Source: Crux

EL PASO — Ruben Garcia, to be clear, is not a man easily impressed by PR gestures or empty rhetoric on the subject of immigration. Born and bred in El Paso, he’s been running Annunciation House, a Catholic hospitality center for migrants and refugees, for almost 40 years, and he’s seen far too much to be conned.

Ask Garcia what he makes of political vows to clamp down on illegal immigration by “getting tough,” for instance, and he’ll tell you the story of a 44-year-old Guatemalan woman currently staying at Annunciation House with steel rods in both legs as a result of hip fractures suffered in a desperate attempt to scale a 14-foot security barrier.

Now utterly destitute, she paid a smuggler roughly $3,000 each for herself and her 14-year-old daughter to get across Mexico, and another $1,500 to be shown where to try to cross into the United States. They were fleeing a situation in which young girls were being kidnapped and forced into sexual servitude by criminal gangs, and the mother was determined that no matter what – “no matter what,” Garcia stresses – that wouldn’t happen to her daughter.

“You turn up the pressure cooker enough,” Garcia said, “and it doesn’t matter how hard to you try to prevent people from coming, they’re going to come.”

“We want to make it rational, and it’s not,” he said in an interview on Monday with Crux. “It’s basically, as a mother or a father, I will do anything to try and protect my kids.”

Thus when Garcia says that Pope Francis’ stop at the US-Mexico border on Wednesday has “absolutely immense value,” it’s not simply kneejerk sentiment, but a carefully considered appraisal.

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