EL PASO – Amid shifting politics, rampant misinformation, and exasperated and fearful crowds converging on the desert city of El Paso, on the border with Mexico, religious leaders are scrambling to provide shelter and encouragement for migrants fleeing poverty and the conflicts.
Along with prayers, they advise migrants on the daunting challenges that await them on American soil, with huge delays in asylum hearings and recently announced measures by the Joe Biden administration that many see as stricter than those just expired. , known as Title 42.
During Thursday morning Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a few blocks from the Mexican border, the Rev. Daniel Mora prayed for goodwill to welcome the throngs of migrants expected to pour into the city and the gym. church-turned-shelter after pandemic-era restrictions on asylum seekers were lifted overnight.
“So that the promises of asylum in this country are renewed,” Mora said during the mass. In an office adjacent to the historic sanctuary, one of his fellow Jesuits prepared to visit a shelter in another El Paso parish to counsel migrants who had already crossed illegally and been apprehended.
“You know that this is a part, we are halfway there,” says Tatiana Gámez, a Colombian mother who was released by immigration authorities to a small shelter run by the Catholic parish of San Francisco Javier, just across one of El Paso’s three international bridges.
“We don’t know what will happen to (the) asylum, but already being safe here is a relief,” he adds. He had listened intently to one of several daily talks on legal issues that Father Mike Gallagher gives to newly released migrants. Gallagher is also a lawyer with the Jesuit Refugee Service/USA.
Gámez and more than half a dozen members of his family, including a pregnant niece and the niece’s 2-year-old daughter, decided to flee Colombia after being threatened in connection with a piece of land they owned there.
They illegally crossed through a hole in the barbed wire that Texas National Guard soldiers installed 17 miles (27 kilometers) along the dusty banks of the Rio Grande (Rio Grande in the United States). ) to avoid mass crossovers when Title 42 was originally expected to be lifted in December.
“We wanted to do things right,” Gámez adds through tears. But they saw more than a thousand migrants lined up, under the relentless sun and strong winds, looking for a chance to be let in by US officials, as they have been doing for months.
Learning that some migrants had slept there for days under constant threat of being kidnapped by Mexican cartels for ransom, and fearing a wave of swift deportations starting Friday, they decided to climb through the hole and spent six days in detention. before being released to the shelter.
Religious leaders said one reason for the huge surge in immigrants earlier this week was the widespread belief that the end of Title 42 restrictions would lead to more deportations of illegal immigrants, who now face a possible bar from returning. to the United States for five years.
“Their main priority is trying to get in,” says María Sajquim de Torres, director of the national program for the Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, which also provides counselors in shelters so migrants can begin to process trauma —from rape to extortion— that most faced along the way.
More than a thousand migrants gathered outside the Sacred Heart shelter earlier this week. Authorities closed the street in front of it last Sunday for fear of another deadly incident like the one involving migrants who were run over in Brownsville, Texas, Mora said.
Only a few turned around Thursday, and the shelter — whose maximum capacity is 140 and often has to turn away all but women with young children — only took in 89 migrants the night before, Gallagher adds.
The priest visits various shelters to explain to migrants that they have been detained for crossing illegally and violating the conditions of their release, such as the “notice to appear” before the immigration authorities and then before a judge to present their asylum case. .
Some migrants have scheduled dates within a month of their arrival in the cities they hope to go to. Others have court appearances not scheduled until 2026 or later as the asylum system is overwhelmed by historic backlogs.
Wearing a rosary necklace, Venezuelan Juaniela Castillo listened intently as Gallagher deciphered her court date: June 2025, in Orlando, Florida, where she hopes to reach a relative.
He will have to find legal help to file an asylum application much sooner — within a year — or he will lose this temporary relief he has been granted from deportation, Gallagher told him.
With her three children, ages 8, 7 and 3, she traveled through Panama’s notoriously dangerous Darien jungle. After two months on the road, she, too, passed through a hole in the wall near El Paso and was detained for six days before being released to the San Francisco Javier shelter.
“I still can’t believe it,” she said as her children smiled at the pigeons chirping in the shelter’s small, shady courtyard. “I never lost faith, never, but one is adrift, adrift from God.”
In a room equipped with cots and tables, shelter volunteer Susie Roman says she notices how confused migrants have been by the policy change, and that she fears the consequences of this latest change.
“I’m afraid they’re all going to be out there and we won’t be able to help them,” she says.
