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

In San Francisco de la Paz, a valley outpost ringed by lush hills in the lawless "Wild East" of Honduras, about the only business that's booming is home construction — fueled by American dollars sent home each month from migrants living in the U.S. Remittances from former villagers helped Carlos scratch out a living, but with every dab of mortar he splashed on vacant homes, he longed to join their owners.

Making $13 a day as a construction worker, he could barely afford to take care of his wife and daughter, let alone help his parents buy medicine for a range of ailments including diabetes, high blood pressure and thyroid disease.

Plus, the street violence that has ravaged Honduras hit too close to home a few years ago, when a cousin was murdered by suspected drug traffickers.

So last year, Carlos, 25, did what most Hondurans do when it's time to get out: He approached one of the three local smugglers who operate in rural San Francisco de la Paz, which has a population of about 20,000.

The smuggler gave him a price: $7,000 to cross the Rio Grande and seek asylum — but only if he took his little girl and they surrendered to the U.S. Border Patrol on the other side.

Otherwise it would cost $10,000 to traverse Mexico and then evade a gantlet of law enforcement at the border and the interior checkpoints beyond.

Carlos' wife, Claudia, pushed back.

She feared sending their only daughter, Heyli, who was 6 at the time, on a nearly 1,700-mile journey in uncertain conditions.

She'd heard grisly stories of migrants suffocating in 18-wheelers or getting assaulted on the long trek through Mexico.

Why couldn't Carlos go by himself?

"I told [the smuggler] many times, ‘Better alone,'" Claudia recalls.

"But he said, ‘No, it will be easier, better with the girl.'"

And cheaper.

The decision was wrenching.

Leaving would break up their tiny family and require them to go deep into debt.

But Carlos and Claudia always dreamed of an easier life for Heyli, away from the grinding poverty of Honduras. So the deal was struck.

Thousands of Central Americans are making the same calculation every month.

Despite the Trump Administration's "zero-tolerance" policy designed to deter illegal border crossing, the apprehension of "family units" on the U.S.-Mexico border has skyrocketed to record levels in recent months, according to the Border Patrol.

In the past five months, Border Patrol agents were apprehending family units at a rate 338 percent higher than in the same period a year earlier.

Unlike the attention-grabbing caravans that have been making their way to Tijuana, the movements of migrants who hire smugglers — and most migrants do — are not tracked by media outlets or in President Donald Trump's Twitter feed.

Like Carlos and Heyli, they slip through Mexico with smugglers, known as coyotes, who bribe cartels and corrupt cops and immigration agents along the way. (Carlos is a pseudonym; the rest of his family members are referred to in this story by their real first names.)

The money that desperate people are willing to scrape together to come to the U.S. has turned humans into cash cows.

According to a 2018 U.N. report, the migrant-smuggling industry was worth $5.7 billion to $7 billion worldwide in 2016.

Since the U.S. remains the top destination for migrants, the North American market is the crown jewel of the global smuggling trade. Continue reading

• Image: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune/TIME
• This story is part of a collaboration between TIME and The Texas Tribune to track the family separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

To watch a documentary about Carlos and Heyli's journey through the migrant-smuggling industry, watch it here.

They say it is morally irresponsible, dangerously ineffective and unwise.

Rather than keeping migrants out of the United States, they would like the administration to be more welcoming.

In a statement from the Hope Border Institute, Bishop Mark Seitz says deploying troops is "a hurtful attack on migrants, our welcoming border culture, and our shared values as Americans."

Instead of attacking migrants, Seitz says "only by working together to address the dehumanising poverty and insecurity in our sister countries in Latin America and around the world will we resolve the root causes that drive migration."

Bishop Daniel E. Flores is also trying to debunk notions of an "invasion" of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico to the United States.

He explained migrants "travel in numbers for self-protection against gangs" and noted that many "Central Americans fleeing violence in their native country try to settle in Mexico.

"Central Americans have a right in US law to apply for asylum," he said.

Another Catholic leader, Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller, called Trump's decision to send the National Guard to the border "a senseless action and a disgrace on the administration."

"These measures manifest represion (sic), fear, a perception that everyone is an enemy, and a very clear message: we don't care about anybody else. This is not the American Spirit," he tweeted.

The Mexican bishops' conference has also expressed dismay and concern for the safety of Mexican and Latin American migrants.

"It's highly risky for our Mexican and Latin American people to have a semi-militarised border ..." a tweet from the Mexican bishops' conference said.

Despite his opponents' views, Trump is justifying his request for the National Guard's help.

He says they are needed to deter illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

In his opinion, the "lawlessness" at the border is "fundamentally incompatible with the safety, security and sovereignty of the American people."

Over the past few weeks, over 1,500 migrants from Central America have been making their way through Mexico, seeking relief from violence in their home countries.

Mexico has broken up groups traveling together, drawing praise from Trump.

Many of the migrants have been given temporary transit visas. Some intend to request asylum in the United States. Others say they plan to ask for humanitarian visas to stay in Mexico.

Source

• America Magazine
• Crux Now
• Image: PressTV