Local parishioners mobilize to serve border refugee centers

Terry Sprague, left, a parishioner of Our Lady of Angels Parish in Burlingame, is pictured in the Mexican border town of Matamoros with a young migrant father from Cuba and his young son. He and his pregnant wife and son are living in a refugee center while they wait for their opportunity to claim legal asylum. Sprague is on her fourth trip as a volunteer with Bay Area Border Relief serving refugees at the Humanitarian Respite Center run by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen, Texas.

June 28, 2019
Christina Gray
Catholic San Francisco

As the House of Representatives passed legislation June 25 to provide $4.5 billion in emergency funding for humanitarian aid at the U.S.-Mexico border, local Catholics are on the scene, just returning from or heading there to support families seeking legal asylum.

Parishioners of St. Ignatius, St. Agnes, Our Lady of the Pillar, St. John of God and Our Lady of Angels are making the trip to the border at their own expense to volunteer in overwhelmed refugee centers.

“Something must be done to alleviate the situation there otherwise we will be seeing more desperate fathers taking a chance in swimming across the Rio Grande after they have been refused entry to claim asylum,” said St. John of God parishioner Roberta McLaughlin, who spent nearly a month this spring at Casa del Refugiados (House of Refugees), the newest and largest refugee center run by Annunciation House, a nonprofit in El Paso, Texas, a few miles from the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.
 
The humanitarian crisis on the border came into tragic focus June 24 when Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria were photographed face down in the waters of the Rio Grande after an ill-fated attempt to cross at Matamoros, Mexico.

Martinez and his daughter died while attempting to swim across the river after they were unable to make an official request to U.S. authorities for asylum from El Salvador, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, reported.

Pope Francis expressed "immense sadness" on seeing the image of the father and child. The president of the U.S. bishops' conference and the chair of the bishops' migration committee said "this unspeakable consequence of a failed immigration system, together with growing reports of inhumane conditions for children in the custody of the federal government at the border, shock the conscience and demand immediate action."

At least 283 migrants died while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border last year, according to U.S. border patrol.

McLaughlin and her husband Jim were among five parishioners from the Sanctuary Committee of St. John of God Parish in San Francisco who traveled to Texas, in May and June, working around-the-clock for the families that passed through Casa del Refugiados.
 
“We received 350-420 migrants per day while we were there,” said McLaughlin, who was joined by parishioners Ken Hoegger, Claudia Quijane and Karen Duderstadt.  Two more SJOG Sanctuary Committee member left June 26 to volunteer at Casa Alitas, a Catholic-run safe house in Tucson, Arizona.
McLaughlin said her group spent hours each day on telephones or computers helping migrants obtain bus or airplane tickets to take them to their U.S. sponsors. The men also took turns driving a 15-seat van they rented themselves to get families to the airport or bus station and helped them navigate the bewildering schedule and security process.

Volunteers did whatever was needed in the moment, she said, from making repairs to the overburdened facility, shopping for food supplies, organizing and distributing donated clothing and shoes, filling baby bottles and rocking crying babies while their weary mothers slept.

“If we were exhausted, what must the migrants be experiencing?” said McLaughlin, who recalled seeing a large group of migrants in an outdoor arena with only tarps covering their heads.
 
“They yelled after us, ‘We have been here 35 days, please help,” she said.
 
Earlier this spring, McLaughlin and other St. John of God parishioners had attended a meeting held at St. Ignatius Parish organized by Annette Lomont, a member of the Solidarity Committee for the Jesuit parish.
Lomont had just returned from a volunteer trek to a border refugee center run by the Sisters of Loretto in El Paso and she went to work to mobilize other local Catholics to volunteer at the border.
 
Lomont told Catholic San Francisco that some migrants wept at the kindness shown to them by strangers and by the small comforts they were offered.
 
“Some of them just sobbed, especially the young mothers,” said Lomont, who recalled leading a young woman with a six-month-old baby to a shower, something she had never seen before. She put her hand under the stream of clean water and murmured, “Oh, delicious,” in Spanish.
 
Lomont contacted Annunciation House and discovered the organization’s founder, Ruben Garcia, was overwhelmed, on some days receiving up to a thousand people at one of the organization’s Costco warehouse-sized shelters.
 
Lomont's neighbor and friend Judy Reuter, a parishioner at nearby St. Agnes, helped coordinate the volunteer effort. Appeals in the Sunday bulletins of both Jesuit parishes generated dozens of inquiries and soon an informational meeting was organized at St. Ignatius.

 “This is not a holiday,” Lomont reminded the group of about 35 that included young adults, retirees and senior citizens. “You are going to work long and hard.”

A good number of volunteers could speak Spanish, said Lomont, a necessity for being able to "listen to the migrants' stories."
 
Ten-person parish delegations are scheduled into November, said Lomont, the first leaving July 13. Volunteers pay their own travel, housing and food costs, though Annunciation House offers the same housing and food to volunteers as they do migrants.
 
Our Lady of Angels parishioner Terry Sprague and Our Lady of the Pillar parishioner Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga returned July 2 to the Bay Area after volunteering for two weeks in the border city of McAllen, Texas, with grassroots organization, Bay Area Border Relief.
 
The small city gained national attention last year when federal border patrol agents locked up hundreds of migrants presenting themselves for asylum and separated parents from their children.
Sprague and Hernandez-Arriaga were there when a 26-foot truck filled with clothing, toiletries, toys and supplies donated by people from throughout the Bay Area arrived to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley’s Humanitarian Respite Center in the Diocese of Brownsville. The center was founded by Sister Norma Pimentel.

“You do find a lot of Catholic representation here,” Sprague told Catholic San Francisco in a phone call from the border where she has traveled to five times in the last year. “But you find all faiths working together.”
 “I can’t even tell you what I have seen without bursting into tears,” she said. “What you see in the news, it’s that bad and worse.”

She said she came for people like the barefoot toddler she saw as she came in to the center, filthy and hungry with matted hair and already wearing a world-weary expression.

Volunteers begin to restore dignity to the migrants by feeding them, offer them a shower, a place to rest and clean clothing and a pair of shoes.

When you begin to restore someone’s dignity, the light returns, said Sprague. “I was able to see this little girl two days later, clean, sleeping on a mat. I hope and pray that they are able to overcome the misery.”
 
St. Ignatius pastor Jesuit Father Greg Bonfiglio, fluent in Spanish, hopes to travel with one of his parish teams this  fall.

Volunteering at the border offers a “very concrete” opportunity for parishioners, many of whom are angry about the situation at the border, he said. "There is a great deal of gratitude on the part of the people who are planning to go."

Catholic News Agency contributed.