The Migrant’s Story: What Sister Norma Heard
By: The Big Roundtable
Tags: Immigration, The Promise, Refugees, Trump, Borders

Congressmen miss a lot when they tour the border in McAllen, Texas, where the president wants to build his wall

Small children accompanied by their mothers at the US Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen. Photo by Delcia Lopez

By Carlos Sanchez

The Southwest border has become a new destination hot spot for members of Congress. Already, more than a dozen, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have dropped by McAllen for daylong tours of the region to get a look at immigration.

But just like everything else in Congress, the Republican path to fact-finding is different from the Democratic path, prompting the mayor of McAllen to declare there ought to be a rule for visiting Congressmen: after visiting with migrants, all Democrats should take the gunboat tour of the Rio Grande. Conversely, all Republicans, after the same gunboat tour, should visit the Humanitarian Respite Center at Sacred Heart Church.

There they would meet Sister Norma Pimentel — who with her staff comforts the stream of immigrants from crime-ravaged countries.

Her face grows stoic as she recounts stories such as the Salvadoran man traveling to the United States with his ten-year-old son.

As they always do, Sr. Norma’s volunteers asked the man how his nearly month-long journey has been going.

That’s when the man opened up, with his son sitting nearby. That’s when he began telling a tale of boarding a bus in Mexico just north of the Guatemalan border, his son in tow, on their way to the United States. That’s when the man met two young women on a similar journey. And because of the shared venture, because of the shared homeland, the man, his son and the young women became fast travel companions as the bus droned north.

This is when the man begins to vainly hold back tears, Sister Norma, recounts, when the man tells of the bus suddenly stopping at a desolate road block in Mexico and of armed men boarding and ordering all the passengers off.

That’s when the man tells of being herded with his son and travel companions and a busload of other passengers into a remote building. Now the man cries openly, talking about the armed men grabbing his two young friends and dragging them to another room — and hearing their screams as they begin to be raped.

Then the man tells of other armed men approaching the horrified man and taking his ten-year-old from his clutches. Then the armed men hold a pistol up to his child and tell the man that, unless he calls relatives and gets money, the child will be shot.

And then through tears, the man tells of the gun going off and, miraculously, of seeing his child, scared but unharmed. By this time, the volunteers in Sister Norma’s respite center are quietly listening to the man sob. He believes God saved his son. As for his two female travelling companions? He never saw them again.

That’s Sister Norma’s life these days.

The missionary of Jesus nun, who is the head of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, routinely — and with determined stoicism — tells this story and others in explaining her motivations.

As a national debate over immigration and refugees heats up under a new president, Sister Norma notes the tendency to dehumanize people like this man, his son and his two travel companions. As organizer of a volunteer effort to provide comfort to a sea of immigrants traveling through South Texas to other parts of the country — over 70,000 in the last two years, Sister Norma sees the human equation daily.

Instead of fleeing authorities, these people sought arrest. They are now in the United States legally having applied for asylum and are entitled to a court hearing to determine if their lives would be in danger if deported. Fleeing countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras with some of the highest murder rates in the world, they brave the dangerous trip to get away from murderous gangs.

For those U.S. citizens who are leery of these new arrivals, she asks the same question: if your child’s life was in danger, would you do anything to save him?

For her, it’s as simple as that.

For this woman, whose work has gained international acclaim and even been recognized by Pope Francis, it comes back to a simple tenet of her religion.

In her quiet, unassuming way, she provides a more secular explanation of her motivation. Recalling the story of the Titanic, she points out that so many life boats, half-filled, witnessed the majestic ship sink, dumping thousands into the icy Atlantic. Only one or two of those lifeboats returned to help; the rest rationalized that it was too dangerous to try.

“I want to be one of the boats that returns to help,” she says. “Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself.