We could no longer look away.

The tragedy of a father and daughter from El Salvador drowning while he tried to save her from being swept away by the strong river current reminded the nation of the horror of the unfolding humanitarian crisis at the border.

We must see them.

Martínez was leading his family from El Salvador to legally seek asylum in the United States.

But he was not able to get through the long wait at the border crossing, so he sought to swim the Rio Grande, stand on American soil, turn himself and his family in to Border Patrol and ask for asylum there.

All of that is legal.

But the river took them before they had a chance.

Martínez and his daughter were not the only migrants to die this week.

A 20-year-old migrant woman and three small children were found dead in the desert near McAllen, Texas, having succumbed to the searing heat.

In addition to these deaths, the news from last weekend of migrant children held in detention in Border Patrol stations in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, without access to soap, toothbrushes, diapers or proper care, rightly caused an outcry from the public.

Instead of the border security debate dominating the immigration headlines, Americans are now more fully seeing the human suffering of desperate migrants fleeing from home to a country that they hope will be a place of refuge.

The numbers of migrants coming are staggering.

People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

The month of May saw almost 133,000 apprehensions at the U.S. southern border, with 96,000 consisting either of family units or unaccompanied children.

The large numbers of migrants now turning themselves in to Border Patrol and asking for asylum has overwhelmed our system.

Our laws require that we hear and process asylum claims and that anyone who sets foot on U.S. soil can claim asylum, but with the government's primary focus being on zero tolerance, deterrence, security, detention, deportation and keeping migrants away from the border, the number of families and children presenting themselves for asylum is too much to properly administer.

The Border Patrol is overwhelmed and chaos has ensued.

Hearing these stories this week reminded me of what I've seen in my own trips to the border in the past year, most recently to El Paso less than two months ago.

There, I connected with a network of churches receiving from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants a day.

The churches gave the migrants food and drink and provided a temporary place to rest before they continued their journey to join family in other parts of America.

I'll never forget seeing the hollow eyes on the faces of exhausted migrants huddled on cots in a church sanctuary that had been haphazardly turned into a migrant shelter in El Paso.

When I arrived, I was told that these migrants had been released by ICE that day to the church.

It was midafternoon, but what struck me was that they were so very tired.

They sat in the quiet church worship hall in silence.

Some slept.

Some just sat and stared.

Babies didn't even cry.

Mothers held their children close and just looked ahead.

No one said a word.

No laughter, no conversation.

No crying of the children. Just silence.

They were all so tired.

I was told by the pastors of the church that many of the migrants who came to them day after day suffered from violence, rape, extortion and threats of being forced into drug gangs.

Many of them saw loved ones murdered and they lived under threats of death at the hands of cartels and drug gangs.

Corrupt police and government officials could not protect the poor who were being used and extorted in these countries that are descending into lawlessness.

Yet, prayers from the pastors, shelter, food, love, hospitality, concern, and being received and embraced as fully human encouraged them greatly.

The work of Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical churches along the border over the past several months has been immense.

I've seen with my own eyes, and through my research with the Evangelical Immigration Table, churches engaging in this hard but needed work of receiving migrants in San Diego-Tijuana; Nogales, Ariz.; El Paso, Texas; and elsewhere.

These churches truly are being the hands and feet of Jesus.

But the other side of the work of the church is that it is often fellow Christians who come to the border from the south and make their way across.

I've heard from multiple sources that the majority of the migrants coming from Central America are evangelical Christians.

I was told by a church shelter manager in Las Cruces, New Mexico, that as many as 75 percent of the migrants they served were evangelicals.

Others in El Paso said the proportion of evangelical migrants was well over 50 percent. In significant ways, the ministry of receiving migrants by churches at the border is the ministry of the church embracing Christ himself.

Not long ago, a Nazarene pastor friend of mine was invited to meet with a group of asylum-seekers at the border.

Among them was a man named Oscar and his little girl.

He had fled to the U.S. to keep her safe.

They shared a meal and then Oscar, who said he was part of an evangelical church, told my friend something profound.

"Somos familia," he said. "Somos hermanos."

We are family. We are brothers.

Was this the same Oscar?

What matters is what the asylum-seeker my friend met said.

"Somos familia. Somos hermanos."

John Garland, pastor of San Antonio Mennonite Fellowship, has also recently written that approximately 80 percent of the migrants that his church receives are evangelical Christians.

I write this not because I think that evangelical Christians have more value than people of other religions or no religion at all, but because I think it is important for American Christians to know that the migrants coming to us are also our brothers and sisters in Christ.

They are family.

How we treat them and see them is how we treat Jesus (Matthew 25:40).

I believe that Jesus sees these desperate people. I believe they matter to him.

Jesus saw Óscar and Valeria. Jesus saw the woman and the three little children who died in the desert.

He sees all of the crowds of migrants, harassed and helpless and fleeing from a home where they are no longer safe to journey to a place they have never been.

He wants us to see them too.

Can we, like Jesus, be moved with compassion for the crowds of migrants coming to us? Can we pray for them and weep for migrants like Óscar and Valeria?

Jesus sees them.

Do we?

• Alan Cross

The National Guard exists for the protection of the nation.

They assist in times of natural disasters or respond to an armed threat from a foreign military force.

None of that is happening at the moment on the border.

Maybe what elicited it was news of a group of Central Americans from their country controlled by narco-trafficking gangs with money from the US sale of their illegal drugs who were making their way to the US border to seek refuge.

There does not seem to be any need for the National Guard to serve down here: there are no invading armies nor hurricanes.

The border has all sorts of different police forces, local, state and federal which are more aggressively than usual seeking out the illegal alien, the drug trafficker and his drugs, the coyote and or human trafficker /smuggler.

This has always been so in modern times.

The Rio Grande Valley was once part of Mexico.

In those days the people crossed the river as need be trying to eke out their existence in this fertile but desert land. The people were all Hispanic, the same genes, the same culture and the same everything.

But since 1848 a line was drawn in the sand.

At first there was no policing other than to keep people in, namely the escaped slaves,(Fugitive Slave Act 1848) the latter to keep people out meaning Chinese immigrants.(Chinese exclusion Act of 1882)

However from 1924 onwards the border patrolling began, sometimes strictly enforced other times more laissez faire, allowing immigrant workers to serve agricultural and enter the labor force to do what north Americans didn't want to do.

And the locals?

Some families have always been here, some arrived 100 years ago, others later on and many, about 13% " wetbacks" (those who metaphorically swam across the river.)

Life goes on as usual maybe not quite as usual as before the Spanish conquest, or the US annexation, but as usual as can be.

Some moments have been with much border restrictions, others more laissez faire, always having to struggle to survive economically but life goes on come what may.

Maybe there is a spirituality of the border, much dysfunctionality , much stress, but in many ways a spirituality of "primero a Dios " "first God" which means He is in charge come what may.

There are too many brave valley people who struggle as is a democratic right to call out the authorities, over injustice and corruption and bring from the darkness to the light of day things that are happening that should not be.

Many groups come together and speak out at risk.

One of these people I know is a brave, resistant and persistent lady who last year after a visit of her group to Washington D.C., pleaded the cause of the simple folk on the border saying:

"Daily life is changing for the worse in my border community.

"My neighbors live in fear that a traffic infraction may turn into a deportation.

"Local police are being asked to enforce immigration laws and that violates the trust with the community.

"Now the president is proposing spending our taxpayer dollars on expensive and unnecessary walls.

"We already have walls.

"I live right next to one that divides our community.

"Our community is poor. More walls will not alleviate our poverty, pave our streets, or provide the public services we need.

"Walls are not the answer to anything."

• Fr Tony O'Connor is a New Zealand Marist priest working in the Rio Grande Valley on the border the USA with Mexico. He is a third generation kiwi; his first ancestor families traveled from Ireland and 1867 arrived in New Zealand. Like most poor migrants they came looking for a better life.
• This is the second of 6 pieces on his experience of life on the border between Mexico and the USA.

Bishop Aegidius Zsifkovics of Eisenstadt has ensured the fence being built along Austria's border with Hungary will have at least two large holes.

The bishop said that fences weren't the answer to Europe's refugee crisis and allowing them would be a contradiction of Pope Francis's views.

The fence is the latest in a number of hard line stances taken by the Austrian government against asylum seekers.

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