Social Justice Education
Border enforcement and free-trade policies directly affect the lives of working people and immigrants. Researchers, advocates, and activists for human rights can find history and resources on this site.
Women and Globalization
Exploitation in global factories has led women workers to fight for fair wages and empower themselves through fair trade networks.
Reimagining the Border
With social critique and humor artists and activists reimagine human relationships along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Immigration and Detention
Women on the Border offers resources for the struggle to uphold the human rights of migrants and the undocumented.
Our History
Women on the Border was founded in 2001 to support the empowerment of women working in the NAFTA factories (maquiladoras) at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In recent years, as U.S. policy has become more hostile than ever to migrants, workers, and people of color, Women on the Border has sought to promote scholarship and activism calling for freedom, justice and human dignity.
Read Our Blog
Josefina Castillo, Co-founder and Director
DR. JOSEFINA CASTILLO: “As a sociologist and as a woman, I’ve always been concerned with issues that address social and gender equality. Also my faith has always influenced my personal stance and beliefs in non-violent conflict transformation. These factors have...
Elvia R. Arriola, Founder and Director
ELVIA ROSALES ARRIOLA is a Latina, feminist critical legal theorist. She has a JD from UC Berkeley and an MA in American History from NYU. She is a former ACLU Karpatkin Fellow (1983-84) and Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State...
Executive Director Sara Phalen
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SARA PHALEN is based in West Chicago, Illinois. She first connected to Women on the Border in 2005 on an NIU law student delegation as part of a course on women and globalization designed by then director and professor Arriola. She became a Board...
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WOMEN ON THE BORDER
(opens in a new tab)Social justice education.
‘I’d rather die here than in Africa’: Migrants describe violent deportation flight
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More than 25,000 people have been expelled to "third countries" under Trump, including to dangerous and conflict-ridden nations such as the Central Africa Republic.
