It was the tents that broke my heart. The shirts, paperwork and shampoo bottles stuffed in the windows between the mosquito mesh and the polyester cover. Inside, a father, his two sons beside him, lying flat on his back on the thin padding, watching as his breathing pushed his chest and phone up and then down. Outside, his wife, crouched on a crate, breastfed their child. As we walked across the gravel, dodging the labyrinth of clotheslines, we passed hundreds of weary tents and even wearier people.
“Personally, I don’t go in my tent during the day,” Stephen explained to us, “If I did, I would get steamed alive.” Stephen, an agricultural engineering student from Colombia, had been living at Senda de Vida 2, a tent encampment in Reynosa, Mexico, for eight months when we spoke. “The bathrooms [where we can shower] are only open a couple of hours a day, except Sundays when they open all day,” he mentions as we pass the bathroom, one of four cement buildings in the shelter. The putrid odor of the 20 portable toilets, their only option when the bathrooms are closed, clung to my clothes.
In a few hours, I would leave and cross back into the United States, unlike the migrants here, who would continue to wait. Before we left, I climbed onto a mound of gravel and saw long steel beams tied together by barbed wire: the border wall. At that moment, I recalled the words from a sign on the Tijuana border wall, described to me by one of the Jesuits I met. It read: “Goodbye to the American Dream, welcome to the American Nightmare.”
In July 2024, I had the privilege of traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border, thanks to a grant from Boston College High School, where I am a senior. I went to capture the current reality at our nation’s border, where shelters like Senda de Vida 2 can be found along the Mexican side. Currently, thousands of families and vulnerable people live in these shelters indefinitely, waiting to enter the United States by applying through the CBP One mobile app. The only legal pathway for migrants seeking asylum is to use the app to request an appointment with Border Patrol that, if granted, will offer them temporary parole and issue them a notice to appear in an immigration court.
Migrants across the entire border petition for one of the 1,450 appointments available each day. Appointments are given out in a lottery favoring those who have been waiting the longest. Between January 2023 and February 2024, more than 64 million requests were made by migrants. Wait times are nearing eight months, and many who apply have already traveled for months, sometimes on foot. Cartels, rampant in Mexico, often prey on traveling migrants.
One of the migrants I spoke to, José, told me that while coming from Ecuador, he and his family were kidnapped in Reynosa, Mexico, and spent a month in captivity. José said his family sold their home in Ecuador to pay the $15,000 ransom. The cartel robbed the family of all their belongings and documents before releasing them. Then José and his family made their way to Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Reynosa.
Shelters are often among the few safe places for migrants like José as they wait to enter the United States. A majority of these shelters are run by and served by Catholic communities. On the U.S. side, places like the Humanitarian Respite Center provide short-term shelter for migrants. The H.R.C. was founded by Sister Norma Pimental and is managed by Catholic Charities. At the H.R.C., migrants have a safe place to buy tickets to their destination, eat a warm meal and get the toiletries, new clothes, and rest they might need for the remainder of their journey.
We traveled with Del Camino Jesuit Ministries to most shelters, including Senda de Vida 2 and the H.R.C. At both locations, the Jesuits celebrate Mass for migrants in Spanish. Afterward, they stay to answer legal questions or deal with concerns migrants might have. The weekly Masses—celebrated on a plastic folding table adorned with a thin tablecloth—are beautiful.
The migrants I met hold a deep faith. A great number of people attend and look forward to the Mass. Kevin, a 12-year-old Venezuelan at Casa del Migrante, serves as an altar boy. His favorite part is ringing the bell during the consecration. The Jesuits, on top of giving blessings and providing daily confession services, have baptized children at these shelters. The Mass is especially sacred for migrants who haven’t received the Eucharist, sung to familiar tunes or even seen a priest during their long journey. People cry, call family members and record videos. The celebration of Mass becomes a milestone in their journey.
With this in mind, I want to share why I traveled to the border to elevate forgotten narratives like this.
My passion for serving migrant communities stems from my own immigrant experience. I immigrated from Venezuela to the United States in 2016, and my immigrant experience continues to be part of everything I do. I was lucky in my immigration journey, finding my way to the United States through my mother’s hard work, which earned our family a green card. This privilege, however, is to me not something to feel guilty about but a direct opportunity to serve the immigrant community. My time at the border allowed me to step into this opportunity and, on top of that, connect with my faith, especially as I saw God in all things—or, in this case, all people.
I vividly remember my conversation with Emma, a Colombian mother traveling with her 14-year-old son, who told me that after waiting seven months, she was kidnapped by the local cartel on her way to her appointment. Afterward, she had to begin the CBP One application process again. Despite her hardship, she explained how she “loves to help” in the shelter, where she is in charge of the children’s activities.
After our conversation, we turned around in our seats to see that Joe Nolla, S.J., was starting to celebrate Mass. Father Nolla later said to me in an interview, “I don’t pray for suffering…but I do pray to have the faith of someone who suffers greatly.”
It was this colossal testament of faith from the migrants—a belief that God was with them at every point of their journey, good or bad—that I was most moved by. Seeing such faith and discerning my time at the border, I came to a better understanding regarding our call to action as people of faith: If we want to live out the Jesuit value of being a person for and with others, we must remember that our love and service, like Christ’s, must be without exception.
Although we cannot all live at the border, dedicating our lives to helping run shelters, God does call us to stand with these migrants in any way possible. Whether by dismantling false narratives, donating to and serving nonprofits, or by a mindful vote at election time, we have an unconditional call to action and justice, especially if we sit in a place of privilege. We must lead with this call to action as we work to reform our immigration system and even in the manner in which we approach immigration reform.
Solidarity with migrants is often lacking in our country today. First, we dehumanize; we close our arms and are inclined to demonize the other to justify our exclusion of them. Then we build walls, both physically and mentally. By perpetuating narratives that migrants could be nothing more than inferior—criminals, freeloaders or immoral beings—we have less and less solidarity, pushing us to build a higher and higher wall. But we are more than capable of stopping this repressive cycle.
One of the most moving parts of our visit was seeing people do exactly that at La Posada Providencia, the only long-term shelter in the Rio Grande Valley. The Sisters of Divine Providence began their sponsorship of La Posada in 1989. La Posada is quiet, located amid the fields of a small rural community. The free shelter has high-quality private housing, playgrounds, bikes, community kitchens, classes in English as a second language and staff centered around one goal: empowering the migrants.
Denise Hernández, the operations manager there, highlighted to us how the people who come to La Posada “want to come and participate actively in this economy.” Migrants usually leave La Posada after a couple of months, most with a job and a place to stay, some even with a car. They often return, once established, to express their thankfulness for La Posada, which they feel gave them a chance to succeed.
The preferential option for the poor and vulnerable is a standard that results in a vast amount of good, a standard we must hold ourselves to. La Posada is not a miracle—it is the product of solidarity, hard work and organization. We must stop approaching immigration always looking for how best to keep people out. Instead, we must approach immigration with the goal of empowering as many people as possible. We cannot, as a people who seek to uphold the God-given dignity of all people, hoard the American title and the American dream for those only who were born here.
Not only can we break the cycle, we must break the cycle. In the short term, we must advocate for much-needed charity to the people suffering in this moment. In the long term, we must strive for standards like those of La Posada, where the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable in our country is not a mere suggestion, but a lived and long-term truth.
We cannot forget. People—families, friends, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters—like those I met during my visit are still traveling thousands of miles on foot, being exploited by people they encounter on their way, getting kidnapped and abused, and waiting at our border. The ultimate question is: Do we support migrants unconditionally with the human dignity they deserve; or, do we abandon migrants, turning their American dream into an American nightmare?
