SAN JUAN, Texas (Border Report) — Fresh off her trip to the Vatican, Sister Norma Pimentel says she is heartened by a recent letter from Pope Francis condemning the deportation of immigrants.
In his letter to U.S. bishops, the pope called the mass deportations a “major crisis that is taking place in the United States.”
President Donald Trump has promised his administration will deport millions of immigrants who he says have no right to remain in the country.
“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” the pope wrote.
Pope Francis did say countries have a right “to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.”
But he added “the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
Pimentel, who is executive director of Catholic Charities Rio Grande Valley, told Border Report that she recently traveled to the Vatican and was among a group who met with the pope. She said he encouraged them to help the unfortunate.
“We cannot criminalize, as our Holy Father says, an immigrant for coming to our country fearing for the lives of their children and wanting to be in a space where they’re safe. You know that’s not a crime,” Pimentel told Border Report on Wednesday from her offices in San Juan, Texas. “We should be able to create pathways where people can actually be welcome.”
Pimentel has run the Humanitarian Respite Center in downtown McAllen for over a decade. It is a migrant shelter where over half a million immigrants have gone for food, shelter, toiletries and travel help after being legally released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“Every single person that we help at the Respite Center has been processed by Border Patrol actually has permission to be in the United States. They have a document that gives them permission temporarily, but until they can resolve their legal status. And so people that we receive are actually those that are in the system,” she said.
However, she says lately there have been days when the Border Patrol doesn’t send anybody.
“If nobody’s brought to us, our numbers are basically almost zero,” she said. “We do have one, three families that maybe one day arrive, and the next day nobody, and then the next day maybe one family. So it’s very uncertain right now as to who we’re receiving, you know, and and how many.”
She says the Rio Grande Valley border community also is fearful of deportations and raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
She also told Border Report an immigrant woman was arrested as she tried to pick up her child from school on this week in the Rio Grande Valley.
She said on Wednesday she was called by a local priest who said his parishioner was arrested while picking her child up from school.
“I just got a call from a priest from here, from the Valley, and he said, ‘Norma, help me. There’s a family from our parish that went to pick up her child at the elementary school, and she was arrested,'” Pimentel told Border Report.
Pimentel would not specify the priest or where this happened but she said she wants to help community leaders to prepare legal documents to pass on custody of children in the cases of parents being deported from the South Texas border.
Pimentel said the child’s mother asked that her child be handed over to school staff but was told they couldn’t because they didn’t have a legal documents to authorize that.
“So, I said, ‘Father, I’m going to try to see what I can do to help your families.’ If there’s anyone that needs some kind of a legal document to give somebody, you know, we have to be there for our families.”
Pimentel was heading to New York on Wednesday to participate in a meeting on immigration.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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