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The fellow pulled up to our home in an ancient panel truck. “Can I park here?” he asked me in Spanish, a good question as parking is scarce in our neighborhood and he was going to be blocking some cars. I said, “Sure, this will be quick.” And quick it was. Between the two of us we hauled out a queen-sized box…

Two weeks ago, standing under the noon day sun of the border city of Del Rio, Texas, I was directing a long line of migrants and their families who had just been released from federal custody into a small building that served as the offices of the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition. Once inside the building,…

Three weeks ago I spoke with a woman via my computer. She was Haitian, with a name so sprinkled with vowels that it sounded to me like a springtime melody. Guernais. This was November, though, and Guernais had been in a Mexican border town named Reynosa since way before last spring. She had travelled a…

June 22, 2022 Many years ago I spent a long afternoon with a Jesuit priest on an isolated road in the mountains of the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. We had been traveling from one mission to another when we came upon a battered pickup truck pulled off to the side of the road. A…

On Sunday afternoons I interview asylum seekers who are living in Reynosa, Mexico, a city across from McAllen, Texas, and one of the most dangerous places in the world. I am helping a team of attorneys move the asylum seekers along a tortuous legal path to their rightful asylum hearing in the United States. The…

It takes no time at all to go from a Whataburger fast food restaurant in Brownsville, Texas to an office serving asylum-seeking individuals in Matamoros, Mexico. The trip requires sticking a dollar’s worth of quarters into a turnstile, a few minutes crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande, and then walking a couple of blocks…

September 7 2021 I got an email this past weekend asking for help in finding a boy who had been lost. His parents think that he died, but they aren’t sure of that. The fellow who reached out to me is a good man trying to do what he could to find somebody lost somewhere…

The young man’s name was Juan. He was seated across from me in the airport terminal in Harlingen,Texas. Harlingen is a city in the Rio Grande Valley, along the Texas southern border. Once upon a time, Ronald Reagan stoked the national fear for those living on the other side of our southern border by noting…

Many years ago, while serving as a Catholic priest, I was invited to celebrate Holy Week with some men who were being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Port Isabel Processing Center, located outside of Brownsville, Texas. When I asked the men which way they would like to pray, one of them…

Twenty-five years ago I got a call from someone asking if a young woman could stay at our parish rectory. “Meribel has suffered horrific abuse, someone who wants to kill her has tracked her to the Rio Grande Valley, and our group cannot find a safe place for her.” Meribel moved into our guest room.…