Story author Cathy Walsh adds the name of a young woman who died in the desert to Sister Betty Campbell’s shrine at her home, Casa Tabor, in Juárez. Visitors are asked to record the name of someone who has died or disappeared. (Photo: Jean Stokan)
Story author Cathy Walsh adds the name of a young woman who died in the desert to Sister Betty Campbell’s shrine at her home, Casa Tabor, in Juárez. Visitors are asked to record the name of someone who has died or disappeared. (Photo: Jean Stokan)
A Mercy Border Immersion Experience in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, took place May 8-13, 2022. Following is one in a series of four reflections from a participant in the experience.
The joy I found on the U.S.-Mexico border in May surprised me. I heard horrific stories of people fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, Haiti and Ukraine, but I also saw countless kindnesses by migrants and those who help them while I was in El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, with the Sisters of Mercy to learn why people are coming to the border in ever higher numbers. I heard people say that the Southern Border is the new Ellis Island.
Following are photos capturing our time at the border.
A Border Patrol agent escorts a mother and her children over the Paseo Del Norte Bridge from El Paso, Texas, to Juárez, Mexico, in a likely expulsion from the United States. Due to the U.S.’s broken immigration system, including a shutdown of the asylum process, families like this one have few legal ways of entering the country. (Faces are disguised to protect the family.)
Titled Bienvenido (Welcome), this El Paso sculpture represents “how welcoming the city is,” says a city official. Yet countless migrants have been turned away at U.S. border checkpoints there during the pandemic due to Title 42, an unnecessary public health policy invoked by the past administration that has yet to be successfully repealed.
Wrapping her arms around the wall fortified by the past administration at a cost of $15 billion, a woman in Anapra, Mexico, gazes into the United States. Once uninhabited desert, Anapra is a colonia neighborhood near Juárez that is home to thousands of people displaced and impoverished within Mexico by NAFTA’s destruction of the country’s small-farm sector. Before the border became militarized, Mexicans and Americans traveled freely between the two countries.
Standing by the wall where a Honduran teacher recently fell to her death, Sister Kathleen Erickson (in blue hat) remembers when the wall wasn’t there. To understand why people flee places like Honduras, where the U.S. supported a 2009 coup, she helps lead “root causes” trips to Central America to examine how American foreign policies helped create spiraling poverty and violence there.Joyful champions of justice: Yvonne, Cristina Coronado, Father Bill Morton, SSC, and Elnora Bassey. After fleeing El Salvador because of gangs’ death threats, Yvonne traveled to Juárez, where she found shelter in Casa de Acogida (House of Welcome), run by Cristina, Columban Migrant Ministry coordinator, and the Columban’s Corpus Christi Parish of Anapra. Yvonne sought—and was offered—U.S. asylum, with the help of CLINIC, the Catholic immigration network where Elnora is an attorney. She turned down asylum, instead discerning a call to help Cristina—with whom she has a spiritual daughter-and-mother bond—to welcome and care for the many refugees, especially Haitians, forced to remain in Juárez because of U.S. immigration policies.Known for her creative and constant outreach to poor migrants in Juárez, Cristina (center) is honored with a prayer shawl made by a migrant friend of Mercy Associate Margaret “Margie” Rudnik (right) provided through the St. Giles Prayer Shawl Ministry in Oak Park, Illinois, which has sent many knitted or crocheted items to the Juárez parish over the last two years.Our Lady of Guadalupe shines a flashlight in this El Paso church mural to help migrants safely cross the Rio Grande. Some 10,000 people have died crossing the Rio Grande since 1994, with a notable surge in numbers after the “zero tolerance” immigration clampdown.An Irish-born sister who once taught students to sing “America the Beautiful,” Sister Bea Donnellan, SHSp, 88, now sees her adopted country through the eyes of those seeking shelter at Casa Vides Annunciation House. U.S. support for Central America’s “dirty wars” have led countless migrants to the home, she says. “I blame our government for their suffering.” The mural behind her and a volunteer depicts Vides family members murdered in El Salvador.
Border Patrol Agent W. Pumarejo and Mercy Associate Joanne Castner share an exchange after the agent and his colleague (not pictured) spoke about their work to the Sisters of Mercy border delegation. Although Pumarejo insisted that the agency must follow the law and that it does much good, including saving migrants’ lives, human rights organizations and the Department of Homeland Security have found numerous agency abuses over years.
Sister Betty Campbell, 87, in her backyard shrine at Casa Tabor, her Juárez home where she has lived for over 25 years. On the shrine’s walls, she and visitors write the names of people who have died violently along the border, as well as names of thousands of Mexican women who have disappeared
Here’s a 2-minute video of the Mercy Border Immersion Experience containing photos by participants Elnora Bassey, Joanne Castner, and Catherine Walsh
If you are interested in learning more, click here.
