It shouldn’t feel so hard to write about voting rights in a way that will not offend partisan sensibilities. It didn’t used to be this way. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the 1965 Voting Rights Act with a unanimous vote in the Senate, 98-0. It was promptly signed into law by President George W. Bush, who did so in honor of Fanny Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in attendance.

A few years ago, I noticed many students in my Baptist history class would get perplexed or defensive when I said Baptists were greatly influenced by the Evangelical revivals that swept across the English-speaking world during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Two years after fleeing Cuba, Erika Meléndez,* Roberto Ortiz and their daughter, Yolanda, still live in hiding in Matamoros, Mexico—across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Back in Cuba, they endured persecution for crimes they did not commit, so they fled their homeland as potential “enemies of the state.”

The escalating flow of refugees to the U.S.-Mexico border has expanded the demands on shelters operated by El Buen Samaritano Migrante, Fellowship Southwest’s partner in northeastern Mexico.

El Buen Samaritano Migrante recently opened a third refugee shelter in Nuevo Laredo, immediately across the border from Laredo, Texas. That brings the ministry’s shelter total to four—three in Nuevo Laredo and another in Saltillo, about 185 miles south.

The leaders of Fellowship Southwest commend the jury in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial for their commitment to truth, fairness and decency. We’re grateful they “believed their eyes,” refused to look away and confirmed what the world witnessed when we watched the video of this murder.

Fellowship Southwest will build its advocacy efforts on three key bases, the organization’s new executive director, Stephen Reeves, told the FSW board of directors April 12.

Irony accompanies migratory birds as they fly past my window near the U.S.-Mexico border. They come and go as they please. No drama in their lives. No spectacle on their journey.

Yet down here on the ground, reports about unaccompanied migrant children arriving at that border and migrant families being released into the United States have become a daily trend. The humanitarian tragedy that compels migrants to journey hundreds of miles to our border has been exploited for political benefits. Here in the Rio Grande Valley, we are accustomed to this.

Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes in Galilee to feed a hungry multitude. For more than two years, Natanael Segura and Blanca Pedraza have fed thousands of migrants in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Last weekend we celebrated resurrection, the defeat of death, light breaking into the darkness and hope from despair. Easter was a long time coming. Scripture teaches that Jesus rose on the third day, but it feels as though we’ve endured darkness much longer.

Despite ever-changing conditions, disappointments and even setbacks, pastors Carlos Navarro and Israel Rodríguez offer unchanging Christian love to refugees along their sections of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Navarro leads Iglesia Bautista West Brownsville near the southern tip of Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico. Rodríguez pastors Primera Iglesia Bautista in Piedras Negras, across the river 320 miles northwest, on the Mexican side of the border.

Immigrant children dominate my memory.

Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry operates shelters and feeding programs along the U.S.-Mexico border. I’ve met hundreds of refugees—mostly from Central America, but also from South America, the Caribbean and even Africa—in Mexican cities from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

Varias veces a la semana, amigos de Fellowship Southwest y del Compañerismo Bautista Cooperativo se comunican con nosotros y nos preguntan: "¿Cómo puedo ayudar a los inmigrantes en la frontera?"

“Beware the Ides of March,” Julius Cesar is warned in Shakespeare’s famous play.

But March 15, 2021, was a day I had been looking forward to for weeks—and one for which I had hoped and prayed for even longer. This was the day I would start as executive director of Fellowship Southwest. Even though I’d start by sitting down at my desk in my home office just as I had for a full year thanks to the pandemic, this first day was still exciting. It did not go as planned.

Overcrowded shelters and constant movement of migrants from other sections of the U.S.-Mexico border are testing the limits of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, reported Pastor Rosalío Sosa, a key member of Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry.

Relief organizations, such as Sosa’s Red de Albergues para Migrantes (Migrant Shelter Network) also are feeling the strain, noted Sosa, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Tierra de Oro in El Paso.

“Not for Ourselves Alone” focuses on the women’s suffrage movement and two of its primary leaders, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony and Cady began working as a team in 1848, and the movement consumed the rest of their lives. When both died, the right to vote for women had not yet been accomplished. Yet their work was not in vain, and women did eventually obtain that right to vote.

A simple question launched a ministry that touched more than 100 refugees in a single week and promises to serve thousands of lonely, vulnerable people in the months to come.

An immigrant named Carina approached Eddie Bernal, a worker helping travelers at a gate at Valley International Airport in Harlingen, at the southern tip of Texas, just miles from Mexico.

A symbol of one of the harshest immigration policies ever devised by the U.S. government has been dismantled and vacated.

The refugee tent camp on the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico—just across the Gateway International Bridge from Brownsville, Texas—has closed in the past week.

Pastor Lorenzo Ortiz always finds a way to serve people in dire need.

As director of the El Buen Samaritano Migrante ministry, he feeds and protects more than 100 refugees in three shelters in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas.

But he never considers that mammoth commitment as an excuse not to help others.

Pastors who form the backbone Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry are adapting to meet the needs of asylum seekers as immigration policy rapidly changes.

The U.S. government is cooperating with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to implement Phase One of a program to roll back the Migrant Protection Protocols—better known as the "Remain in Mexico" policy—designed to begin processing migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the mid-February polar vortex caused temperatures to plummet to historic lows, Fellowship Southwest’s close ministry partner Hearts4Kids showed up to provide physical and spiritual warmth on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.