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A new frontier
Religious orders plan joint effort on the border
By J.D. Long-García, jdlgarcia@catholicsun.org
August 21, 2008
NOGALES, Mexico — It’s not uncommon for pregnant women who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally to have a miscarriage on their journey.
Missionary Sister of the Eucharist Maria Engracia Robles knows this all too well. She also knows that unaccompanied women are the most vulnerable of all illegal border crossers.
“The women who migrate [illegally] need to accept that they will be raped — not once, but many times,” Sr. Engracia said.
She’s met many of these women — who have had miscarriages or been raped in the Sonoran Desert — after the U.S. Border Patrol deports them back to Mexico.
For the past year the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist have been running el Comedor, a migrant care center for deported migrants just a few hundred feet south of the Arizona border.
On Aug. 15, the sisters opened Casa de la Mujer Deportada Caminante, an apartment across the street from the care center that will house as many as eight women who have been deported.
To get to the apartment, the women will climb four stories of dusty, concrete steps. Inside, there’s a somewhat large common area, a small kitchen and two bedrooms — each with two sets of bunk beds crammed in.
It isn’t much by U.S. standards, but it will seem luxurious for the women after their time in the desert.
“It will be a place for these women to reflect that is absolutely safe,” Sr. Engracia said. “This way they’ll be able to take more time making a decision on their future.”
When the Border Patrol deports illegal immigrants, they don’t know what to do, Missionary Sister of the Eucharist Imelda Ruiz said. Before making the journey north, many migrants borrow money and the little they have, they sell.
“They want to at least earn as much as they borrowed to get over the border,” Sr. Engracia said. Migrants pay smugglers around $1,500 to bring them across the border, or around $3,000 to be smuggled through the port of entry hidden in a car.
That’s a lot of money to pay back, especially when many of the migrants — most of whom come from southern Mexico, according to the sisters — were earning less that $300 a month.
Once deported, smugglers — known as coyotes — take advantage of the migrants’ desperate situation. The coyotes offer to take the migrants into the United States as long as the migrants shoulder a heavy load of contraband — often drugs.
“Some try to cross as many as seven times,” Sr. Engracia said. “They struggle with depression. They lose everything, even the desire to cross.”
The situation is even worse for women, she explained.
“A woman in Mexico — especially an indigenous woman — is very marginalized,” Sr. Engracia said.
“The woman who crosses the desert with children will usually be the one to carry the children,” she added. “When she is deported, after being exploited on the journey, she is wrought with fear.”
A ministry of education
A problem is that many depressed migrants become dependent on services like the sisters’ migrant care center, Sr. Engracia said.
To change this, the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist will team up with Jesuits of the California province, Jesuit Refugee Service and the Mexican Province of the Society of Jesus.
This binational effort, called the Kino Border Initiative, will work closely with the bishops of the Diocese of Tucson and the Archdiocese of Hermosillo, Mexico, starting this January.
The primary social ministry of the initiative, according to the California province, will be to help staff the sisters’ migrant care center.
Sr. Engracia said the Jesuits will also provide much needed education services — to the deported migrants and also to a lukewarm Nogales community.
“The closer you get to the border, the less people are willing to talk about this complicated issue,” said Mark Potter, the assistant for social ministries in the California province. “We want to create a common space where we can discourse.”
He said the initiative will be “parish-based and reflect on the challenges the border presents in the light of the Gospel narrative and Catholic social teaching.”
“The Mexican Jesuits have a long history of doing this kind of education and formation in southern Mexico,” Potter said.
He also said the initiative will document migrants’ stories — from their journey to the border to their capture by the Border Patrol.
Joining the ongoing effort
The Kino Border Initiative offices will be in Nogales, Ariz., and will serve as a point of contact for the many U.S. humanitarian groups working on the border.
Juan Antonio, who volunteers with the No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization that aids migrants in need, said they will continue needing assistance. Antonio, who now volunteers in Nogales, Mexico, tried crossing in the past.
“You try crossing here, and you’ll find [Border Patrol agents] all over,” he said, staring across a small valley between the United States and Mexico near the Mariposa point of entry.
“You cross at night, and you’ll run into a gang member who’ll take everything you have,” he said.
Gilberto Flores heads up the effort at the aid station. He makes sure there is food ready for deported migrants making their way into Mexico.
On the way into Mexico, Maryada Vallet, who also volunteers with No More Deaths, pointed out a gaping hole in the chain-link fence.
“Some just duck in there and try to cross again,” she said, referring to deported migrants.
Vallet said No More Deaths is considering shutting down its aid center and instead lending support to the Jesuit’s Kino Border Initiative.
“We want to make the best use of our resources,” Vallet said. No More Deaths set up their aid center a few years ago and wants to be sure it’s serving migrants and not the general Nogales population.
Walt Staton, who volunteers with the organization, said that while they’ve been seeing fewer deported migrants at the Nogales aid center, they’re seeing more illegal immigrants than ever at their desert camp in Arivaca, Ariz.
No More Deaths does patrols throughout the summer, offering food, water and basic medical care for immigrants left behind by smugglers in the Sonoran Desert.
The organization also leaves behind caches of gallon water jugs in designated locations. Volunteers return to the same locations to leave more water and pick up empty bottles.
“We’re going through more water than we ever have before,” Staton said. No More Deaths has offered aid in the desert for the past five years.
Staton speculated that, while the number of crossers may be down, the border fence has channeled more illegal immigrants through their camp location — some 30 miles north of the border.
“They’ll find a way through,” he said, referring to illegal immigrants’ ability to overcome the escalated security efforts.
Staton said that volunteers are coming across groups of immigrants every day, unlike in past years, when encounters were more sporadic.
“None of the politicians are talking about the real problem — the poverty these migrants come from,” he said. “It’s not right to have to leave your home country just to earn a livable wage.”
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