A Church Without Borders

Politico Magazine (Op-Ed)

By Fr. Sean Carroll

September 22, 2015

A Church Without Borders 

It is not every day that you receive a letter from Pope Francis.

I’d written to the pope last fall asking him to visit our outreach center for recently deported migrants in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico as part of his visit to the United States. Our student volunteers at Lourdes Catholic School in Nogales, Arizona, who also wrote to the pope, hoped beyond hope that he would respond.

Pope Francis did not disappoint. Last January, a letter arrived from the Vatican. The man many call the Migrant Pope answered us, praising the students for their work with migrants. He said, “These young people, who have come to learn how to strive against the propagation of stereotypes, from people who only see in immigration a source of illegality, social conflict and violence, can contribute much to show the world a church without borders … a church that extends to the world a culture of solidarity and care for people and families that are affected many times by heart-rending circumstances.”

While Pope Francis was not able to accept our invitation to visit, he will address Congress this week — the first pontiff to do so. What will he say about immigration? That’s a question I’ve asked myself dozens of times since I received his letter.

Will the pope stand on the floor of the Congress and remind us that how we apprehend and deport migrants speaks volumes about who we are as a people? So often the rancorous immigration debate focuses exclusively on whether we should deport upward of 11 million members of our communities, but the inhumane manner in which we carry out deportations deserves equal attention.

My six years of work at the U.S.-Mexican border have shown me that America’s deportation process treats apprehended migrants as worthless and disposable, people to be rounded up, battered, humiliated and dumped. At the outreach center, we all too often witness the unnecessary suffering meted out by an increasingly punitive, callous and unjust U.S. border enforcement system.

I wanted Pope Francis to come to the border to offer hope to Esther, who needed medical care but was told by our nation’s largest law enforcement agency while she was held in detention that Mexicans shouldn’t get care. I wanted Pope Francis to come to the border to offer hope to Alma, who reported that her daughter was fondled by one Border Patrol agent when he apprehended the two in the desert, that the agent kicked their food and covered it with sand, calling it “rat food.” I wanted Pope Francis to come to the border to offer hope to Roberto, whose ribs were cracked by a Border Patrol agent who spat on him and used his booted foot to grind Roberto’s face into the desert sand during apprehension.

If Pope Francis had come to visit our small outreach center, where we have provided 27,097 meals to migrant men, women and children from January to August of this year, he could have witnessed firsthand the condition of migrants when they arrive: hungry and thirsty after days in U.S. detention facilities, disoriented from being in an unfamiliar city and depressed because of their forced separation from family members.

He would have seen how our staff and volunteers welcome the migrants with warm meals, a place to sit and rest, care for their blisters and cuts, and reminders of their human dignity.

He would have spoken to volunteers like young Jorge, who told Francis in his letter that migrants “are treated as something less than human beings, and their hopes and dreams are crushed or even worse — when they die under the harsh conditions of the trip.” Francis would have seen in the people we serve the dehumanizing consequences of current U.S. immigration enforcement and deportation policies, the realities we see every day while ministering to the needs of the broken, battered and discarded.

Inspired by Pope Francis’ encouragement and deeply aware of the injustices many deported migrants experience, the Jesuits of Canada and the U.S. as well as the Kino Border Initiative recently released a new report based on surveys of deported migrants who passed through our outreach center. The data reveal what I already knew from personal experience: Our border enforcement system needlessly undermines the basic human rights of migrants.

One in three migrants reported having suffered abuse of some kind by the Border Patrol; 16 percent reported having been the victims of verbal abuse; 8.4 percent were subjected to racial slurs or discrimination; 14.5 percent experienced inhumane detention conditions; 15 percent reported a failure to return personal belongings; and 12 percent suffered physical assaults. The prevalence of abuse and failures to follow established procedures suggest that operational negligence and abusive behavior are endemic problems.

Our report also highlights the particularly callous tendency of deportations to separate families. Almost 65 percent of migrants who traveled north with immediate family members were separated during the apprehension, detention and deportation process. Many family separations would be easily avoided if the agency implemented a standardized process for determining familial relationships, so that one family member was not detained longer than the others and spouses, children or siblings were not deported to separate border crossings.

Too often Sister Cecilia, one of the Roman Catholic nuns who works at KBI, has had to spend hours on the phone, calling from shelter to shelter along the border to try to find husbands or brothers of women and children deported hundreds of miles away.

On one occasion Juana, a young Mexican migrant woman, showed up alone at our shelter, desperate and stranded because she was unaware of the location of her husband. It took hours for our staff to locate the man, who had been deported senselessly to Tijuana, a 12-hour bus ride from Nogales. Once deported, people like Juana and her husband were twice as likely, according to our study, to be attacked and victimized in Mexico because they didn’t have their family members to protect them.

These, and other dangerous practices like deportations at night and to dangerous locations, increase migrants’ vulnerability to crime and exploitation in Mexico. Unsafe deportations and careless disregard for the lives and security of migrants contribute to insecurity on both sides of the border.

Our own findings were also corroborated by a recent internal review by the CBP Integrity Advisory Panel, which called out U.S. Customs and Border Protection for its insufficient staff to vet Border Patrol applicants, investigate misconduct and respond to complaints. These factors have contributed to the agency’s struggle to curb corruption and inappropriate use of force by agents and officers.

Providing safe, dignified and humane repatriation, the purported goal of CBP, is not rocket science. It happens when immigration authorities proactively exercise discretion and avoid practices that deliver cruel and inhumane consequences. It happens with increased training, accountability and oversight of CBP agents and officers, including an accessible and responsive complaint process to build trust between the Border Patrol and the communities it serves and protects. It happens when there are protocols to determine family relationships among detained migrants, and when possible protocols that preserve family unity. It happens when there’s quality medical care, sanitary detention conditions and an end to border prosecution programs that swell the ranks of our federal prison populations without providing the basic due process protections. It happens when nighttime deportations end.

The Jesuits are a missionary order of Catholic priests and brothers. Pope Francis has said he became a Jesuit because he liked going to “the shantytowns, to the peripheries, being with people.” He encourages us to build a culture of solidarity, to see migrants as our brothers and sisters and to care for people who find themselves in heartbreaking situations, some literally fleeing for their lives. I too am a Jesuit priest, and my life is spent working at the margins. I have committed to working for, as the Holy Father calls it, “a culture of encounter.”

At the end of Pope Francis’ letter to the students and me, he said that our message had moved his heart. While he cannot visit us on the border this time, I am convinced that during his trip to the United States, he will raise our awareness about the lived reality of migrants by inviting us to be bearers of hope. Will our hearts be open to his message?

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com