Despite that she’s as slim as can be, fit as a fiddle, and runs on little sustenance or water most days, even though they’re packed with professional and service work and mom duties and being there for her friends and keeping up with her big family, Becca Niburg asked me a couple times last week for recipe recommendations. She cooks too!
But me–of all people. I’m a horrible cook. The only thing I can “make” is Basmati rice in a rice cooker. Oh, and I can boil water, too. Anyway, I decided to order Becca a cookbook online called Pakistani and North Indian Cooking for Students and Beginners by Syed Abbas Raza. We’re both big fans of South Asian cuisine, and I’d heard good things about this book from several friends of mine. And I own it and love it!
Her Background Comes to the Foreground
Becca, a local immigration attorney, HoCo resident, and powerhouse progressive activist had just returned from a trip to El Paso, which is on the border between Texas and Juarez, Mexico on Sunday, August 18th. She worked with a group called HIAS to counsel would-be immigrants from all over before they crossed the border to assist them in presenting a convincing case to United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP). She’d been there for six days, August 12th to 16th, and I wanted a run-down of her experience.
“Robert, do you want to go to that South Asian supermarket on Red Branch Road, Desi Bazaar?” she asked me over the phone the Sunday after she returned from her stay in El Paso. She said she’d tell me all about El Paso after she got the ingredients to make chholay, a scrumptious chickpea recipe, while she’d cook it back at her home in Laurel.
I got to the shopping complex where Desi Bazaar is located a few minutes before we were scheduled to meet.
And I thought about a part of what makes Becca special and frequently inspires me. When she sees a problem, her mind immediately begins looking at solutions. She sees the obstacles and challenges only as part of a puzzle to be solved. And she gets to solving that puzzle. In fact, she once told me that at a former job of hers she wanted more challenges! Becca’s also deeply compassionate. This is probably why her employer, a local immigration advocacy organization acceded to her request to spend six days working with HIAS.
“I mentor pro bono attorneys with no immigration experience to handle immigrant kids cases,” she said of her day-to-day nine to five.
Becca will, as she said to me once, give a person the shirt off her back as soon as she meets them. And it’s true. I can attest to that. It’s probably why RoCo became fast, close friends with her upon moving to Howard County two years ago.
She’s been working in immigration law for the past 15 years.
Three weeks ago, Becca crowdfunded her sojourn to Mexico on Facebook, getting donations from friends and friends of friends to pay for her airfare and hotel stay faster than she could keep up with them–the first night she posted the request, in fact. She wrote an online thank you to those who donated money, airline miles, and hotel points to her the next day.
Don’t Mess With Texas
“In El Paso, I was just trying to help. El Paso is one of the places the immigrants are being held, so there was a pretty big need right there,” she said.
Becca was at a mini-crossroads that day, having a personal gerangl, as we say in Yiddish, or conflict. For all the good she does, both professionally and as an activist, she said she’d wondered in El Paso if she were having any effect.
“In the moment, and with the individual cases I worked on there, I felt like, ‘Sure, I helped these people,'” she told me as we both ambled back to our cars outside the South Asia market. She looked over at me, squinting in the sunlight and holding her hand up to her forehead to guard it. “But I’m not sure I’m making a difference in the bigger picture. The problem is so big. You know what I mean?”
I nodded yes, but I had to disagree with her. I reached over and pulled out a Pakola from the reusable bag Becca always carries with her that we’d put the groceries in and that was hanging on her shoulder. It’s a Pakistani green-hued, cream-soda-y drink that one of my best friends, a Pakistani by birth named Baqir who immigrated here in 1968, introduced me to. I always get one when I’m at a South Asian grocery store. I popped it open and made sure to relish one of my favorite sounds: the pop of an opened aluminum can and the quiet, constant fizz of the carbonated drink thereafter. I took a sip of the green liquid inside the can.
“I think in El Paso and in your daily work and in all the activism you do, you make a big difference. I know the problem of immigration is so big…”—she nodded at this—“but you’re making a difference. You are,” I said, sipping my Pakola again.
Her bright blue eyes took on a slightly perked-up hue as a hot breeze whipped by us. I put my arm around her. I could feel her clavicle and shoulder bones. I told her the Talmudic proverb: “He who saves one life saves the world entire.” She’s Jewish and was familiar with it but said she appreciated being reminded of it.
We decided to go back to her place to talk more while she cooked chholay (curried chickpeas) from the recipe in the cookbook I’d given her.
Becca showered and donned a lovely light blue maxi dress with tank sleeves. She started preparing the ingredients for the chholay. She chopped the tomatoes, green chilis, and onion with a knife that had a giraffe print on it, which I said I liked and she smiled proudly. She kept the chopped ingredients in neat piles on a cutting board. The onions made her tear up. As she wiped her cheeks with the back of her free hand, I felt like giving her a hug. But I didn’t, as we were in the middle of a conversation about her early life.
Becca was born in Evanston, Illinois. When she was three, her family moved to Grafton, Massachusetts. Of course, now she’s a HoCo-an through and through.
She got her B.A. in International Studies with a minor in Russian Language in 2000 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then got two concurrent advanced degrees: a Master’s in European Studies and a J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. Later, she went back to the Midwest to be near her family. But before that, during her second year at Washington, she studied abroad in Moscow. She met her ex-husband, Sam there. He was born in Stockholm but was working in marketing in Moscow when they met. He still works in that field but lives here in HoCo, too. They co-parent their children.
After Becca graduated from law school the Niburgs moved to Maryland because Becca got a clerkship with a judge in Baltimore with the state Court of Special Appeals. Then, she got her first immigration case–helping Sam get his citizenship. After a two-year stint at her father’s law firm in North Carolina, then, Becca got a job at the Department of Justice, and she and her family moved back to this area.
“I got my undergraduate degree in International Relations because I was really interested in bridging gaps between cultures,” she said as her kitchen exhaust fan inhaled cooking fumes and she carefully slid ingredients into a frying pan.
From 2008 to 2015, Becca worked from home for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Also: I talked to Regina Clay, a holder of multiple official titles of HoCo’s spiritual life.
“At that point, I went to a different office of DHS because I was going a little stir crazy being at home by myself,” she said, raising her eyebrows as she looked down at the spices she was adding to the frying pan that would soon congeal and become the masala for the chholay. She worked at the Potomac Service Center until 2017.
“I was overseeing officers who were adjudicating immigration petitions,” she said, pausing to look for cumin seeds, raising herself up on her toes. 2017 was when the Howard County Council considered the notorious bill, CB9, to make HoCo a sanctuary city for immigrants. Its supporters and opponents went head-to-head in intense advocacy. Becca testified on behalf of it. She got to know the political, activist, advocacy, and non-profit lay of the land here.
A Rule of Thumb Is Three
Back in El Paso, there was a three-step process to get across the bridge over the Rio Grande River at the El Paso/Juarez crossing. First migrants had to put five pesos or $.30 into a turnstile to get on the bridge. Then, migrants would walk to the top of the bridge, but Customs and Border Protection was implementing the Trump Administration policy not to let anyone in who didn’t have a passport or a green card and to discourage people from seeking asylum. The third step was basically what you see at the airport, Becca said to me as some cooking oil crackled and flew out of the frying pan, some of it onto her. She paid it no mind.
As Becca chopped tomatoes, which made a clipped, crunching sound, she said the advocates there sought to put in migrants’ appearance forms to officially register as their attorneys.
Becca was mostly involved in the first part of the process.
“I was screening to see if they had a case, primarily, so that if they did have a good case, HIAS can find them an attorney to take the case pro bono,” she said.
Unjust Things Comes In Threes
The first four days of her five there, Becca and her advocate colleagues started their days by doing basic Know Your Rights training to would-be asylum-seekers.
“We’d tell them, ‘Here’s what asylum is, here’s what your documents mean,’ that kind of thing.
They’d then have a basic conversation with people individually, asking them how their time in Mexico was and why they were seeking asylum.
“We’d let them know if there was a pretty strong claim there and we thought we could help, or we’d tell them they didn’t have a claim at all, or—and this was the hardest one—we’d have to tell some people they did have a claim but in Texas, they just weren’t going to win.
HIAS had attorneys in Mexico if those last category of migrants wanted to pursue asylum in Mexico, especially with the Trump Administration’s Remain In Mexico policy that encourages Customs and Border Patrol to tell migrants to go back to Mexico from the border and seek asylum from there.
“We told them we could help them do that because the laws in Mexico are a little bit better,” Becca said looking at a bunch of coriander sideways as she diced it.
Three cases that Becca saw stayed with me–horrified me, really–as Becca told me about them, particularly since she is still waiting for the updates she requested HIAS give her on them.
One was a lesbian couple, consisting of one woman who was 22 and had a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and another who was 19, whom a gang had threatened to rape and tried to wrench the daughter they were raising out of the biological mother’s arms. They were sleeping on the street in Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
Another case involved 12 transgender women who a fellow-advocate of Becca’s had told CBP she would be bringing across the bridge, but they tried to stop them anyway.
Finally, there was a case that made “all hell break loose” on Friday, her last day volunteering. A doctor working with the detention center put in a request to the court to force-feed two men from somwhere in India, perhaps Kashmir, Becca said, on a hunger strike. They said they’d rather die than go back. They’d lost 16-18% of their body weight.
“I genuinely think the doctor cared about them and this wasn’t an easy choice for her,” Becca said, sighing.
Getting Involved
When I asked her more about her background in volunteer immigration advocacy, Becca said, as she stirred masala with a spatula, until CB9, particularly with her federal status as a government employee, that she thought she should lay low despite her strong feelings in favor of various progressive issues. Her decision to speak out was also based on many misunderstandings by pro-and-con CB9 activists on how the government works. As a seasoned federal employee, she felt compelled to set the record straight. Then County Council-members Calvin Ball and Jen Terrasa, whom she befriended, were glad to have a go-to person for information on immigration issues.
“I met them and they were like, ‘Oh! Someone who actually knows what she’s talking about!'” she said, and we both laughed as they scrumptious cooking odors got more intense. “I think Jen and Calvin recognized that I was actually somebody who knew about the process and what was actually going on, unlike a lot of other people who were just making assumptions.”
Becca met John Greene, Esq. then, a local immigration attorney who owns his own a one-person firm in HoCo. He offered her a job, and she took it.
“I was thinking of getting out of government and met with him for an informational interview about the immigration scene in Howard County and he asked if I was asking him for a job,” she told me. She hadn’t anticipated it would turn into a job offer, but it did, but she was glad it did. While working for John for two years, she got more and more involved in local politics. She got hired as a Field Organizer for Team Howard, a collection of progressive workers who banded together to get the Democratic candidates elected during the 2018 local elections. She then joined then-candidate for State Senator in District 9 Katie Frye Hester. There was a Blue Wave in HoCo last years, including Katie’s win in her relatively conservative district.
A Piece In a Fractured Whole
“The whole system is broken. And sometimes I felt like I was just a cog in an process that I wasn’t sure was working,” she said
Becca’s work in immigration law and specifically El Paso, is like a recipe, I thought to myself then. If she follows the “recipe” to aid immigrants, it will make a difference. That’s how recipes work. Maybe they don’t always turn out as consistently reliable as, say, and algorithm–input in, output out–and it’s an art. But even so, if Becca keeps doing what she does at KIND and with HIAS in El Paso, it will always have positive results. And I think that includes in situations as harrowing as the ones we’d discussed earlier.
Finally, I got her to say it.
“Ok, so at the end of the day, I guess I did feel like I accomplished something. And I had an impact,” she said, in a faux-grudging tone, smiling.
She looked down at her plate of chholay, and nodded. We both dug in to our–ingredient-based–chholay and shared a pleasent meal.
“I may even volunteer with HIAS again,” she said loking up at me after swallowing her first bite of chickpeas.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.