“Dad is in America,” Kenia Veronica Merari told her boys, over and over, as they walked. It was the only way to keep them moving. Two years and five months had passed since their father left Honduras to find work in Pennsylvania, leaving Kenia behind with their two sons, ages 7 and 5. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. “But the separation made me want to come,” Kenia told me. Eventually, she threw spare clothes into backpacks and told her sons they’d be heading to the United States.
They took a series of buses through Guatemala, buffered by miles of walking between. It took them weeks to get through Mexico, a nearly 2,000-mile trek across jungles and deserts. When they reached a port of entry at Nogales, she turned herself in and petitioned for asylum. The next eight days were a blur: a Border Patrol facility in Tucson, Arizona; a plane to Nuevo Laredo, Texas; a bus to McAllen. Her boys, realizing they were in the U.S. but were being funneled into yet another bus, broke down into tears. “We thought Dad worked here,” they cried. “Where is Dad?”
When I met Kenia and their boys, they had yet to find Dad. They were still in McAllen, a sleepy border town in southeast Texas, waiting for family to purchase them plane tickets to Pennsylvania. But they were safe, showered, and in clean clothes. The Humanitarian Respite Center, a shelter run by Catholic Charities, provided them a place to sleep and three meals a day. The boys found other kids to play Uno and draw with crayons with them. For the first time in months, they felt safe. “Thank God, and thanks to her,” Kenia said, nodding her head toward a white-haired nun, standing in the corner of the room.
Sister Norma Pimentel deflects the praise. “The force behind what we do comes from God,” she told me. At least one guest described her as “an angel.” Another credited her for saving the guest’s life. Following Pimentel as she marches around the center is a feat: She seems to never sit still, walking from cot to cot, greeting guests and hugging their children. She marches through the kitchen, ensuring enough food to feed the center’s several hundred new arrivals is prepared. She oversees the logistics as migrants are transported to airports or bus stations.
The result? One of the most active humanitarian organizations along the U.S.-Mexico border, providing aid to tens of thousands of migrants each year. Customs and Border Protection has come to rely heavily on Catholic Charities’ work, dropping off busloads of apprehended and processed migrants who have petitioned for asylum, passed a credible fear interview and are awaiting a day in court. Instead of turning them out onto the street, CBP takes them to Catholic Charities, which helps them make arrangements to reunite across the country with family or friends.
“We are blessed that Catholic Charities helps,” said Javier Villalobos, the Republican mayor of McAllen. “If it wasn’t for them, it would be very difficult for us.”
But not all Texas officials see it that way. One Texas member of the U.S. House accused Catholic Charities of “operating a secretive, taxpayer-funded, and likely illegal operation to move unknown migrants into the United States.” In 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order outlawing the transportation of migrants by anyone but local or federal law enforcement. The executive order directly interfered with Catholic Charities’ work, and proponents claimed it was a violation of religious freedom. Pimentel signed onto an amicus brief filed by the Becket Fund, a religious liberty law firm, claiming it is “Catholic Charities’ God-given task to … give respect for migrants’ common human dignity.”
More recently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, has attempted to curtail the work of faith-based groups in south Texas, accusing some of “human smuggling” and “worsening illegal immigration.” Annunciation House, a Catholic-run charity in El Paso, was served a lawsuit in February, claiming it facilitated immigrants’ entering the country illegally. The lawsuit was deemed “outrageous” and tossed out this month by a federal judge, who accused Paxton of “harassment and overreaching.”
But Paxton went after Catholic Charities, too. “We’ve been investigated by the attorney general, and really pushed to shut down this location,” Pimentel said. Just last week, a judge denied Paxton’s request to depose her.
As the country creeps toward Election Day and voters say immigration is a top issue, the political backlash is only expected to increase. Allegations against the faith-based groups have spread among pockets of the internet, and immigrants — and those who aid them — are caught in the middle of a messy political battle. Catholic Charities volunteers have been threatened and harassed across the country. In Laredo, Texas, and southwest Ohio, Catholic Charities shelters are beefing up security.
In McAllen, Pimentel is saddened by the opposition. “We’re not doing anything wrong,” she said. “To feed somebody, to clothe somebody, to give somebody a safe space to be in … to think that this is wrong is simply a political position.”
She shook her head. “That is why the city government is so grateful for what we do. Because we resolve the problem in their hands, if they have all these people in the streets.”
A call to help
Ask anyone in McAllen about the “border crisis,” and they’ll think back a decade. In the summer of 2014, Sister Norma started getting phone calls and texts from worried neighbors: the city’s downtown was flooded with people, they’d say, mostly Spanish-speaking. They were wandering around the streets and begging for food. At night, they huddled in the doorframes of businesses or under benches at the bus station. Most didn’t have money. Most didn’t have shoelaces, either, thanks to the Border Patrol’s long-standing custom of confiscating potential weapons.
For decades, border crossers had largely been young men from Mexico; in 2014, seemingly out of nowhere, Border Patrol agents were overwhelmed by large numbers of families and children. During fiscal year 2014, three times as many family units (at least one parent and one minor) were apprehended at the border as the year prior. Nearly 70,000 unaccompanied children, too, a 77% increase year-over-year. Most were from Central America. Border Patrol built a facility in McAllen to process the unaccompanied children and turn them over to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the adults had nowhere to go. They were screened, interviewed, served a court date — often years in the future — and sent into the street.
Pimentel, a nun of the Missionaries of Jesus, called the priest at Sacred Heart, a 100-year-old church two blocks from McAllen’s central bus station. Pimentel worked out a deal: She could temporarily turn the church’s fellowship hall into a makeshift shelter for migrants, so long as she oversaw the operation. She quickly got to work, rallying together local families to volunteer. Word got out, and the streets cleared of migrants. City officials took notice and visited. “What are you doing here?” Pimentel recalls them asking. She looked around the parish hall — piled with donated clothing and food, buzzing with volunteers and migrants, “packed with so much goodness,” she said.
“We’re restoring human dignity,” she told them. “Their sense of value, their sense of worth as a person — we’re giving it right back to them.”
The city immediately signed on to help. Pimentel said they needed showers; the city had some delivered that evening. “Anything and everything the Sister needs, you make sure she gets,” the mayor said. The city doesn’t provide funding, Pimentel noted, but they’ve been helpful in other ways: air conditioning units, cots, portable toilets.
“It didn’t matter where you stood politically, where you stood in a denomination,” she said. “We all believed in restoring human dignity. That’s been the model.”
What began as a temporary arrangement with the church — intended to last a few weeks, at most — stretched into months and years. In June, she celebrated a decade in operation. She now works out of an old nightclub in central McAllen, transformed into a shelter complete with an operating kitchen, dining and sleeping areas, and showers. She’s been widely acclaimed for her work: She was named to the Time 100 list in 2020, and Pope Francis knows her by name.
But to new arrivals, she is simply Sister Norma, the kind stranger who showed them the first glimpse of kindness in weeks. To Yoandris Durán, a Columbian who came with her husband and 6-year-old daughter, the shelter was the first place she felt “at home” since leaving South America four months earlier. Nancy Toaquiza, a single mother from Ecuador with three boys, arrived “dressed in rags” and was offered clean clothes. She said her partner was killed by a gang. “I came here alone, with three children. But God never left us alone,” she said.
Most migrants stay no more than 24 to 48 hours — just long enough to rest, bathe and make arrangements for travel. Upon arriving at the southern border, migrants have a right to seek asylum. If they establish credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country, ICE schedules a court date for them to determine whether they qualify for asylum. Often, those court dates are years in the future, and instead of leaving migrants on their own, without the ability to legally work, ICE often partners with faith-based groups or other nonprofits to care for them. That’s where Catholic Charities comes in: busloads of asylum seekers, awaiting their court dates, are shuttled to the McAllen Humanitarian Respite Center to help them get on their feet. In addition to caring for their immediate temporal needs, Catholic Charities helps them arrange for travel across the country to reunite with family members or friends (who pay for the bus or airplane tickets).
Pimentel has turned the operation into a slick-moving machine. Hot food is served three times a day. In between, volunteers stuff sandwiches and fruit into plastic bags and sort them into piles of to-go meals. Bottled water goes in the “bus” pile, not in the “plane” pile. Across the hall, a woman sits at a desk with a large Sharpie, writing flight numbers onto the back of a manila envelope. Inside are a migrant’s boarding pass and legal documents; on the outside, in large text, “PLEASE HELP ME. I DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. WHAT PLANE DO I NEED TO TAKE? THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!”
Pimentel introduces me to a family of six from Haiti, fleeing their country to escape gang violence and political turmoil. I ask where they want to end up. “Utah,” the father, David Chery, says. He has no connection to the state, but before leaving Haiti, he did a Google search of “most friendly state to immigrants.” Utah topped the list.
Pimentel’s rapid tour through the facility pauses when she sees a mother cradling a baby. Pimentel walks over and embraces the mother. She stands, staring at the child, for several seconds. The baby was born only five days earlier, the mother says. After a moment, Pimentel hugs her again and keeps walking.
“If I can put a smile on the face of a child, that is the most rewarding part of this,” she said. “They are the joy of life. They are the hope of tomorrow.”
A difficult journey — before and after arriving in the U.S.
In the corner of the shelter’s main room, not far from where cots are stacked haphazardly each morning, two women sit on the floor, recounting the horrors of their journey. One woman, Maria, came here from Guatemala and was arrested after crossing the Rio Grande. She was fined $2,500 for trespassing on private land on the U.S. side of the river; she couldn’t pay, so she went to jail for 39 days. Silvia, a woman in her mid-20s, interrupts. “She was in prison,” she said. “We all were.”
While Maria went to an actual jail, the prison for Silvia, she explained, was not physical, but psychological. She left Ecuador with her boyfriend a month earlier, to get away from violence. The journey was hard enough: a flight from Ecuador to El Salvador, traversing the rivers and mountains of Guatemala, taking buses and trailers through Mexico. When they turned themselves in at a port of entry at Reynosa, agents separated her and her boyfriend. She ended up in Donna, Texas, at a makeshift processing facility, where agents took all her belongings and forced her to change into thin, tissue paper-like clothing.
They followed a strict schedule in the facility: up at 6 a.m., cleaning their residential area at 7:30 a.m., lunch at noon, cleaning at 3:30 p.m., cleaning again at 11:30 p.m. If they were offered a shower, it was at 2 a.m. Few of the women slept; more frequently, Silvia said, they would stay up late, restless, swapping stories about their journeys. She heard about sexual assault and cartel violence. Some woman were transported to the facility by plane, and they were forced to wear handcuffs on their wrists and their ankles, connected to the seats. (“In case of emergency,” Maria noted, “how do they grab the air mask?”) One woman, upon reaching the Rio Grande, said she strapped one of her infant children to her back and held another in her arms. When she emerged from the neck-high water, the baby on her back was gone. She kept walking.
Several of the women had been at the facility for three weeks with no update on their status and no contact with the outside world. When Silvia found out she would be released, one woman handed her the foil lid from an apple juice container from that day’s lunch. She’d etched the phone number of her aunt, living in the United States, into it. ”When you leave, please call her, and tell her I’m alive,” the woman pleaded.
I asked Silvia if she ever called. She nodded. “I didn’t know what to tell her,” Silvia said.
‘God is calling us to be there’
The most frustrating thing to Pimentel, the nun at the border, is seeing her fellow self-professing Christians — Abbott, Paxton, others — fighting against her work. “You cannot be selective when it comes to God,” she said. “Either you love God, or you don’t.” Maybe someday, she reasons, they will be like Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, and their hearts will be changed. ”God was able to touch him and make him change,” she said. “I am hopeful that maybe these people that are against immigrants with such a passion, someday can come to see how mistaken they are.”
For his part, Abbott has expressed little dissonance between his faith and his political positions. “If you want to just be pure biblical about this, it is the role — and I respect the role — of individuals to treat their fellow men with the charity that the Bible speaks of,” Abbott told the San Antonio Express-News in 2015. “Similarly, the Bible speaks of the role of government, which is among other things focused on protecting the safety and security of its people.”
Pimentel understands the concerns about border security. “I agree that we have to protect our borders, and we have to know who enters our country,” she said. “But at the same time, we should also make sure that any policies, any decisions, do not leave out the person involved in it — that we must provide for them the proper care and attention that every human being deserves.”
In McAllen, cooperation between city officials and nonprofit leaders like Pimentel have made that easier. Migrant apprehensions across the southern border are down year-over-year for the past three months; even before then, in fall, when border agents were recording a record number of apprehensions, the shelter was operating fine, Pimentel says. The largest strains on resources largely match global migration trends and domestic policy changes: spikes occurred in spring 2023, when Biden lifted the COVID-era Title 42 policy, and in August 2021, when a spike in migration from Central and South America pushed the center some 500% past capacity. At its peak, the shelter was helping more than 2,000 migrants per day; now, Pimentel says they see around 100 per day.
The surrounding area, too, is benefitting from Pimentel’s work. Villalobos, the Republican mayor, likes to tout the city’s ranking as third-safest in the country. “You look at the news, depending on what propaganda station you look at, and they’ll portray the border areas as banditos running around, shooting guns,” he said. “That’s not true.” The anecdote tracks with data: The more immigrants in an area, the lower the crime rate.
Pimentel wishes more people would recognize this isn’t a humanitarian issue relegated to the border region. “People that do not live at the border and want to help also have immigrants in their own communities,” she said. “If everybody would step up and recognize that our God is calling us to be there for one another, there wouldn’t be a problem with immigrants, because we would be able to provide for them together.”
“It’s not a ‘border crisis,’” she added. “It may be a humanitarian crisis, but not a border crisis. The crisis is the fact that we can actually give ourselves permission to turn our backs on a human person that is suffering.”
