A red brick building sits on the corner ten blocks from the border between Mexico and the United States. Erected almost a century ago, it’s in El Paso, Texas. Juárez, Mexico, is just across the river. And everyone knows that even though the two cities are only steps apart, those from the other side of the border who find their way to that red brick building can finally feel safe.
Since its founding in 1978, Annunciation House has offered shelter, a bed, a shower, and a hot meal to the homeless and anyone with nowhere else to go. The concept first took hold in 1976, when a group of young Catholic idealists got together in El Paso, searching for a meaningful mission for themselves, and proposed the idea of creating a space to serve people without a home. In 1978, the Catholic archdiocese in El Paso decided that the project was worthwhile and gave them the second floor of the brick building to use, on the condition that they also maintain it. And with that, Annunciation House was born.
Rubén García was among that group of young Catholics. As director of the Office for Young Adults at the diocese, he decided to focus all of his enthusiasm and energy on the new project. He and four others moved into the second floor and began seeking out “the poorest of the poor” to lend a helping hand.
“When the House first opened, there were only two other shelters in El Paso,” recalls Rubén, who is still the director of Annunciation House. “At the time, we didn’t know those shelters did not accept undocumented people.” It was 1978, and after the end of the Bracero Program, which between 1942 and 1964 had allowed Mexican workers to enter the United States on a temporary basis, immigration laws had hardened. No social service organization could offer aid to anyone who was undocumented.
“We found out when we were flooded with immigrants who told us they had looked for help and had been refused ‘because we don’t have papers,’” Rubén remembers. “We understood then that immigrants were the most vulnerable group. They were the poorest of the poor.”
Ever since the first opponents of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz’s regime made El Paso the headquarters for their conspiratorial operations over a century ago, the El Paso/Juárez area has been the setting for border crossings related to asylum and exile from Mexico and sometimes even from Central America. “The house was founded in 1978, right when the Sandinistas defeated Somoza in Nicaragua and took control of the country,” Rubén remembers. “That’s when the guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala rose up, hoping they could overthrow their governments too, which as we know did not happen. But the civil wars caused a wave of exiled migrants, and El Paso was one of the border towns where they landed. So we took them in at the House.”
With increased border security efforts and a hardening of immigration politics in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, undocumented immigration into the United States has grown increasingly dangerous but has not diminished. Over the past two decades, Annunciation House has remained full, sheltering between 100 and 125 people on average. Since they first opened their doors, Rubén estimates that he and his volunteer staff have welcomed about 125,000 people.
Saúl Reyes crossed the Santa Fe bridge with his wife and their three children in February 2011. When the Reyes family arrived in El Paso, the first place to shelter them was Annunciation House.
Dozens of families have stories like that of the Reyes family. They have been harassed, persecuted, and physically attacked, their property has been ransacked or burned to the ground, and their attackers enjoy full impunity. One study by the Autonomous University of Chihuahua found that since 2008, when violence in the area escalated, approximately 100,000 Mexicans have moved from Juárez to somewhere in the United States; half of those moved to El Paso.1
Similar to the wave of upper-class pro-Díaz Mexicans at the beginning of the twentieth century, some leaving Juárez have the resources, a visa, or a work permit allowing them to stay in the United States legally. Others, like the Reyes family, thought they had a strong enough case to win asylum and decided to embark on the legal process. But these cases are the exception. Although migration and asylum are commonplace in El Paso del Norte, U.S. legislation is restrictive when it comes to granting political asylum to citizens of countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Given that asylum laws date from the 1980s and were formulated based on the geopolitics of the Cold War, those who come from Mexico and Central America are not considered eligible for protection since their governments are, at least theoretically, democracies. Immigrants from countries like China, Iran, or Venezuela, which the United States defines as non-democratic, have approval rates for asylum applications of between 70 and 82 percent, while the rates of approval for asylum petitions from Honduras and Guatemala are around 15 to 16 percent. Petitions from El Salvador are approved less than 8 percent of the time, and approval rates for Mexico are barely 2 percent. Faced with these dim prospects, the majority choose the only option they have: entering the country without documentation or with a temporary visa that will soon lapse, and fading into anonymity among the 11.5 million undocumented people living in the country.
Father Arturo Bañuelas knows his city well. The priest of the San Pio parish for twenty-six years, he recently moved to a new parish also in El Paso and has been closely involved with Rubén’s work at Annunciation House. The shelter’s operation is indispensable, he asserts, especially with all the exiles from the recent violence in Juárez. That city and El Paso, Father Arturo points out, are bound by “very strong economic, cultural, and religious ties. The people here are one community. Now we understand that after the violence broke out, for each person killed [in Juárez], a hundred more on both sides of the border have been affected … We are closer to each other here than to the capitals of our own countries. So the people who had the resources found a way to get out when the violence started. The ones who stayed in Juárez are the poorest, the ones who could not pay for their escape.”
One morning in July 2014, Rubén got a phone call. It was an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agent told him about the growing numbers of underage migrants traveling across the border alone, or with their mothers, then detained around the Río Grande in South Texas. Immigration authorities could only process them, but once they were released on bond, they had nowhere to go and had no family or host to receive them. The ICE agent told Rubén that planes were about to fly into El Paso with 140 migrants. They would be released under their own recognizance. For the ones with nowhere to go, the agent asked, could Rubén take them in?
Although Rubén was used to taking in entire families, the phone call surprised him. For years, Annunciation House had been subjected to raids and harrassment by the border patrol and ICE agents. Gradually, however, the harassment had abated, to the point where ICE agents themselves escorted undocumented pregnant women, sick people, and children to Annunciation House. And the house had provided temporary shelter to approximately 2,500 undocumented minors from Central America during the 2014 surge.
Annunciation House has become an icon for El Paso, a community that boasts of being the “Ellis Island of the southeastern U.S.,” according to Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado, whose family, originally from Durango, made El Paso their home after spending a few years in the fields in California.
“This city is home to people who want to reinvent themselves, who are fleeing hard times and need security, a way to start over,” Alfredo says, a hint of pride in his voice. “It’s a city that takes in the oppressed, the dispossessed, people who have lived through bloodshed and uncertainty.”
In May 1976, while he was still working for the archdiocese, Rubén invited Mother Teresa to visit his group of young adults. She accepted the invitation, and a relationship grew between them. Two years later she asked Rubén to work on a project she was starting. But Rubén had just received permission from the archdiocese to create a shelter for the poor, and he told her he could not accept her invitation. Mother Teresa responded in a letter praising his decision: “Now you can go forth and do a work of annunciation. You will announce the good news and give people a home in the name of Jesus.”
From then on, Annunciation House’s destiny was settled.