Last week I was visiting with a couple of guys in the Catholic Charities’ Respite Center in McAllen. They were helping clean up the kitchen and I was poking around the cabinets,  looking for garbage bags, trying to do my small part in offering hospitality to the stranger.

They told me how hard it had been to leave home. Both had horrific stories about why they had to leave. A fellow from Honduras told me that he had intervened in an assault on an American woman. “I testified against this guy,” the Honduran told me, “and he gets convicted and given twenty years in jail, but, you know, he was related to the local police chief and was let out after a couple of weeks. Then he and his gang came after me. I was lucky to get away. But how I miss my family.”

The other man, a Nicaraguan, had a similar story, but, as he wrapped up his story, the both of them said, “You know, you really need to talk to this other guy. He really has had a hard time.”

They brought a young father from El Salvador over to me. We sat down at one of the tables in the small dining area. After a long moment, he told me that he and his five-year-old daughter had left El Salvador some five weeks ago. He said that the journey was hard, but that the worst that had happened to them occurred right as they reached the border region.

“We had passed a Mexican immigration checkpoint,” he said, “Just before you get to Reynosa (the Mexican city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas) and a Mexican state police car pulled our bus over.”

He told me that he knew to pay attention and that he noted that the police car was numbered “192”.

Shortly after being stopped, a group of men armed “only with machetes and knives” pulled up in pickup trucks, commandeered the bus and drove it some miles down a dirt road. The immigrants were led off of the bus and taken into a large, two story building where the children were separated from their parents and taken to the building’s second floor. 

The adults were put into a large space on the ground floor. They were tied up and then told that they had been kidnapped.

“It was a terrible, terrible two weeks that we spent there,” he said. “I had no idea what was happening to my little girl, they beat us up, they hardly fed us.”

He paused a moment and then said, indignantly, “They stripped me naked and made me tape a message to my family, demanding money. They made my family look at my naked body.”

At some point, he told me, another group of men showed up at the barn and freed the captives.

“I don’t know who they were, but they saved us from being murdered, of that I am sure,” he told me. And with that, his five year old, who had been playing with some other children at the center, came into the room and crawled up into his lap. He introduced me to her; she shyly smiled and told me her name.

Her father thanked me for listening. He stood up, and gathered his things. “We have to catch the 4:30pm bus,” he told me, and he walked away, through the doorway, and down the street toward the bus terminal.

It was only later, while telling the story to the woman I try to serve as husband, she being a pediatrician, that I appreciated the father’s horror during those two weeks.

“You know,” the doctor said to me, “that little girl could have been raped.”

Just a week after I had heard this story, the Washington Post reported that the United States and Mexico were close to an agreement that those seeking asylum in the United States would stay in Mexico, a “safe third country” while their requests were evaluated.

There are many places in the world that are not safe for five year olds. The adults in the world are charged with looking out for the well-being of those children. That is a considerably low bar as a measure of a civilization, but one to which we, as a nation, should aspire.

I know at least one five year old and a pediatrician who would agree.

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