By Kelly Ryan
Editor’s note: Some people quoted in this commentary are identified only by first names to protect their privacy.
No American city represents “the border” like El Paso. Its community spirit, civic engagement and pervasive can-do attitude are American to the core. Its history is complex and layered.
As born-and-raised El Pasoans know, Spaniards arrived in 1598, well before the founding of New York City. The city was incorporated in 1659, and Franciscans soon established the Mission Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. The original church still stands – across the border in what is now Ciudad Juárez. The city was divided in 1850.
Perhaps this intertwined Mexican and U.S. history explains why in El Paso there is a compassion and clarity about border realities at odds with mainstream perceptions.
“It’s how the community has always been,” says Manuela, a lifelong El Pasoan who works with me at Jesuit Refugee Service/USA. “Is it our culture? Our upbringing?”
Manuela says she “never really saw anything bad happen” in the city until a self-identified white nationalist opened fire at Walmart in 2019. “People thought, ‘Why would someone come to El Paso and do that? Why would someone target us?’”
On my first visit to El Paso as president of JRS/USA, before the change in administration, I met with as many of the organizations we cooperate with as possible – federal, city and church officials.
I met with Department of Homeland Security representatives and heard their frustration with our immigration system: the punishing workload; the dearth of legal pathways into the U.S., especially given our labor shortage; and the persistent lack of resources. We discussed our shared anguish about how lethal it had become to be a migrant. Like us, they saw the aftermath of traffickers’ extreme tactics – which routinely included sexual exploitation, starvation and kidnapping.
JRS has provided legal services and/or mental health and psychosocial services in courts and shelters around El Paso. I visited as many of these as I could. Nearly everywhere, I found El Pasoans – including former law enforcement officials – volunteering or making second careers accompanying and serving migrants.
Nancy, a retired county parole officer, volunteers full time at the Rescue Mission shelter. In her former career, she wished she could help people in a more active way. “It doesn’t feel like a job,” she said about her shelter work. I watched multiple children run up and embrace Nancy as they scampered through the shelter.
At Sacred Heart shelter, I met Michael DeBruhl, a former Border Patrol chief. After DeBruhl retired, he saw immigration rhetoric shift.
“I started hearing that everyone coming across the border is a criminal,” he recently told USA Today. “We started separating children from their families. I was really bothered by all these things … . This wasn’t the America I grew up in.”
When the streets outside Sacred Heart Church swelled with more than 1,200 male migrants, DeBruhl stepped up, working with the Jesuits at the church to develop a new shelter to meet the growing need.
We toured the shelter, including the donation center, to which many El Pasoans have given new and used items. DeBruhl observed how the simple act of choosing clean, new clothing helps restore people’s sense of dignity. Later, at Holy Family Shelter, I watched Knights of Columbus serve dinner. They approached this work with a spirit of joy, kindness and hospitality.
Today, with the Trump administration’s closed border and mass deportation policies, the shelters are nearly empty. The immigration courts are full of applicants seeking legal pathways. Federal, state and local jails are full of immigrants who have committed no crimes.
Coyotes still harm their “clients” and attempt to bring desperate people across the border – in more remote, perilous places. People are still extorted, assaulted and starved. As the quintessential border city, El Paso was “supposed to” be relieved by the disappearance of migrants.
As we all could have predicted, it hasn’t been that simple. Clearly, we need safe, orderly and dignified migration; instead we now have more families divided, U.S. citizen children living without the support of their parents, and persons who need asylum unable to make a claim despite genuine danger at home.
As University of Texas at El Paso education student Natalie Mendoza said to The Times of London last spring, “We lose something without the migrants. In El Paso, we’re a border city. I’m not saying we should let in all migrants, but it is what the city is made of.”
El Paso has long demonstrated hospitality, generosity and a rejection of “us” versus “them.” Its citizens have lived the Gospel of Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
As the country grows more weary of the overreach and recklessness of the current administration’s policies, perhaps the rest of the U.S. will be able to benefit from El Paso’s example.
Kelly Ryan is president of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Washington, D.C., that serves forcibly displaced people through detention chaplaincy, legal assistance, and mental health & psychosocial support.
The post Opinion: El Paso’s long history of hospitality offers a lesson for U.S. immigration policy appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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