Washington D.C., Sep 24, 2020 / 09:01 am (CNA).- Sister Norma Pimentel, a member of the Missionaries of Jesus and executive director of Catholic Charities Rio Grande Valley, this week was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2020.
Pimentel has for the past several years been a visible and highly active advocate for migrants in need of humanitarian aid at the US-Mexico border.
“It’s amazing how we see human suffering in such magnitude, right across from the United States,” Sister Pimentel told CNA in an October 2019 interview.
“It’s something that we could have handled so [differently]— these are refugees, people who are fleeing violence, asking for protection, and we deny that opportunity to have them come in and wait here.”
Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley opened their first respite center at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen in 2014 to provide migrants with basic necessities, including a shower and a bowl of soup.
In need of more space, they later moved to a former nursing home, and eventually in 2019 to a new, larger center in downtown McAllen.
The center has helped hundreds of thousands of migrants over its years of operation, Pimentel says, with donations coming in from around the country and, before the pandemic, many volunteer groups coming to help.
Pimentel said most of the people they help are women and children who have been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a court date to consider their request for asylum. In earlier years, border agents would typically drop asylum seekers at the McAllen center shortly after being released from the custody of federal authorities.
New Migrant Protection Protocols took effect during January 2019, which require migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico, rather than being allowed to come into the US to await their asylum hearing.
Before the new protocols took effect, Pimentel said the Humanitarian Respite Center was receiving close to 1,000 migrants daily, offering basic aid such as food, clothing, and showers.
Catholic Charities’ role changed drastically after the new protocols kicked in, she said, because the number of migrants actually making it to the US dropped dramatically, to between 10-40 people daily in late 2019.
“And in the meantime, they’re stranded there [in Mexico], they’re homeless. It’s the most horrific human suffering that we see happening to these families, exposed to so many dangers and abuses; cartels and things like that. So it is a very sad, dramatic change that we are seeing,” she told CNA.
Donations received at the Respite Center are sorted and distributed to groups working with immigrants along the border, she said. There are several large aid groups working to improve conditions for the migrants in Matamoros, Mexico, right across from Brownsville.
Volunteers working with Catholic Charities frequently went across the border to Matamoros, where the families are camping out, and bring them hygiene items, food, and anything else that they need. There are estimated to be about 650 migrants in the camps currently, down from several thousand at its peak.
The coronavirus pandemic has made helping families along the border even more difficult. In March, President Donald Trump shut down nonessential travel across the US-Mexico border, and indefinitely suspended the asylum system.
In Matamoros, Pimentel says she often would encounter entire families waiting at the border, fleeing persecution in their home countries, who have nothing to eat except what is brought to them by aid groups. Matamoros is one of the world’s most dangerous cities, with frequent kidnappings and murders.
“I really touches my heart to hear that, and to see the children and families hurting so much. It really hurts to see children in such poor conditions,” Pimentel said.
In addition to basic supplies, Catholic Charities was helping to provide legal assistance, workshops, and explanations to the migrants, who often have little idea how the US immigration system works, and have no idea how their hearing will go. Often there is not even a translation available for migrants who do not speak English, she said.
The United Nations refugee agency says in 2019, there were about 70,000 who filed for asylum in the US from Mexico, up from 2,000 in 2014.
Pimentel wrote a July 2020 op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that squalid conditions at the Matamoros camp and a lack of water and sanitary supplies made the camp “a potential outbreak waiting to happen.”
To Pimentel, helping the destitute migrants in the area is part and parcel of the charity that the Catholic faith demands of every believer.
“If we believe in a God of love, a God who tells us that we must welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, clothe the naked— Jesus was very specific in saying ‘Look for me and you will find me in them, in those people who are hurting and suffering,'” she said.
“How else do we want to receive Jesus if he is telling us already: ‘This is where you will find me.’ And so if we don’t do that, I think we are failing to understand Jesus in our lives, and what He is calling us to do.”
The Catholic bishop of Brownsville praised Sister Pimentel’s work Sept. 22 and congratulated her on her distinction.
“Thank you, Sister. You help us all come together in the Valley to face our challenges,
you help us learn how to help each other, how to protect the vulnerable, to not lose hope…and to be a sign of Christ in the world,” Bishop Daniel Flores of Browsville said Sept. 22.
President Trump visited McAllen during January 2019 in an effort to drum up support for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall along the border with Mexico. Pimentel said after the visit that she was “truly disappointed” that she did not get a chance to speak during a roundtable discussion with the president.
Pimentel said at the time that if she had had the opportunity to speak, she would have emphasized that she understands the importance of border security and keeping the country safe, and that the Border Patrol – with whom she says she has always had a good relationship, and prays for daily – should be supported.
”We also must recognize that there are a lot of families, innocent victims of violence, that are suffering,” she said.
“And we find them here in our community, and we as a community are so generous in responding to help them, to be there for them. It’s a part of who we are as Americans, very compassionate. And that is a side that unfortunately our president was not open to listening to.”
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For the Hochul-Bassett duo to fault CompassCare for not offering abortion “services” is like the Munich Central Hospital (city nearest to Dachau) being faulted for not doubling as a Nazi crematorium.
Mind-bending and gender transitioning are cut from the same cloth…
The earlier Governor Cuomo refused to enforce child protection against abortion, and the transition to the later Governor Andrew Cuomo gave us the announcement, in 2014, that those who oppose abortion and gay “marriage” “are not welcome in New York.” More recently (2016), it was reported that the fully transitioned New York City Commissioner on Human Rights declared no less than thirty-one kinds of sexual identity (and now there are 78!). And, that (“he”) wanted the use of the “non-binary” spectrum “zie” in place of “he” and “she,” threatening heavy fines for not following the new script.
Small wonder—the net loss of well over 300,000 people from New York City last year, and an equal number overall from New York state. Reported as COVID fallout, but a sane world knows it’s because the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
This type of thinking makes you wonder if this country will survive.
More heavy-handed stupidity from the left. Their ironic double standards of morality are plainly visible except to those most thoroughly indoctrinated.They get away with lies, propaganda and distortions which push us further left as long as people do not openly oppose them and complain to their govt representatives. I am reminded of the leftists who even now flap their hands hysterically about an “insurrection” that was “threatening the very foundations of our democracy”, all the while on TV I am seeing film of UNARMED folks in viking costume taking selfies.Yeah. Scary as anything. NOT. A dog is a dog, and no amount of calling it a cat will make it so.
It didn’t take long for progressives to move way past cakes and flowers.
It didn’t take long for progressives to move FAR beyond cakes and flowers.
Lex – When were they EVER at cakes and flowers?
Just when you thought (or hoped) that the lunacy had peaked.
Q: WHY did they do that?
A: Because that’s what they do.
One is tempted to say that they can’t help themselves, but that’s not the case – they know damn well what they’re doing.
The Transgressive Party Platform:
1 – We decide what your choices are, or we burn your business down.
2 – We believe Science is Surreal, and Bruce Jenner is a woman, and if you don’t agree, we’ll burn your business down.
3 – You are just breeders, and your kids are our property, and we’ll decide how to raise them, and if you don’t agree, we’ll burn your business down.
The picture of life arising from modern Democrat politics is all chaos and the relations with it maintained by the Republicans can seem to be mostly self-serving and paternalizing/accommodating and therefore impotent.
As you might compile a study card, jot down some notes and see: endless Congressional management hearings, over-bearing petrol prices, sabre-rattling for war, fire-bombings, prosecuting victims, reductionist federal policies, etc., etc.
It’s ugly and I don’t want to complete the list. But it serves the purpose of providing a snapshot of where things are and a measuring line for discerning if anything actually progresses.
And it provokes the question, very rational, very universal: What really can be achieved that way?
The graffiti looks like something from a four year old’s coloring book. Real bright people, these.