Immigration | United States
We Can Welcome With Dignity. We Must.
A short history of the sanctuary and settlement house movements and the rise of humanitarianism in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas
Once upon a time, not too long ago…
…the Rio Grande Valley border was porous. Families crossed it regularly, and easily, living binational, bicultural lives. This was the era of “natural migration,” with people coming and going between work and home, and crossing from one country to the other to attend a wedding or to receive specialized medical care. Border Patrol agents ushered familiar folks through the international boundary without checking passports. They opened ports of entry when hands were needed in US fields; then waved the workers southward again, now laden with goods purchased in US stores, when the seasonal harvest was over.
In the 1970s and ’80s, a new population began to arrive at the US frontier, not as part of their daily lives, but to start new ones. This was the era of the “Dirty Wars,” when civilians throughout Central America were too often caught in the crosshairs of the violence sweeping their native lands. A 30-year genocidal war in Guatemala decimated the country’s indigenous population, leaving 200,000 dead or forcibly disappeared. El Salvador’s 12-year conflict, typified by the murder of Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero, sent 75,000 souls to the grave, disappeared 8,000 others, and displaced 550,000 more. The counter-insurgency, aka Contra War, in Nicaragua, dedicated to checking the advances of the popular revolution there, killed another 30,000 on top of the 50,000 sacrificed in the effort to overthrow the brutally repressive, US-supported Somoza-family dictatorship.
Indeed, US fingerprints could be found in each and every 20th-century Central American contest. Harnessing Cold War rhetoric to whip up historic fears of a Soviet threat right on our doorstep, successive US governments spared no expense to protect US and other foreign investments in the region, even at the cost of lives. Only Honduras escaped armed conflict at that time. But it was no less involved: Its Soto Cano (or Palmerola) Air Base became the staging ground for US-sponsored civil strife in Nicaragua as well as El Salvador. In the process, it addicted corrupt elites and officials to arms and drug trafficking — habits that have undermined regional stability ever since.
The Sanctuary Movement
Nearly one million Central Americans arrived at the US border between 1981–1990. But they find the doors of the so-called promised land closed to them. Most were deported right back where they came from, many to certain death.
The borderlands faithful found it impossible to reconcile the actions of a government that refused protection to the very victims it created. A movement sprang out of the dry Arizona desert and quickly spread east-west along the 2000-mile US-Mexico frontier. Based on the Judeo-Christian principles of welcoming the stranger, healing the sick, and giving water and
nourishment to the thirsty and hungry, participating congregations provided sanctuary to the traumatized and destitute pouring into the borderlands. They did so in open defiance of an immigration agenda they felt betrayed both religious beliefs as well as national values, the promise of the US Constitution, and internationally recognized human rights conventions to which the US was a signatory.
At the height of the sanctuary movement, over 500 houses of worship of all denominations comprised a newfangled overground railroad, willing to support Central American refugees in an act of civil disobedience. In Brownsville, Texas, the Casa Romero, established in 1980 in honor of the slain priest, cared for about 150 souls each month. Within two years, a similar number sought shelter there each day.
Peace and prosperity? For some.
The ’90s brought a glimmer of hope to the region, following the fall of the Soviet Union. Peace processes vowed to pursue justice for the worst human rights offenders. President Clinton issued a public apology, stating “that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.” Trade deals, touted as the answer to economic development and future stability, were sealed. But this was a false promise.
US intervention shifted to imposing economic polices that tilted in favor of the wealthy and against workers and environment. This set off a hemispheric “race to the bottom” in wages, while simultaneously giving right of way to destructive extractive industries. US agricultural surpluses flooding into the region crashed local economies just as international financial investments in mining and hydro-electric power displaced the rural poor. Both phenomena drove millions of small-scale farmers and agricultural workers off the land and into maquiladoras. Owned by transnational corporations that were promised low taxes and no regulations, these operations eschewed fair working conditions in favor of positive revenue. The violence of war gave way to the violence of poverty as traditional labor practices went into extinction.
Today, the distribution of wealth in Latin America is among the most unequal in the world, allowing narco-trafficking and its chief bedfellows, corruption and brutality, to spread throughout the Americas without regard for national boundaries. Add climate change to this already toxic mix — with extreme weather events either burning up or drenching the coffee and fruit-growing baskets of the Americas — and you have the perfect storm of root causes of forced migration.
While the reasons for displacement have changed over the years, refugees from Central America, and beyond, have just kept coming to the US border. The one thing that remains constant, according to Brownsville native-son, James Pace, is that they are running for their lives.
Some are ‘traditional’ asylum seekers, fleeing political persecution. or economic migrants fleeing hardship. But in this last decade, the majority of asylum seekers from Central America and parts of Mexico are victims of torture, rape, incessant gang death threats, and extortion. They are prime targets for human trafficking. They come in fear. Indeed, scores of asylum seekers returned to their respective countries have been killed within six months of their return. — James Pace
In 2013–14 and again in 2018–19, Brownsville saw an influx of Central American refugees far surpassing anything witnessed in the Dirty Wars era. Fortunately, James and his friends and colleagues at the Good Neighbor Settlement House, Jack White and Marianela Ramírez Watson, were there to receive them, and to welcome them with dignity.
The Settlement House Tradition
James‘s mother, Zenobia Pace, was a life-long Sister of Charity and the model for his faith. She coached women leaders of her local United Methodist Church Women’s Society of Christian Service. And she was one of five Methodist women to found a settlement house in Brownsville in 1952.
Called The Good Neighbor Settlement House, its mission was to serve the local poor and homeless. By 2018, Good Neighbor was supporting the needs of asylum seekers as well — just like its historic counterpart.
As the 19th century tipped into the 20th, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened their Chicago home to immigrants. They called their project Hull House and for several decades, both leaders as well as residents of Hull House adapted and expanded to serve the needs of a diverse and ever-changing population. Their good work birthed the US Settlement House Movement.
Responding to the challenges facing immigrants, especially under-educated women, they offered much more than charity: They built child care centers and schools; food banks and communal kitchens; shared laundry facilities and health clinics. They invited the participation of university scholars and local leaders, giving rise, as well, to the profession of Social Work.
By the 1920s, there were nearly 500 Hull House–inspired facilities all over the country, serving not just immigrants but the indigent and less-abled. Zenobia Pace and her colleagues established Good Neighbor Settlement House on this model. Brownsville’s Casa Romero followed suit, pivoting in the 1990s, when peace looked hopeful in Central America and refugee flows slowed, to become a “holistic Homeless Services Program” in a new location and under a new name: The Bishop E. San Pedro Ozanam Center.
In addition to delivering emergency shelter for refugees, both Ozanam and Good Neighbor continue to provide homeless prevention through case management as well as food pantry services to Brownsville’s most vulnerable: poor families, run-away youth, the elderly, and those with substance abuse problems, mental illness, and other special needs.
Security Trumps Humanity
Sadly, regional peace was fleeting. As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, civil wars gave way to drug wars. Transnational drug-smuggling operations required gangs, which quickly birthed rival cartels, whose turf battles now menace civilian populations with ever-increasing impunity throughout Latin America, up the Central American isthmus, and all the way across the 2000-mile US-Mexico border.
In 2004, tending to the needs of 200 refugees would have been considered a busy day for Rio Grande Valley humanitarians. Fast-forward to 2014, and the borderlands saw those numbers double when roughly 70,000 families and another 70,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border in a single year.
This time, refugees were fleeing crippling poverty as well as gang violence and brutality. But the so-called “Drug Wars” had by then combined with a post-9/11 zeitgeist of fear, bringing a super-charged “law and order” approach to the borderlands. Barriers both seen and unseen were erected to “secure” US citizens from potential terrorist attacks. Border patrols were replaced with Border Patrol armadas, trained to believe all crossers guilty until proven innocent.
A newly militarized border threatened to render humanitarianism obsolete. It also made the trafficking of migrants a lucrative side-line for the criminal cartels, putting at ever-greater risk the world’s most vulnerable people. Fortunately, as the drumbeat of division drove a stake into the heart of the borderlands, the call for a more compassionate response toward those in need beat more loudly as well.
The View from Ground Zero
In the spring of 2018, the winds of change blew across the border again. That April, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced “zero tolerance” for anyone who dared to cross into the US from the south. Marking all migrants — even asylum seekers — as criminals, the administration he served demanded they be treated that way.
Everyone was detained, even children, in ill-equipped processing centers meant to be temporary way stations, and for far longer than the legal three-day limit. Families were ripped apart, separated, and funneled into different bureaucratic purgatories. And rather than deliver those who were released directly to area shelters and respite centers, as per Border Patrol practice to that point, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents simply loaded them into white buses and dumped them, penniless, hungry, filthy, and confused, at Rio Grande Valley bus stations.
It was a humanitarian crisis.
“Prior to their release and while in US custody,” states James, “the migrants were thrust into cold storage detention (la hielera) from one to twelve days, with inadequate food or clothing, intense light 24/7, and, at times, so crowded in they could only sleep standing up.”
Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities RGV, was one of very few people outside the US Department of Homeland Security ever to be allowed a peek inside the now-infamous Ursula Processing Center in McAllen, Texas. “That experience has marked me forever,” she remembers.
She describes seeing close to 100 children packed into cage-like cells, with no showers, few mats to sleep on, and no room to sit or lie down, in frigid temperatures, all crying and pulling on her dress, saying, Please get me out of here. The memory remains for her, “like a dagger in my heart.”
That’s when she reached out to request the aid of other local sanctuaries and respite centers, like the Good Neighbor Settlement House, which she knew, in the right hands, was capable of scaling up to serve 800 people at a time.
“Jack, we have a problem.”
“When Sister Norma asks you to do something,” says Jack White, MSW, then Good Neighbor’s volunteer director, “you jump, and ask how high later.”
He recalls her sending him to the Brownsville bus station as the numbers of migrants landing in McAllen were reaching record highs of 800 to 1000 a day. Sure enough, he found that ICE was dropping people in Brownsville as well, 50 at a time, hundreds a day, until as late as 9 p.m. Some were released directly from la hielera processing centers, still in the same filthy clothes they’d been wearing when they crossed the border. Others had been detained in prison-like conditions for months, in some cases without knowledge of the fate of their children and spouses.
“They were traumatized. They didn’t know where they were going or how to get there. They had no money, no English, no direction,” states Jack. “When the bus station closed at midnight, they were pushed outdoors to sleep on the surrounding streets.”
Fortunately, according to James, Jack’s particular genius is in raising armies of volunteers. Five years earlier, he prevented the Good Neighbor Settlement House from having to shutter its doors by increasing its volunteer workforce. In 2018, Good Neighbor’s wheels were turning smoothly thanks to the efforts of three paid staff members and a cadre of volunteers that clocked in 1,500,000 hours annually.
That summer, Jack and his volunteers became immediately enmeshed with Sergio Cordova, Michael Benavides, and Andrea Rudnick of the just-formed Team Brownsville, a group of local educators that stepped up in the face of the crisis. They handed out travel packs pre-stuffed with water, snacks, and other necessities, like diapers. They marked up US maps with migrants’ ongoing travel itineraries; bought them meals and bus tickets; and taught them a few useful English phrases to help everyone on their way. For those whose buses were not leaving for hours or days, they ran a round-the-clock escort service to Good Neighbor, located just a few blocks away. There, staff and volunteers were moving nonstop, feeding people, outfitting them with new clothes, and bedding them down for the night after a warm shower.
“When Jack called me in September, asking me to help him with the refugee and asylee program at Good Neighbor, I immediately replied, Yes!,” recalls James. After 14 years of teaching full-time and four more years of substitute teaching, James Pace retired at 81. In the summer of 2018, at age 87, he commenced to waking up at 4:30 a.m., five mornings a week, to greet asylum seekers arriving at the Brownsville bus station from 5:30.
“James was the first person there every morning,” says Jack.
“We welcomed them with smiles, oriented them, loaned them our personal cell phones to call their friends and relatives with whom they were going to live.”
That’s also when Jack brought in another Brownsville native to aid the effort: Sister Marianela Ramírez Watson. She married into the Methodist Church in 1986 and has worked with United Methodist Women ever since. She served as president of the local chapter from 1990–93 and became district treasurer in early 2018. From September of that year, she could also be found first thing every morning at the Brownsville bus station. In addition to providing travel packs and bus routes, she also kept detailed records, becoming the primary public relations person and archivist of the humanitarian push-back against the Trump administration’s immigration agenda of “deterrence by cruelty.”
“It was an incredible time to be living and serving in Brownsville,” says Jack. “It seemed the whole community turned out to help. My job was to open up everything possible at Good Neighbor to support the humanitarian mission, secure the help and buy-in of our municipal leadership, and to inspire volunteers to take action.”
Still, the numbers of asylum seekers passing through the Rio Grande Valley were so high, Good Neighbor’s team struggled to accommodate everyone. As Jack says, “The logistics of it all threatened to stretch our capacity at times.”
No Rest for the Weary
Fortunately, in addition to Sister Norma’s Humanitarian Respite Center, The Ozanam Center, Iglesia Bautista West Brownsville, and La Posada Providencia in nearby San Benito stepped up to offer overflow shelter when the Good Neighbor Settlement House hit capacity. The collective effort hummed from the summer of 2018 through the holidays. Then, one January evening at 5 p.m., Jack received his first-ever phone call from ICE.
“They don’t usually direct communications to people like me,” he says. But they wanted him to know that instead of dropping migrants off at the bus station throughout the day, as they had been, they would henceforth be delivering them directly to Good Neighbor Settlement House. He could expect 200–300 people the very next day…starting at 7 a.m.!
This gave Jack less than 12 hours to turn an operation staffed by three into a round-the-clock system. “It was then we went into madness. What followed was expansion to a 24 hour, 7 day a week service. We put bandaids over bandaids; our medical clinic was overwhelmed; showers broke down. We had to reconfigure food preparation to provide for both refugees as well as our homeless. We had to set up sleep spaces in spare rooms over the food bank and in the community room, where we packed in up to 300 a night.”
The local police chief called ICE to give them a piece of his mind for causing an untenable public safety crisis. But somehow the Brownsville humanitarian community managed, and the “holy chaos,” as Sister Norma dubbed it, ticked along until July 2019. That’s when the Trump administration erected the most impenetrable wall of all thus far: The Migrant “Protection” Protocols (MPP), which didn’t protect anyone at all.
Rolled out in San Diego on January 24, 2019, and otherwise known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, MPP required asylum seekers to wait out, in some of the most dangerous places on Earth, the adjudication of their claims — decided in kangaroo courts under border-hugging big-top tents over video conference calls with little legal representation and no language translation other than Spanish.
It took six months for MPP to flow east with the Rio Grande. At which point, bus stations, respite centers, and shelters all over the Valley went shockingly, eerily quiet.
Reclaiming the Humanity of the Borderlands
One early afternoon, before the implementation of MPP, a teenaged girl arrived at Good Neighborhood Settlement House. She carried an infant child in her arms. Sister Marianela reached out to give the girl a hug and to help lighten her load. But the young woman recoiled in panic. She cried out, “No, you can’t take my baby!”
Marianela reassured her that she meant no harm. “You and your baby are among friends, here,” she said.
Once the young mother had settled in and regained her composure, Marianela invited her to share her story. She learned that an immigration officer at the Gateway International Bridge, the US Port of Entry connecting Brownsville with Matamoros, Mexico, had tried to take the girl’s child, not believing it was hers. And this happened just hours after the two had escaped an attempted kidnapping.
The young mother was clearly traumatized. And her story didn’t even include what forced her to run in the first place. Marianela learned only that they had flown from Guerrero, Mexico to Matamoros two days before.
“I felt good knowing I was only a few kilometers from the border with the US,” the young mother recounted. She had hailed a taxi, asking the driver to take her to the bridge, but on exiting the airport, he turned south.
She knew it was not the right direction, and told him so. He replied, “No, señora, vamos a Ciudad Victoria. No, ‘mam, we’re going to Ciudad Victoria.”
That was 320 kilometers away — the wrong way!
She demanded that he turn around and take her to Matamoros. When he didn’t, she emptied her purse of all her remaining bills and coins — about $100.
“I told him all of it was his, if he would just take me to the bridge leading to the US.”
He did, fortunately. And the mother did not subsequently lose her child to overzealous Customs and Border Protection agents, like so many.
“But what of the numerous youngsters who don’t have the resources for a bribe?” Marianela asks. “Are they condemned to be sex slaves?”
Welcome with Dignity
Stories such as this humanize the plight of migrants and refugees to the US. They call into question the labels, stereotypes, and myths used by anti-immigrant forces to justify such policies as family separation and MPP. To some, individuals like this young mother and her infant child are criminals and drug dealers coming for your jobs. They are “aliens” and “illegals” and “lazy cheaters,” who failed to migrate “the right way” — not the resourceful 15-year-old potential victim of a sex crime, running away from her abuser and toward a better future.
Like our borderlands humanitarians, we need to put a human face on the folks the Trump administration wanted to disappear into Mexico or fly back to certain harm; that the Biden administration continues to stop under Title 42 or with messages of “don’t come,” delivered just as US policies in the region continue to set fire to the proverbial Central American house.
Such stories of real people with hopes and dreams and beating hearts, seeking their human right to live without fear of persecution, reveal the power of hope and the human capacity for resilience in the face of horror and extraordinary circumstances. Pull the lens out to include them and their borderlands response and you see the double-sided coin that is humankind — capable of such darkness as well as such glorious kindness.
We can do better. We must do better. And as the folks at the Good Neighbor Settlement House prove every day, we know how: with communities of caring rather than criminalization.
All it takes is the popular will to educate social workers and trauma specialists rather than Border Patrol agents and security guards; to create childcare rather than detention centers; to raise armies of volunteers to stock food banks and cook in communal kitchens. We must harness the participation of Church, University, and local political leaders, as Jane Addams did a century ago and as Jack did when Good Neighbor faced insolvency, to provide clinics and counselors dedicated to the physical and mental health needs of human beings, no matter the language they speak or on which side of an arbitrary borderline they happen to be born.
We must, at the very least, be guided, like James, Jack, Marianella and the generations of US humanitarians, by justice.
