Many hearts, many hands

 Andrea* arrived at our door with her three year old daughter Carmita in early January.  Unlike most others who are arriving from Mexico, she came to the San Antonio Greyhound bus station from Cleveland, OH, frantic to check on her husband and seven-year-old son being held in detention just west of San Antonio.  Andrea had traveled to the US a year ago from Guatemala seeking asylum and was staying with her brother in Cleveland awaiting news from her husband Carlos who had delayed his departure.  ICE had called her in Ohio to tell her to come and claim her son whose detention had exceeded the 21 day limit. Now she needed legal advice and emotional support as she feared her son would be separated from her husband, and that he would be deported back to Guatemala where they fled gang violence six months ago.

The San Antonio community has formed a model network of organizations to support the thousands of asylum seekers like Andrea and Carlos who pass through their city each year.  Each organization provides a unique set of services needed by those fleeing violence in their home country.  As soon as Andrea arrived at the bus station, she was approached by a volunteer in a blue vest speaking Spanish who identified herself and asked if there was anything she could do to help. These volunteers are the gateway to other organizations that provide overnight accommodations, clothing, healthcare, assistance buying bus tickets, food, legal advice and long-term assistance when immigrants stay.  San Antonio Mennonite Church where we  volunteer provides overnight accommodations both short and long term in their hospitality house La Casa de Marta y Maria.  This is where we met Andrea that first day.  At the height of this ministry, the Mennonite church provided shelter for up to 300 immigrants per night.  This has dropped to 2-15 per night in 2020 and is now handled by La Casa

Typically, the La Casa Coordinator gets a call from the Interfaith Welcome Coalition (IWC) or blue vests as I call them, whose volunteers  greet immigrants in the bus station to inquire about their needs.  The San Antonio bus station is often immigrants first real stop since crossing the US Mexico border. When the bus tickets require an overnight stay in San Antonio, we pick up the immigrants, feed them and provide a clean and safe space to sleep before sending them on their way the next morning.  In 2019, 32,379 immigrants passed through San Antonio and the IWC provided 25,000 backpacks filled with clothing and food, found shelter for  22,000 and served 85,000 meals through their food bank (interfaithwelcomecoalition.org 2/2020).  IWC has nearly 1000 volunteers who greet and serve the immigrants as they exit nearby US ICE Detention Centers or come straight from the Mexico border.  In Andrea’s case, we hosted her for two months.

Andrea was also connected that first day with the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Raices is a nonprofit organization based in Texas that provides legal services for immigrants and Andrea needed legal help with her son and husband who had been in the area Detention Center for six months. As of 2018, Raices was the largest legal aid group of its kind in Texas with 130 employees.  They also have a presence at the bus station in order to answer questions about the immigrants’ legal status and to connect them with legal services locally and around the country.  Since the paperwork for asylum seekers is complex and difficult to decipher, Raices provides education and referrals as well as low cost or free legal services for asylum seekers in building their case to stay in the US.  For many seekers, this legal process involves months and even years of paperwork and legal work that would be impossible to complete successfully on their own.

The Migrant Immigration Center for Human Rights also provides legal services but primarily to those in US ICE Detention Centers like Karnes that held Andrea’s husband and son.  The Migrant Center provides free and low-cost legal services to detained, low-income immigrants facing removal from the United States at the third largest adult detention center in the U.S., the South Texas Detention Complex located an hour outside of San Antonio. With a bed capacity of nearly 2000, this is the third largest detention center in the US.  An asylum seeker from Somalia put it this way, “In this [detention] facility everything is hard if you don’t have a lawyer… [They] don’t respect you if you don’t have a lawyer.”

Andrea also utilized Catholic Charities, another key part of the immigrant support network. In San Antonio, among the many services they provide to the poor and vulnerable population is monetary assistance to purchase bus tickets for those heading to places like Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Cleveland as Andrea would be if reunited with her husband and son.  Many of the asylum seekers have been traveling from 3 months to a year before reaching the US.  Upon arrival, they often have nothing left but the clothing on their backs.  To make it the final leg of their journey, requires an additional $200-$300 per traveler for the bus ticket.  Catholic Charities provides this help and sends them on their way.

This impressive immigration support network requires fulltime professional staffs, millions of dollars in donations and thousands of volunteers each year.  It has been a pleasure and a challenge to be one small part of this welcoming network during our two months in San Antonio.  Even better was the opportunity to accompany Andrea and her daughter to the bus station for the reunion with her husband and son when they finally arrived from the Detention Center.   The tears of joy flowed freely from all of us who witnessed this miracle of family reunion.

*Names and all identifying information have been changed to protect the family involved.

In the beginning

It has been a little over two weeks since Julie and I arrived in San Antonio, and I have been feeling as if I’m being thrown around by a cultural tornado.  Mostly in a good way.  We came here as volunteers to help with tasks at the Casa de Maria y Marta.  We have our own room upstairs and share a bathroom downstairs.  Immigrants being transitioned from the border to final destinations in the US are dropped at the Greyhound station downtown.  We provide overnight shelter for various of those families.  We’ll give you more details about that process in a later blog.  My goal for this post is to describe some of the local context.

To start, when I was five years old, Walt Disney introduced me to Davy Crockett, my first hero.  I have sobered up on Davy since then, but now, oddly, live a mile and a half from the Alamo, where he died.

We walk for exercise on the San Antonio River Walk which we can access just three blocks from our house.  It runs the length of the city, beautifully green where we start on the south side and lined with brightly lit restaurants and bars through the city center.  When we returned home last week walking down another street, we passed a home with a large basket of grapefruit outside their gate with a sign reading, “Free. Take some.”  Inside the fence was a tall tree with hundreds of beautiful fruit.  They were delicious.

The San Antonio Mennonite Church (SAMC), which owns La Casa, occupies an old building going through major remodeling and repair that makes my Columbus Mennonite Church Facilities Commission role look like a Caribbean vacation cruise.  They have one part-time pastor, and, as far as I can tell, no regular custodial staff.  Even while this renovation is going on they offer office space to three other non-profit groups, including Conjunto.  The word conjunto describes a Tejano accordion style of music.  Mondays and Thursdays there is an open mic workshop from 3 PM till nine PM.  Saturdays three or four teachers are giving accordion lessons, and students are sitting in the hallways warming up or practicing.  Check this link.  Is this what your church sounds like?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCjLTXVCd1s

Helping with the remodeling has me well-acquainted with the local Home Depot.  As far as I can tell, all the staff are bi-lingual.  At HEB, the giant Texan grocery chain, at least 25% of the bread section is tortillas, which is to say, there is no specific Hispanic food section.

The Catholic gentleman, Rodollfo, who started the conjunto program a couple years ago has started to attend SAMC and has become so moved by the immigration work of the church that he is donating his family “ranchito” or small farm to the church. For the last couple decades it had been rented out to a pig farmer who accumulated two old mobile homes, three RVs, and massive piles of junk.  The mobile homes are currently temporary housing for two families from Central America, and the church is seeking funding to upgrade the water, sewer, electrical infrastructure.  The land has been in Rodolfo’s family since 1778.

One last cultural tornado image.  Jordi was a tall, thirteen year-old Angolan boy who loves basketball and LeBron James.  We had been looking at Google Maps on my laptop, and he asked if he could show me something on YouTube.  So, I was sitting on the sofa with this kid who had been in the US three days, who speaks a local Angolan language, French, and a little bit of Spanish, and we were watching a Britain’s Got Talent video of two British boys singing an amazing anti-bullying rap song.  A very special moment.