Washington Post
By Melinda Henneberger
April 1, 2014
NOGALES,
Ariz. — While Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley distributed Communion
through the slats in the tall fence at the Mexican border to believers
on the other side,
hands reached out through the bars.
“We
have lost a sense of responsibility to our brothers and sisters,’’
O’Malley said in his homily at the Mass in the Desert, quoting Pope
Francis in a sermon that highlighted
the 400 bodies found near the border every year and the 25,000
children, most of them Central American, who arrived in the United
States last year unaccompanied by an adult.
In
an interview during two days of events surrounding a push for
immigration reform, I asked O’Malley about a bishop’s remark to me
earlier in the day that comprehensive
reform was a “dead dog, and the only question is whose porch it winds
up on.”
O’Malley
laughed and said, “That’s an interesting metaphor” on “an issue on
which we’ve had many false starts.” But the way our government treats
migrants, he said, is
not something he and the seven other American bishops who came here can
ignore, or that the church as a whole can, either.
“These
immigrants are not different from our parents, grandparents and
great-grandparents who left horrific situations because they had the
courage, the ambition, the
desire to do something for their children,” he said.
During
the 20 years he worked in Washington in the 1970s and ’80s, O’Malley
said, “most of my parishioners were undocumented refugees. To me,
they’re not statistics; they’re
people, and I’ve seen the kinds of sacrifices and the suffering they’ve
endured.’’
The
inspiration for this trip, he said, “was Pope Francis’s very first
journey’’ after becoming pontiff, to the Mediterranean island of
Lampedusa, “where thousands of
people have perished trying to get into Europe, and we have a very
similar situation here.” Francis visited Lampedusa to remember the 366
migrants who died when a boat sank off its coast last October.
On
Monday, several bishops met with the weeping mother of a 16-year-old
boy shot to death by U.S. Border Patrol agents two years ago.
Authorities said the shooting occurred
after someone threw rocks at the guards, but news reports said it
wasn’t clear that the boy, Jose Antonio Elena, was involved. The boy’s
family said he had just gotten off work at a nearby convenience store
and was on his way home when he was shot 10 times.
The
bishops also crossed the border on foot and met with women staying in a
shelter run by nuns in a high-rise apartment building ringed with
plastic bags, bottles and
other trash. Three of the women said they’d been fleeing domestic abuse
when they were deported, although the shelter isn’t specifically for
abused women. A fourth said she’d been deported after she got sick in a
detention center in Eloy, Ariz., where she
was held for six months after being picked up by police at the border.
The facility, privately run by the Corrections Corp. of America, needs
to keep its beds filled to maximize profits, she observed. (According to
the Immigration Detention Justice Center,
Eloy is “under close watch by human rights groups due to the high
number of inmate fatalities.”)
In
their black clerical garb and pectoral crosses, the bishops also served
dinner to deported migrants at a soup kitchen run by the Kino Border
Initiative, named for Eusebio
Kino, a 17th-century Jesuit priest. The soup kitchen, funded in part by
a grant from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is not far from
where the 1963 Sidney Poitier movie “Lilies of the Field” was shot, said
a priest who works there.
The
small serving space has canvas walls, a tin roof and a concrete floor.
Up in the hills just across the road, adolescent lookouts with
walkie-talkies let gang members
know when deported migrants are coming across the border, and many of
the migrants are robbed or rounded up by ‘coyotes’ promising to get them
back into the United States for an exorbitant fee. “If there were a
viable legal way to get in, they would take it,’’
said the Rev. Sean Carroll, a Jesuit priest who has been working here
for the past five years.
At
the long metal tables of the soup kitchen, retired bishop Ricardo
Ramirez of Las Cruces, N.M., spoke in Spanish to three men who had been
deported. “You have the features
of a Mayan god,’’ he told Tomas Dominguez Avila, 24, who is originally
from Guatemala. Avila came north on a 15-day train trip that he spent
hiding in a space just above the train’s wheels, tied into place to keep
from falling onto the tracks. He was arrested,
he said, after authorities in Danville, Ky., where he’d been working in
a Chinese restaurant, asked to see his Social Security card.
Like
many of those here, his plan is to find a “good sponsor” — a coyote
he’d pay to smuggle him into the United States. He said he knows that
some “sponsors” rob and
even kill their customers in addition to overcharging them, “but there
are good smugglers and bad smugglers.”
Every
day in the United States, about 1,000 deportations are reported, many
of them tearing apart families. Gustavo Sanchez, 24, is desperate to get
back to the wife and
two children he was supporting with construction work in Phoenix until,
he says, he was stopped while riding a bike with no light on it at
night.
The
Catholic leaders who’ve come here to advocate for change only have to
convince a couple of key players: President Obama could curtail
deportations without congressional
approval. And House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), himself a
Catholic, would simply have to allow a vote on comprehensive immigration
reform, although he isn’t expected to do so until after the midterm
elections this fall .
“I’m
told we have the votes, so we have hopes,’’ said O’Malley, who didn’t
mention either Boehner or Obama by name. “But we’ve had hopes before.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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