On Friday, August 10th, the day after the Murrieta rally in Austin, my husband Andrés and I went to help the church of Cristo Rey pack up donations for the refugees. We joined a group from the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition, spending six hours on our feet, sorting and moving clothes and a few toys, so that we could pack up a truck they were renting to take to McAllen, Texas.

It was over 100 degrees all day, but luckily, we were not outside that long. I kept thinking about the refugees as they walked and walked in the heat.

The next morning we left Austin at 6 am so that we could get to McAllen’s Sacred Heart by noon. When we arrived, volunteers walked us through the process of what they do for the refugee families the border control detention centers let go, so they can stay with relatives while they await their hearing, which concerns “removal proceedings” in immigration court.

Originally —since these centers are so overcrowded— they would let a lot of refugees go, dropping them off at the Greyhound Bus Terminal with no money, no food, dirty and worn from a trip of who knew how long to the north, besides who knew how long of a detention at the center without a shower, even. The good folks of McAllen began to notice, and they would go to help.
First one, then another.

Before they realized it, McAllen and the surrounding county of Hidalgo decided this could not continue, and Catholic Charities with other religious and service organizations decided to act. They stepped in to provide shelter for these people before they had to go on their way. Thus they established Sacred Heart as the refugee center: a place for these weary travelers to shower, get fresh clothing with which to change, good home-made food to eat, and a chance to talk to people who would not turn them away, who were sympathetic to their suffering.

“Taxpayers are paying for it and they are all behind it,” Josh Ramirez, director of the city agency providing support to the immigrants, said.

Sister Norma Pimentel and her army of volunteers and donors run the shelter out of a parish hall.

The Rio Grande Valley is one of the poorest regions in the U.S. Yet since the centre opened in early June, residents, businesses and the city have contributed huge amounts of clothing, food, diapers, soaps, medical aid, legal aid and other help.”

Refugees travel by whatever means necessary to get to the border, and when they get across, they surrender to Border Patrol. At the detention center, they are held anywhere from a couple of days to as many as five or six, sometimes even more. The refugees with family who will pay for their bus ticket to join them might be released —with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a manila envelope enclosing their immigration papers that affirm stolidly, “Removal Proceedings.”

It is at this point that the shelter established only a few blocks from the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Sacred Heart takes them in. All the folks from McAllen have joined in helping these refugees, as they like to call them. It is a humanitarian crisis, they believe, and the people of McAllen are assisting with this need, as one good soul succors another.

The 57,000 unaccompanied children coming across the border are not included in the aid the center gives the children who come with mothers —along with a few fathers as well— though usually men and women are separated at the detention centers. One woman was telling me that she was placed on one side, along with her two children, while she stared at her husband on the other side of a huge room, her heart broken after all they had been through together. She felt that she would eventually be released, yet her husband, who knew? She could only gaze after him, too weary and numb from the journey to even cry.

These are the families Sacred Heart Center supports. Although the organizers have been trying for months to get in to see the unaccompanied children too, they have still not been successful. In the meantime, however, the families they do service are plenty enough. They have assisted over 6000 people already. These young families leave Sacred Heart with full stomachs, clean bodies, at least one set of clothes —besides the change they are wearing— clean shoes, socks, undergarments, and happy knowing that not everyone is like most of the border patrol and other officers they encounter at the detention centers.

With the openhearted folk they meet in the center at Sacred Heart, the refugee families realize from that first welcoming clap as they enter the doors of the church that not everyone in the United States wants to place them in crowded cells, with throngs of people swarming about them. The United States is not —unlike what they dreamed— small rooms and stinking toilets reeking next to them, all out in the open for everyone to see. Not all people believe that they deserve so little privacy, that they are worse than animals. They finally get to see the humanity of McAllen, of the United States, and that is a much-appreciated reprieve after all the suffering they have experienced.

So Sacred Heart Center has its hands more than full with the families released day and night. Both nights I volunteered to work at the bus station —making sure the mothers with their children got on their right bus— there were at least 30 people each night waiting to take buses to their varied destinations. They were going everywhere each night: from Houston to Miami, to Chicago, to Boston and New York City, to L.A. They were going north, south, east, and west. And we waited with them, during this first part of their American journey, hoping they would not encounter that same type of beast that brought most of them north to the Rio Grande Valley.

Folks who are so dead set against helping —against doing anything for these refugees— should only go to work at this center for two to three hours to change their minds. There, they will encounter an incredible system that has been established, in make shift style over the past four months, since June. The city of McAllen, with help from all types of organizations and individuals from all corners, has set up an entire system of doctors and nurses, lawyers, psychological trauma counselors. They have put up makeshift showers at Sacred Heart, a food pantry, and tables upon tables filled with clothes of all sizes. Volunteers pack clothes and food for these mothers with children —for their coming trip to their waiting families— so they will not suffer as they did struggling up through Central America and Mexico.

All this is done through a vast and still growing volunteer network, made up of wonderful people who are now coming from every state and even from other countries (a trauma counselor was flying back to Portugal on my 4th day there).

But there is one core group of main volunteers, the ones who live in McAllen, the ones who began the program, the ones who stay there and who go daily —no matter their politics— to lend a helping hand.

While the families are showering, the volunteers gather a change of clothes for them, and, depending on how long their trip is, maybe even two or three sets. Sometimes these families have to wade through six or seven different bus tickets before they reach their destination. So mothers are given one change of clothes, older children two sets, while the youngest receive three sets, since they dirty them up the quickest. Imagine all the donations McAllen is receiving, but yet still needs to receive!

Moms need to carry the food and babies, so they get the least clothing so as not to weigh them down. Volunteers put everything in one small backpack —also donated— as they have another pack that the shelter gives them with food for the road. The center has the entire system worked out.

There are volunteers who advise the mothers about their journey; they explain what their bus ride will be like, how many stops they will have to make, and how to get around the different bus stations. They also advise them and tell them what to do if no one speaks Spanish, showing them a ready-made document they carry in their paperwork with the words, “Help me, I do not speak English.” The volunteers let the young mothers call their final destination, so folks on the other side are aware when they will arrive, and these women even get to call home, to Central America, so people there know they are safe and taken care of, in a good place.

But before arriving at Sacred Heart, the detention center the Border Patrol took refugees to was far from what these families imagined the United States to be. From what these women told me time and time again, the holding cells at the detention center are just like those photographs we have all seen: 60 to 80 people in a freezing room, where they even have to sleep in the bathrooms, on the floor, without anything to cover them in the frigid rooms, hieleras, they call them. If they are placed in separate holdings, those look like dog cages, one of the young mothers told me…

This young woman also murmured that the guards took all her baby’s clothes away and left him only in diapers, so the babe was shivering, trembling, his lips blue with cold. When she asked for something to cover him, they did give her a thermal blanket, but they did not explain what it was. These poor people from Central America, who have been en route for days and are confused and tired, who have never seen anything like thermal blankets, and guards give them sheets that look like foil paper? What was the young mother to think? These Americans were mocking her! She began to cry inconsolably, holding on to her child desperately to give him her body’s warmth, crying her hot tears into his frosty skin.

The young mother continued… the guards did not feed them well at all. She was there for 24 hours or so, and she received one small bottle of water and a tortilla with a little rice and beans. That was it. This mother was nursing. Another nursing mother told me they fed her only apples for two days straight. She thought she would faint. Since this young mother had begun her trip, she had lost 8 pounds and her baby six. On one of the last days I was there, I was taking care of two sisters, a young one and a teenager. They were so happy to be there, to get clean clothes and to eat a decent meal. They drank the soup the volunteers served as if they had never tasted anything so good. Then they went for seconds lickety-split.

When I took the girls to the showers with their change of clothing, they were excited to put on and show off their “new” things. But a few minutes into the shower, the teen called out to me. I came over, and she held out her long thin arm to me, saying that she didn’t think she could stand. I glimpsed her falling figure from behind the half open shower door, trying as hard as she could to keep from fainting. She looked at me desperately: “I think I am going to be sick… I am so so sorry…” I told her to throw up right there, not to worry about anything; it was very easy to pick it up from the shower stall. She was ashamed to be sick, yet I knew what was causing it.

The detention centers do not feed these refugees for days, or they feed them very little and badly. When they finally do eat (homemade chicken soup!), their stomachs are so empty that many cannot hold anything in. I heard more about the conditions at the immigration holding cell from this girl’s mother. Too many people have told me the same stories over and over again to be making these accounts up.

Besides, my thrown up clothes are proof positive that all these women are speaking the truth…

I talked with an indigenous woman who voiced a broken Spanish, a second language for her. Her native tongue was K’iche’, one of several Mayan languages spoken by the Guatemalans fleeing from the central highlands of their country. Another woman had her baby taken to the hospital in McAllen, waiting days for him to get out. She had her baby en route to freedom, she said; she started out in Honduras but delivered her baby in Guatemala. She was released from the hospital overnight, then she took off again with the newborn. She would not stay in that country of death.

Why would she remain in another violent country she did not know? The young woman just kept going. When she made it to immigration at the border, she collapsed. The guard at least rushed both mother and child to the hospital, the child dehydrated. They released the baby finally, a few days after releasing the mother to Sacred Heart. She was so grateful to be in a place that was taking care of her instead of shipping her out… The smile this young woman beamed as she left the center a few days later, baby against her breast, in a brand new baby pouch sling —carrying a bag filled with diapers, baby food, and clothes for the baby until she reached her own mother and father— she would never forget her stay at McAllen.

And we would never forget her.

Have we thought about what it must be like to live in a place where we would rather deliver our baby on the road, then get up and go, rather than stay the violence of living there, or having our children grow up in the vehemence of the times, go to school there, become educated in misery? Have we realized what a journey must mean to someone who speaks no English, very little Spanish, but who would rather live that, than stay in her home country, because that only means certain death? Do we realize what strength we must have to go it alone, with small children, to risk everything, to move to an unknown place in the cold north called Sioux City, Iowa? Most likely we probably don’t know how to pronounce or even find the place, yet we know we would risk anything for the sake of our children…

How can we say these families are not refugees?

A young mother told me she was walking along the river, on a high cliff, and she saw that alligators were nearby below. Whether this was really so or imagined —what she had been told by coyotes[1] trying to scare her— it had worked, but not enough to stop her from going forward. She instructed her young son to keep throwing pebbles ahead of him as they walked, to keep his eyes peeled for any movement; alligators were afraid of falling rocks, she said. When mother and son were flung into the river by the smuggler who turned away —with the money they paid him in his pocket— she held on to her son and kept wading frantically on to the other side.

I’ve been telling these young mothers to make sure to seek a lawyer before going to their court dates. In their pack of papers, they receive a list of pro bono places where they can seek help once they get to their destinations. I don’t know, though. Those places must be overwhelmed with work too …

Still, if everyone helps out —as the folks in McAllen have been helping, as folks everywhere have been flocking to places like this embracing city— things will work out. I think, most of all, people are good and kind. Most folks want to help others; they believe in justice. And I would surmise most understand, undoubtedly, that these refugees are escaping a violence and horror we cannot even imagine.

Think, how bad can things be that a woman leaves her country, not even speaking Spanish —never mind English— because she fears for her life? How can anyone say that she wants to leave her homeland, to come to a country where she does not understand and is not understood? That she wants to take advantage of us?

These are brave women, brave children. I admire their courage, and I commend their spirit. But I also admire the brave women and men I met in McAllen, who have put aside their differences to help others in need. Because that is what good people do.

I only hope that as teachers, we can continue to do the same.

[1] A coyote is a person who smuggles Latin Americans across the US border, typically for a high fee.

If you would like to further help with the Refugee Crisis:

Catholic Charities:

https://www.catholiccharitiesrgv.org

The Texas Interfaith Center: “How You Can Help”

https://texasinterfaithcenter.org/article/how-you-can-help-humanitarian-crisis-border

The Department of State Health Services:

DSHSBorderIssues@DSHS.State.TX.US

It has created an email address which may be used as a single point of contact for requests for volunteerism and other external inquiries related to current border issues.

Also, if people would like to give monetary assistance:

https://www.supportkind.org/en/donate

Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) offers legal services to children facing the labyrinth immigration legal system alone. You can contribute through PayPal or with your credit card.

Besos, not borders,

Ana M. Fores Tamayo, Adjunct Justice

Petition: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/better-pay-for-adjuncts
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/AdjunctJustice
Tumblr: https://adjunctjustice.tumblr.com

Also, see the other posts in this series by Ana Maria Fores Tamayo:

1. Anti-Immigration Murrieta Nasties Battle Besos, Not Borders
2. McAllen’s Sacred Heart Leads Efforts Helping Refugee Families
3. Helping with the Refugee Crisis at the Border: A Photo Essay

Here is an image gallery for the entire three part series: