Fellowship Southwest hosts CBF state/regional leaders on border tour
(Scroll down for a photo slideshow.)
The humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border is personal—illustrated by tear-stained faces and heart-breaking stories—for Cooperative Baptist Fellowship leaders who toured Fellowship Southwest refugee-ministry sites last week.
Thirteen CBF state and regional coordinators from across the country participated in the tour, sponsored by Jorge Zapata, associate coordinator of CBF Texas and director of the FSW Immigrant Relief Ministry, and Marv Knox, coordinator of Fellowship Southwest. They completed a circuit from San Antonio, to Brownsville/Matamoros, then McAllen, Laredo/Nuevo Laredo and Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, and back to San Antonio.
The tour provided opportunities to meet Central American refugees in FSW-supported shelters and hear their stories, including:
Delila, who has a master’s degree in education and worked for an organization that taught literacy in rural areas. Because education threatens their stranglehold on power, the gangs (“gang” is too-soft a word; they’re organized crime syndicates) sought to quash the teaching.
Eventually, a gang assassinated Delila’s colleague. That’s when she and her husband knew they must gather their two small children and flee. Now, they live with more than 80 other refugees in a house/shelter in Nuevo Laredo.
“I didn’t want to come to the United States,” Delila said, tears streaming down her face. “But we knew I would be killed if we did not leave immediately.”
Jorge and Jorge Jr., father and son, who fled to Piedras Negras, where they live in the downtown church building owned by Primera Iglesia Bautista. They left their home for a couple of reasons: Crop failure brought on by climate change meant Jorge struggled to earn a living for his family. A hard and willing worker, he has found a job in Mexico, even as he seeks U.S. asylum. Also, Jorge Jr. was born with wrists fused awkwardly at right angles to his arms. His father hopes he can receive medical treatment north of the border.
Their trek illustrates ever-present danger immigrants encounter. In Mexico, they have been harassed by cartels. As they ran for their lives, they tried to jump between railway cars, and Jorge Jr. tripped and fell on the tracks. His father grabbed him and pulled him to safety in the nick of time.
Jorge’s and Jorge Jr.’s encounter with cartels (like “gangs,” think Mafia-style organized crime) is all too common, the CBF group learned.
Standing in a Nuevo Laredo shelter that houses 50-60 immigrants, someone asked, “How many of you have been kidnapped by the gangs?” The hands of at least half the adults shot up.
Their stories echo a common pattern: The gangs kidnap refugees and hold them for ransom, calling family back home or in the United States, demanding money. Captives subsist on very little water and perhaps one taco a day, while their captors threaten to kill them unless their loved ones pay up. And repeatedly, they say the police are complicit—if not outright helping the gangs, then turning a blind eye to the violence.
A young Honduran couple stood in a makeshift apartment—a classroom of the church where Jorge and Jorge Jr. live—their little daughters clinging to their legs and playing at their feet. Like Delila, they said they never intended to flee to the United States, but they had no choice.
Gangs extorted their family, seeking “protection” payments they could not afford. The situation got so severe, the wife/mother’s father committed suicide, intensely stressed and thinking perhaps the harassment would stop. She told the gang they could not pay; besides not being able to afford it in the first place, they now had to pay for a funeral. The gang said they didn’t care and gave her three options—pay up, leave the country, or be killed.
So, this young family can’t go back home, but they fret the U.S. immigration protocols will prevent them from receiving asylum. Almost every day, they think about swimming across the Rio Grande—two little girls in tow—and taking their chances at entering the country illegally. They know even crossing the river is a life-threatening venture, but that’s the level of their desperation.
(Click here to hear their story—translated by Jorge Zapata of CBF Texas and recorded by Rubén Ortiz of CBF Latino Ministries.)
All along the route, the CBF leaders prayed with the refugees, as well as the pastors sheltering them. They included:
Pastor Carlos Navarro of Iglesia Bautista West Brownsville. The tour began at IBWB, where participants heard from Elaine Hernandez (pictured below), regional director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, about the push-and-pull factors that have prompted mass immigration.
The Brownsville church operates a respite center for asylum seekers. Navarro and church members provide a compelling welcome—including a meal, shower, fresh clothes, other supplies and an explanation of Christ’s love—to refugees who have received the date for their asylum hearing and are departing to await that date with sponsors around the country.
Fellowship Southwest is helping IBWB construct a new immigrant center on its property.
Pastor Rogelio Pérez of Iglesia Bautista Capernaum in Olmito. Pérez leads a ministry in the mammoth refugee tent city in downtown Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville. Each Tuesday and Thursday, he and church members bring lunch and supplies—including plenty of diapers—to immigrants awaiting asylum hearings.
Pastor Lorenzo Ortiz of Iglesia Bautista El Bueno Samaritano in Laredo. Ortiz crosses the border multiple times each day to maintain seven shelters in Nuevo Laredo, perhaps the most dangerous city in North America. Ortiz not only provides places for immigrants to live while they wade through the arduous asylum process, but he keeps them off the streets and protected from gangs, which prey on refugees.
Pastor Israel Rodriguez of Primera Iglesia Bautista in Piedras Negras. Rodriguez has led his church to minister to refugees in shelters across the city, and he engages lay groups in the congregation to maintain the never-ending task of feeding, counseling and providing spiritual nurture to scared, desperate people far from home.
