The U.S./Mexico border is a more complex situation than most realize. It’s certainly more complicated than news stories often convey. Since much of that border is also Texas’ southern border, Texas Baptists have a particular call to be involved there.
A week before the 2024 presidential election, I went to the Rio Grande Valley to put eyes on the “immigration crisis” myself and to meet asylum-seeker-hopefuls wishing to begin new lives sheltered within the security and promise of the United States.
I expected to find remarkable people who had endured great tragedy, doggedly determined to make a new way in a new country where life and human dignity are honored in a way not experienced in their homelands, and I did find something like that.
Accompanied by a guide and interpreter, I met two young mothers in their 20s from towns further south near Mexico City. The women and their families are residents of a refugee camp on private property on the Mexican side—a mostly fenced property of no more than three-quarters of an acre.
Women and mothers
One woman, married since she was 17 and a mother of an 8-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, invited me into the structure where her family lives, embarrassed she hadn’t tidied up.
The structure didn’t have a door, but it had a curtain, three rooms and a small Dia de Los Muertos shrine to the memory of her mother, lost to cancer, and her infant daughter, lost to a congenital heart condition.
One of the rooms was arranged as a shop with items to sell to other refugees. One was furnished with a makeshift table and pantry area that served as her kitchen. Behind another curtain, lay a room that served as the bedroom for the whole family.
Her family had been living at the refugee camp for eight months, awaiting an appointment through the CBP One app.
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Another resident in her early-20s had a baby three months ago in a Mexican hospital, then brought her newborn baby home to her family’s shelter at the refugee camp.
The women I met were just like people I know here in the United States—human.
The camp
The camp consisted of fewer than 10 similar structures—built from shipping pallets and scrap wood with no doors or windows—housing individual families. Currently, seven families live there.
Additionally, the camp included a three-stall shower structure, where 5-gallon buckets of ambient temperature water could be hauled around to the back into a stall to wash.
There were structures housing ovens of a sort, a “living room” structure with a couch, armchair and TV and a laundry structure with two waist-high hand-wash basins, scrub boards built in.
Portable toilets served as restroom facilities, and there was one sink with running water in the largest outdoor kitchen structure in the middle of the camp. I did not see electricity anywhere, except the living room structure.
Camp residents currently number 10 women, 10 children, 18 men and one baby. Most are from deeper in Mexico, but I was told Ecuador and Dominica also were represented. They prefer living here to one of the two large refugee shelters run by evangelicals.
At the private camp, the men can work, and alcohol use is not grounds for expulsion.
In the past, the camp has housed much larger groups, including around 1,000 Haitians at one point. They were there before the more permanent structures were built, so the Haitians lived in tents and under tarps.
A different shelter
From the refugee camp, we walked across a field to a different shelter through a covered area where cartel “hawks”—or watchers—stood monitoring and permitted our passage to the refugee camp.
This shelter is enclosed behind high cinderblock walls with formidable doors. Four different faces peered through the trapdoor peephole, noting the “gringita” and the familiar face of my guide before they decided to open the door to us.
Security is tight for good reason. The men at the door, Guatemalans, explained they’d been unable to leave the shelter for weeks. They know if they do, the cartel is waiting. They will be kidnapped for ransom immediately.
Several hundred refugees currently are housed in there, but I didn’t get to speak with any besides the men at the door. They were a half-hour into an hours-long worship service under a large pavilion built by a grant from the Latter-day Saints.
Most people here live in tents raised off the ground by pallets. Restrictions against drugs, alcohol and weapons are zero-tolerance, but likely easily enforced since none of the refugees is free to come and go with the cartel threat just beyond the door.
The LDS grant also helped build around a dozen tiny homes with window units. Pregnant women and women with infants are prioritized for this housing.
Between the two locations of this other shelter, an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 refugees currently are waiting in Reynosa for CBP One appointments to request asylum.
Cost to cross
The risk to visit these shelters had increased since my guide last crossed the week before. Our taxi driver reported an increase in fares was due to the increase in risk.
One of my ride share drivers in McAllen told me a relative recently was kidnapped when the bus taking him to his job in Mexico was stopped by cartel.
Several men were taken, but when the bus driver was questioned, he said the bus had not made any stops and no one got on or off anywhere along his route, my driver explained.
The family was able to gain his brother-in-law’s release, but not until paying $10,000 to the cartel. The CBP One app has cut down on the coyotes’ income stream, with more asylum hopefuls choosing to wait for their chance to cross legally.
The wall
Additionally, on the Texas side I observed pieces of border wall, oddly arranged in football-field length sections and at least a mile from the Rio Grande in places.
Giant lights blaze each night from the seemingly haphazard barriers built atop concrete levees, taller sections erected under the first Trump administration and shorter segments under the Biden administration.
A complex situation
Border dynamics are complex. I came home from the border with many more questions than answers and with the words of Revelation 1:18 on my mind: “I am the living one; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I have the keys to death and Hades.”
Many of the 122.6 million displaced people around the world are physically and/or spiritually on the wrong side of that door. They need a way out of the hells they are facing.
Texas Baptists must prayerfully consider the Great Commandment and the Great Commission in our attitudes and conversations about border ministry and policy. The River Ministry offers vision trips and opportunities to serve among this vulnerable population.
Complex situations have no easy solutions, “but Jesus.” He calls us to be bold, trust him and step into the darkness with his light. May we be found faithful.
Calli Keener is a news writer for the Baptist Standard. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.
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