The government response in Mexico City has been swift, but surrounding towns devastated by last week's earthquake are frustrated by the slow arrival of aid.

Thousands of volunteers and rescue squads have flooded Mexico City, where workers, electricians, nurses, students and others work side by side to save the last victims and bring relief to the survivors.

This year the Grand Bargain on refugees seems increasingly fragile.

The earthquake feels like yet another crisis tearing at our transnational families. The earthquake was a natural disaster, but the many ways American society fails to value the lives of foreigners, of immigrants, of its own citizens, because of their skin color or their Latino heritage is a disaster of our own making.

When the hurricane hit the island with winds of up to 155 miles per hour, it tore out cables, roofs from homes and buildings, uprooted palm trees and even bent a cross anchored to a cement post at the entrance of a Jesuit school.

In the aftermath of two earthquakes in the span of two weeks in Mexico church-based relief agencies have been on the ground providing food, shelter and repairs.