jacumba and cruises the backroads looking for wandering migrants in need of assistance.

Most often they collect in four unofficial areas dubbed by locals as Willows, Moon Valley, O'Neil and San Diego Gas & Electric Tower 177. Parker broke her right arm at the tower in the spring. She stepped out of her SUV, tripped and fell. A Venezuelan nurse who had crossed the border and spent the night at the tower put her arm in a splint.

When a surge in migration at the San Diego border started in the summer and fall of 2023, advocates accused Border Patrol officers of telling hundreds of asylum seekers, including children, to stay in the open-air detention facilities or they would be deported. Conditions were dire. There was no food, shelter or water. The days could be searingly hot and the nights frigidly cold. Families waited hours or days before Border Patrol agents transferred them to detention facilities for processing.

In April 2024 a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered U.S. border officials to process and move migrant children from camps throughout Southern California. At the center of the case were sites near San Diego and Jacumba. The situation has improved, “however, families still wait hours,” Parker said.

Just a few months later in July, a federal judge partially terminated court oversight of the conditions migrant children in custody experience, reversing, with exceptions, guidelines for the humane treatment of children set in the 1997 Flores Settlement agreement. While U.S. immigration policy frequently shifts, many still cross without knowing the latest legal ruling, guided by hope and desperation.

Parker recalled an afternoon when she found four elderly women clustered in a group under a tree at tower camp in wet clothes. They had been unable to keep up with their companions and sat in a circle waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up. “Even when they walk to a detention facility, the Border Patrol sends them back to one of the camps, now called staging areas, to be picked up,” Parker said.

She has met asylum seekers from Peru, Columbia, Ecuador, China, Pakistan and Iraq. Their reasons for fleeing to the U.S. varied. Gangs made life dangerous in Ecuador, Peru and Columbia; in China, Pakistan and Iraq it was the economy and secret police. And there was always government corruption.

One day at Willows Camp, Parker encountered a Syrian man. He stared at Parker with a vacant gaze. He told her he had been held by ISIS for two years. He escaped and fled to Egypt. His family sent him money and he flew to Bolivia and then made his way on foot and by bus north toward Tijuana. How he wound up in Willows Camp, Parker didn’t know. He had a compound fracture in his left foot that had healed on its own and he walked with a limp. He spoke without blinking, his words hollow, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere. He saw me but didn't see me, Parker remembered. She pointed to the tailgate of her SUV and suggested he sit. Together they ate tuna out of a can with a skinning knife.

“You are here,” Parker told him. “This is my truck, this is the town of Jacumba. It is two in the afternoon.” She gave him facts to ground him, to bring him back from wherever his mind had taken him.

“Some of them may be criminals, I'm not naive,” Parker said, “but not most of them. The Syrian man wasn’t. He just sought a better life. Why is that a crime?”