AT THE BORDER WITH THE PATRON SAINT OF TRANSMUTATION
Photos by Sam Slovick
BY SAM SLOVICK
Two little girls in Sunday dresses play in the church at Ágape Misión Mundial, a shelter in the Nueva Aurora neighborhood of Tijuana, Mexico serving dispossessed migrants. Nearby, church services are gearing up in a big room with orange walls, sheer red curtains and tidy rows of white plastic chairs that fill quickly as a four-piece band warms up. Keyboard, bass and drums open with a chorus of “The Blessing,” a popular evangelical anthem. Singer Julio Garcia sets the tone for today’s service: gratitude. As a child, Garcia’s family worked in the old Tijuana landfill that the church was built on. Now, he’s about to graduate from law school. Like the rest of the young parishioners in the band, the church sponsored his education.
Across the border, a new administration has inspired a cautious sense of optimism for migrants here as Sunday services get underway. Francisca López, a woman in her 40s, pours out her soul to Jesus Cristo as others gather in front of the low stage. “Gracias, Señor! Gracias, Señor!” she prays.
Colored lights strobe as the sound system threatens to buckle under the bass. It’s 11:00 a.m., 20 minutes into the devotional service when Tony, a visually impaired parishioner in his 60s, breaks into an emotional testimonial. He plays tambourine in a spirited dance, then genuflects.
The room is packed a little tighter on Sundays, but the devotional service is a daily ritual here in the church at Ágape Misión Mundial, a sanctuary for some asylum seekers. Perched on a big hill, down a rutty road off a main thoroughfare, the compound was constructed nearly two decades ago on top of a landfill that was decommissioned in 2002, long before Mexico had adopted environmental regulations.
The Ágape Misión Mundial migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico.
“There were all kinds of toxic and very dangerous stuff here at this old city dump. Medical waste, X-rays… everything,” says Pastor Albert Rivera, the man behind the mission. “We put over a hundred 3-ton truckloads of good dirt on it, and then we started compacting. And then we started building on top.”
The shelter is wedged between a neglected government graveyard, whose sloping grounds shift with the weather, and a new 20-acre landfill called Eco Waste, which was temporarily shut down not long ago for dumping feces in the neighborhood. In what became a big story, Rivera led the charge to stop the polluting after a baby at the shelter was born malformed. In a hard rain, though, there’s no telling what might surface. This is Tijuana, after all, the deadliest city in Mexico, America’s biggest trading partner. Two thousand people were murdered here in 2020, about 200 fewer than in 2019.
Rivera started his ministry in 2001. Newly ordained by the World Agape Mission Church in Los Angeles, armed with a Bible and a mission to preach, he shared his faith and served some food. “I stood there for three years,” he says, recalling the early days of coming to the city dump to preach and serve meals to hungry people. “There were 1,200 people working here, looking for trash and recycling. Kids and everything.”
Rivera coordinated his efforts with several different food banks. One of them was Heart of Compassion in Montebello, California. “Then, the Los Angeles Dream Center. They helped out a lot. Children’s Hunger Fund, that’s a great organization that helped us out, too. Before I knew it, we were bringing 40 tons of food to distribute to everyone working inside the dump. We were serving,” he says.
“I stood there for three years. There were 1,200 people working here, looking for trash and recycling. Kids and everything.”
The Ágape property in Tijuana consists of five structures in a state of perpetual construction on 11 lots. The main walkway cuts the compound in half. Two-story buildings across from a basketball court are adorned with 20 clotheslines neatly hung with clean laundry. Inside, dormitory rooms filled with bunk-bed cubicles that are separated by walls created from blankets provide shelter to about 12 migrants each. A big indoor kitchen, dining area and computer room are rarely empty. A second outdoor cooking area fitted with a cinder-block fire stove is just across the walkway from individual shower rooms and bathrooms.
In February, 100 people were living here. But the shelter could soon be filled to capacity with the new influx of migrants, just as it was in 2018 when a Honduran caravan stranded 7,000 migrants in Tijuana in time for the U.S. midterm elections. The buzz now is that another caravan is getting ready to leave Central America soon. So far, it’s just a buzz, but organizers in Honduran chat rooms are actively planning.
On a Monday morning last month, though, sunlight warms the shiny plywood floors in Rivera’s office on the third floor. A big room with freshly painted green walls and lots of windows looks down on an old cemetery. “That little green building used to be a crematorium,” Rivera says.
He sees Carmen María, a young migrant girl, playing on the walkway below and smiles at her. Carmen and her family are asylum seekers from Guatemala. They’ve been there for 18 months waiting for an asylum hearing after registering for the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program. According to the Department of Homeland Security, MPP is a “U.S. government action whereby certain foreign individuals entering or seeking admission to the U.S. from Mexico – illegally or without proper documentation – may be returned to Mexico and wait outside of the U.S. for the duration of their immigration proceedings, where Mexico will provide them with all appropriate humanitarian protections for the duration of their stay.”
For an indication of the administration’s mixed messaging about compassion and crisis, consider that the DHS website still quotes the department’s former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen toasting the launch of the program that separated families and relegated unaccompanied minors to the streets of dangerous Mexican border towns. Nielsen’s testimony is a gruesome reminder of the damage inflicted under former White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s reign: “We have implemented an unprecedented action that will address the urgent humanitarian and security crisis at the Southern border. This humanitarian approach will help to end the exploitation of our generous immigration laws.”
Some people didn’t survive the MPP, like two Honduran teens from the 2018 caravan, Jasson Ricardo Acuña Polanco and Jorge Alexander Ruiz Duban, who were stranded in Tijuana and then murdered by narcomenudistas (low-level drug dealers). They were two of the 2,518 reported killings in the border town that year.
The ongoing border crisis may be the result of decades of incoherent and exploitative U.S. immigration policy, exacerbated by the former Trump administration’s intentional cruelty, but President Biden is being tasked with heading the cleanup crew, regardless.
Right now, Rivera is Carmen’s link to whatever possibility of immigrating into the U.S. her family still harbors. Rivera is Tijuana’s patron saint of transmutation. He turned a mountain of garbage into a sanctuary for vulnerable migrants in a town rife with drug cartels, gangs, corrupt police and politicians. He has a way of making things happen, even in the shadowy realms of migrants in the city.
Later in the day, the pastor sinks into a donated brown couch in his office and tells his story, including how he was once mistaken for a close relative of drug lord El Chapo and taken into custody by military police in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala. He is perpetually clean-shaven and dresses in freshly pressed khakis and a white T-shirt. Christian books are scattered on a big, round, plastic table, along with a well-worn leather Bible. A tangle of wires on the desk as a big surveillance monitor keeps watch of everything.
***
Albert Rivera was born in Puerto Rico to a single mother who moved them to Los Angeles when he was 3 years old. There, he grew up rough in the Westlake neighborhood around MacArthur Park. As a teen in the 1970s, coming of age in a hardscrabble neighborhood, Rivera soon found himself on shaky ground: gang-affiliated and taking drugs. He ended up in psychiatric care at a Los Angeles County hospital after an accidental overdose. There, he met a volunteer who began taking him to church services.
Pastor Albert Rivera in his office at the Ágape Misión Mundial migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico.
Religion didn’t take right away: the future pastor was temporarily banished after scaling the big cross behind the altar in a state of fervor at Faith of Our Father’s Church in Gardena, California. The church later embraced him and welcomed him back, and he began his path to becoming a pastor. He was ordained as an evangelical Christian pastor by the Agape World Mission Church English Ministry, based in L.A’s Koreatown neighborhood in 2001.
Rivera has a compelling story and a long-standing, symbiotic relationship with the local press in Tijuana, but things had gone quiet after the big Honduran caravan put migrant shelters in the spotlight in 2018. Now, it’s picking up again. Media outlets are sniffing around, sensing a story forming in the Central American diaspora, especially during the time of the pandemic.
“All of a sudden, things are moving again,” the pastor says.
He’s getting calls for interviews about the shelter’s Covid-19 response to the next wave of Central American migrants. “We don’t have Covid here,” he says, looking to the heavens. “Nobody has gotten sick here yet. Thank God.”
The coming surge is partly in anticipation of new opportunities for asylum seekers at the border under the Biden administration, but there are other drivers. Hurricanes Eta and Iota are storms that ravaged swaths of Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize in 2020. Climate refugees, long predicted by environmentalists, are a part of the movement.
Rivera is Tijuana’s patron saint of transmutation. He turned a mountain of garbage into a sanctuary.
While advocates, organizations, refugees and people like Rivera seek to read the tea leaves of the new administration’s policies, temperature checks and hand sanitizer are mandatory at Ágape Misión Mundial as government agencies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border wrestle with the logistics of an emerging policy.
The political chaos takes human form at migrant shelters like Ágape all over Mexico as wells as places like the El Chaparral port of entry at the Tijuana border, where a non-governmental organization called Grupos Beta is a resource for migrants who have started showing up at the crossing, asking about their asylum cases. The NGO works with the country’s National Institute of Immigration to serve migrants.
For those not on the MPP list, a gamble is crossing the border without documentation and hoping for release inside the U.S. Rivera points out the obvious: “What happens later, when you show up in front of the judge, and he says, ‘Hey? Why did you jump the line? Why didn’t you wait?’ Now, maybe he’s not going to give you asylum,” he says.
For most asylum seekers, it’s still a waiting game, but not everyone is waiting. In January, there were 78,000 arrests and detentions at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s the highest number for that month in over a decade. Currently, 5,000 children are in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody waiting to be placed by Department of Health and Human Services with relatives or sponsors in the United States.
Carmen on the walkway at the Ágape Misión Mundial migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico after her fingers were amputated.
Three-year-old Carmen doesn’t care about borders. She’s posted up on the ground near the walkway in a blue dress embroidered with small, white hearts, and a donated Barbie doll nestled in her lap. Carmen intermittently checks over her shoulder as she combs through her Barbie’s shiny blond hair with her little fingers. Nearby, her three older brothers throw trompos — brightly colored, plastic spinning tops on the concrete. Carmen is here at Ágape with them and their parents, Silvia Orozco and Erick Mazareigos Lopez, who are waiting for their asylum hearings.
It’s been a long, arduous journey just to get here. The family fled gang violence 18 months ago. They escaped with their lives and have been adhering to the MPP program left over from the previous administration under the “remain in Mexico” policy.
About 70,000 asylum-seekers were deported to Mexico to wait while their cases adjudicate in U.S. immigration courts as required by MPP’s “remain in Mexico” directive. Some 25,000 of those are active cases that will be allowed into the United States.
***
It’s an early afternoon in February and Pastor Rivera is wrapping up a three-hour Zoom conference with representatives of 60 other migrant shelters and officials from government agencies in Mexico. Confusion about the new U.S. border policy and Covid-19 protocols are wreaking a bit of havoc. The good news is that shelters will now communicate directly with the government and take a more active role in registering migrants and Covid protocols. “The Mexican national policy is for everyone to get Covid-19 vaccines, including the immigrants,” Rivera says. “Shelters also want vaccines and PPE for front-line workers and a few other things.”
The sudden spirit of cooperation coming from the government surprises the pastor. “Another problem came out,” he says. “We have some unaccompanied minors and no country wants to take responsibility for them. Who is going to take responsibility for all these unaccompanied minors?”
This question is one of the many political landmines in the minefield the new administration has just stepped into. President Biden, though, is familiar with the terrain. Under the former President Obama administration, Central American Minors Program enabled kids to join parents already in the U.S. legally. But some 3,000 young Central American migrants who had already been approved to reunite with parents in the United States were left in the lurch when the incoming Trump administration abandoned the Obama-era program without notice.
Ultimately, some 6,000 children were separated from families and more than 1,400 parents deported. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently said the Biden administration’s taskforce for reuniting migrant families will give them the option to be reunified in the U.S. Separated families are eligible for legal services, healthcare and mental health services, and other benefits.
The Biden administration will revive the Central American Minors program, allowing 5,000 youths in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to apply. “There’s about 10,000 migrants just in Tapachula now and 7,000 still here in Tijuana still from the 2018 caravan,” Rivera says, while children gather around him in the kitchen. “Migrants were forced to file their asylum claims in southern Mexico as part of the MPP program. Forty thousand want to get back on the line now,” he says.
Timing is everything in politics, and the question of whether the Biden administration can rally enough public and political goodwill to eclipse the photo-op politics of Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is a big one.
The MPP program may have ended, but there is nothing in place to replace it just yet, which is contributing to the growing confusion and a steady stream of migrants showing up and camping out in Chaparral plaza at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in Tijuana. Fueled by desperation more than the hype and hope seen on social media, they want information, and the border crossing in Tijuana is where migrants can present themselves to Mexican and American immigration officials to apply for asylum. Or at least they could previously.
There is reason for both a renewed sense of possibility and mistrust. Biden reversed the policy of turning away unaccompanied children at the border, instead placing them with relatives and sponsor families in the U.S. His immigration plans also include an eight-year pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. An expedited route for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and essential workers, more diversity visas and more funding to immigration courts are all on the wish list — when he took office as president, he inherited a backlog of almost 1.3 million files pending resolution by immigration judges.
Timing is everything in politics and the question of whether the Biden administration can rally enough public and political goodwill to eclipse the photo-op politics of Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is a big one. With priorities like a Covid-19 relief bill under his belt and eyes trained on a so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill, the burgeoning border crisis is a potential political quagmire for a president struggling to keep a divided country from coming apart at the seams.
An asylum seeker from Honduras at the El Chaparral migrant camp in Tijuana, Mexico.
Meanwhile, the additional pressure on immigration — slave wages south of the border and the rampant exploitation of cheap, undocumented labor north of it — remains unaddressed in any real way. However, the Biden plan does include investing $4 billion in stabilizing the Central American economy, addressing poverty, violence, environmental crises, drugs, gangs, corruption, and so on. It’s not a new idea and it is directly intended stem the tide of illegal immigration by shoring up the countries from which migrants are fleeing. Passing any significant legislation to that end, though, will be a tall order in the current political climate.
For now, the messaging from the White House is that, while it is serious about family reconciliation and sweeping reform, it’s going to take time. Don’t come to the border now. The first youth shelter under Biden opened in February in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is, so far, not a good look, and recent photos emerged of a government-run tent city in Donna, Texas at the U.S.-Mexico border. Images of 1,000 migrants crowded in close confines on plastic mats with silver mylar blankets, in cells separated by clear plastic sheets, summon recent memories of kids in cages shivering on concrete floors at DHS detention centers. Then, there was 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, who perished on camera in a holding cell at a processing center in McAllen, Texas in 2019, shortly after being diagnosed with the flu and a 103-degree fever.
***
The people at Ágape Mundial may have nothing, but they serve food to other people who have less than nothing. They take clothes and blankets to other migrants stranded on the journey at the border crossing in Tijuana. “Ágape means unconditional love,” Rivera says.
The pastor is at his apartment, where a three-day women’s retreat is just coming to a close following the Sunday service. The retreat provided women from the shelter some time for healing and a break from the kids.
These moments of peace and normalcy are tenuous. For these asylum seekers, threats known and unknown can be around any corner. This afternoon, as food is being served, a big wooden table collapses, smashing Carmen’s fingers. Blood squirts everywhere. Her mother Silvia picks up her screaming daughter but is overwhelmed and faints. Another woman, Mary, scoops up Carmen and makes a dash for the hospital in Rosarito a few miles away. The rest of the women regroup in the circle and pray.
But the hospital in Rosarito doesn’t treat Carmen other than to put on a bandage and send her to the local Red Cross, where Rivera says she also is turned away. “They said the doctor was gone,” he explains, but he suspects it’s “because they’re immigrants. They have no insurance.”
Carmen’s father Erick finally takes his daughter to the Red Cross in Tijuana, where they’re advised to spend the night, but the doctor never shows up in the morning. The following day, Carmen’s fingers turn black. They are badly infected. Erick finally found a private doctor to treat her, who promptly amputates parts of two fingers of her left hand.
While the particulars of Carmen’s story are unique, its trajectory is predictable here, where migrants are under constant attack by cartels, coyotes, sex and labor traffickers, the media and sometimes by each other. They’re assaulted with false narratives, beaten up by policies, stripped of their human rights and exposed to the elements in detention centers and on the streets. Police found the remains of 227 migrants last year along the Arizona border alone. The U.S. Border Patrol reported 7,442 migrant deaths from 1998 to 2018.
“Things happen to immigrants. It’s very sad,” the pastor says.
While the particulars of Carmen’s story are unique, its trajectory is predictable here, where migrants are under constant attack by cartels, coyotes, sex and labor traffickers, the media and sometimes each other.
Things continue to happen, even to large groups of asylum seekers. Guatemalan riot police and military teed off on a Honduran migrant caravan in mid-January, tear gassing some 6,000 in Chiquimula at the border with Honduras. Later that month, 19 migrants were found dead by police in two burned-out trucks in Santa Anita, Mexico, at the Texas border. The Guatemalan media reported that the killers were smugglers.
A few days after parts of Carmen’s fingers were removed, Rivera tipped off the media about her plight. A slew of on-camera interviews followed, and soon Carmen became something of a celebrity. She and her parents are now a big story in Mexico, Central America and parts of the U.S. People recognize them when they show up at the border crossing in Tijuana in mid-February with Rivera.
Tents line the sidewalk outside the office of Grupos Beta, where more than 800 migrants are queued up in what is now known as the Chaparral camp. “I’m not surprised that this was created this way, to create a crisis at the border and everything so that you could demonstrate to the U.S. that, yes, we have a crisis and everything: give me more money,” Rivera says while pulling up the church van at El Chaparral Plaza at the Otey Mesa Port of Entry.
Rivera and some of the migrants sheltering at the Ágape mission unload the van and set up a big table and pots of rice and beans to the asylum seekers here. “I’m hearing from people. They want to know if the shelter is open. What’s going to happen at the border? All of a sudden, everybody is coming,” Rivera smiles, looking over the top of his glasses as Erick, Silvia and the kids climb out of the shelter’s van.
A news crew shows up to interview Erick and Silva. It’s routine by now. Carmen sits on a blanket and watches while her parents tell their story to the camera. Her bandages are off. The scabs have fallen away, but the two stubs are still tender.
Carmen may be missing parts of her fingers, but her family is intact, and a few hours later she disappears through the gate of a chain-link security fence at a government shelter not far from Ágape. Rivera looks on with the emotional detachment of a monk as they recede into the system.
We have some unaccompanied minors and no country wants to take responsibility for them. Who is going to take responsibility for all these unaccompanied minors?
The shelter will provide Covid-19 tests to the family, and if everyone is negative, they’ll get on a white bus with 50 other immigrants and cross the border into the U.S. to wait for their asylum claims to process. Ultimately, an immigration court will make a decision on Erick, Silvia and their children. The media attention they received when Carmen’s fingers were amputated may help.
Carmen and her family end up spending the night in a hotel in San Diego. They’ll be moving in with Silvia’s mother in Texas while they wait for their case to adjudicate. The pastor drove back from the border crossing to Ágape Misión Mundial with a family of eight asylum seekers in tow. They are climate refugees from Haiti. Another family has already moved into the dorm room where Carmen, Silvia, Erick and the boys spent the past 20 months.
For more on this topic, read an excerpt from the Pacific Council Magazine’s “The United States and Latin America: Good Neighbors At Last?”
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Sam Slovick is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. His feature documentary, “Radicalized” (2016), has been called the definitive voice-of-a-generation protest film.
This article was originally published by Red Canary Magazine.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
