The southernmost barrier roughly marks the international boundary between the United States and Mexico, between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Baja California.

The area is patrolled 24/7 by US Border Patrol agents in SUV's and helicopters.

Cameras monitor the area to spot anyone who might try to cross the border illegally.

But it was not always this way, according to Deacon José Luis Medina, the administrator of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in San Ysidro, a San Diego neighborhood just north of the border.

Deacon Medina was born in Tijuana.

"We have a good relationship between Mexico and San Diego," Deacon Medina told America.

"A lot of people come from Tijuana to go shopping here. We're not very happy with the wall."

Our Lady of Mount Carmel will be the site of a 40-foot "Welcome the Stranger" sculpture.

The monument to the Virgin Mary, which will be surrounded by a meditation garden, was inspired by the Statue of Liberty and commissioned by the San Diego Organizing Project.

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego supports the project.

"The president wants to build the wall, and we want to build a bridge," Deacon Medina said.

"We are Christians. Our faith tells us that everyone is a human being."

The sculpture will stand in stark relief to the increasingly militarized border.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to build a "great border wall."

Earlier this year, thepresident visited San Diego to see eight border wall prototypes, but community members say the "Welcome the Stranger" statue is not meant as a political statement.

"This has nothing to do with politics," said David Gonzalez, who has been a parishioner at Our Lady of Mount Carmel for 20 years.

"This is who we are and what we believe in. We welcome people."

It is personal for Mr. Gonzalez, whose mother was born in Mexico. He also has undocumented friends in the community who "are doing very well, helping the economy and everything," he said. Continue reading

The Trump administration lost track of the children, the story went, after separating them from their parents at the border.

The news spread across liberal social media — with the hashtag #Wherearethechildren trending on Twitter — as people demanded immediate action.

But it wasn't true, or at least not the way that many thought.

The narrative had combined parts of two real events and wound up with a horror story that was at least partly a myth.

The fact that so many Americans readily believed this myth offers a lesson in how partisan polarization colors people's views on a gut emotional level without many even realizing it.

As other articles have explained, the missing children and the Trump administration's separation of families who are apprehended at the border are two different matters.

The Trump administration does in fact have a new policy of prosecuting all undocumented border crossers, which involves separating parents from their children.

But the 1,475 children whom the Department of Health and Human Services recently reported it cannot locate are not among those taken from their parents.

These "missing" children had actually come to the United States without their parents, been picked up by the Border Patrol and then released to the custody of a parent or guardian.

Many probably are not really missing.

The figure represents the number of children whose households didn't answer the phone when the Department of Health and Human Services called to check on them.

The unanswered phone calls may warrant further welfare checks, but are not themselves a sign that something nefarious has happened.

Obama too

The Obama administration also detained immigrant families and children, as did other recent administrations.

This past weekend, some social media users circulated a photo they said showed children detained as a result of President Trump's policies, but the image was actually from 2014.

Some waved off this seeming contradiction, saying Mr Trump's other harsh immigration policies put his administration's actions in a different context.

And it is true that even when using similar tactics, President Trump and President Obama have expressed very different attitudes toward immigration and espoused different goals.

Those arguments underscore the degree to which this controversy is animated as much by attitudes toward the president and the way he has made immigration a focus of partisan conflict as by specific policy preferences.

Decades of compromise

Deadlock over immigration has meant that, for decades, politicians have turned to the same compromise: greater enforcement of immigration laws in exchange for more liberal policies.

The Reagan administration's amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants, for instance, also increased security along the Mexican border and made it harder for undocumented immigrants to work.

The Obama administration sharply increased deportations in his first term in the hope of building a case for comprehensive immigration reform. (That move did not pay off.)

Detained immigrant children have frequently been caught up in the enforcement side of that bargain.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Immigration and Naturalization Service before it have argued that immigration detention is an essential part of enforcement and deterrence, and have vigorously pursued detention of families and children throughout multiple presidential administrations.

Immigrants' rights activists have brought a series of lawsuits that challenged and ultimately overturned many detention efforts.

But those efforts did not reach the level of national scandal that the Trump administration's policies have now.

So what has changed? Rising partisan polarization. Continue reading

The policy has seen thousands of children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to end the policy after days of outrage from the public and politicians.

"We're going to have strong — very strong — borders, but we are going to keep the families together," Mr. Trump said.

"I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated," he said when explaining why he ended the policy.

Children will now be able to stay in detention with their parents along with other "alien families … where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources".

However, Trump's changed stance does not address the situation of the 2,300-pluschildren who have already been separated from their parents.

Federal officials initially said those children would not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings.

However Brian Marriott, the senior director of communications for the Administration for Children and Families division of the Department of Health and Human Services indicated decisions still need to be made.

He said "it is still very early, and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter … reunification is always the goal".

Marriott says the Children and Families division "is working toward that [reunification]" for the children separated from their families because of Mr. Trump's policy.

Meanwhile, Trump has directed US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to go to court to ask for a modification to a 1997 court settlement.

This settlement, known as Flores, prohibits the detention of migrant children for more than 20 days.

If the court agrees to modify it, children could be held in detention until proceedings have been completed.

Trump said he will continue to maintain a tough stance on immigration.

Source

• The Guardian
• The New York Times
• Image: PBS

We walked to the Federal Courthouse in 35 degrees C and a powerful "dog days" Texan summer sun. I walked with Eddie Canales, a local hero, from Corpus Christi, who discovered that hundreds of unidentified bodies had been found on the Brooks County's rugged ranch land over the past decade.

Since 2012 the numbers of deaths have climbed. Violence and poverty in Central America and Mexico and a crackdown on the other corridors along the US-Mexican border, have funnelled even more migrants through Brooks County, 70 miles north of the Rio Grande and hour and a half from Brownsville.

Walking to the court house Eddie told me that in late July they discovered the six-day-old corpse of a Guatemalan lady, and then last week two more bodies were discovered.

The smugglers (coyotes) leave the migrants on the southern side of the Border Patrol checkpoint of a small town called Falfurrias, and they have to walk north for several hours through bracken on sandy terrain to avoid the Border patrol. Many get disoriented or sick and then perish from heat exposure and dehydration.

Eddie's outfit is called the South Texas Human Rights Center with the mission to end death and suffering on the northern side of the Rio Grande corridor; to help families find their lost loved ones; to increase awareness of the oft fatal plight of migrants; and the militarization of the border.

Eddie's volunteers set up and service water stations out in the scrub. More ranchers but not all are giving permission for them to put up these water stations on their land along the migrant routes to help prevent dehydration and save lives, especially at this time when temperatures are into the mid to high 30s.

There is opposition to this project with talk of poisoning the water and just recently 18 water stations have been destroyed or stolen. Today there are more than 90 stations established covering an area of some 1200 square miles. Home grown acts of kindness inspire the greater ones.

• Article written by Fr Anthony O'Connor, a Marist priest based in Brownsville, Texas.

Francis was asked in a press conference on a papal flight from Mexico for his reaction to Mr Trump's proposal of a US-Mexico border wall, and what he might say to US Catholics supporting Mr Trump.

Francis said that he was "not going to get involved" in giving advice about voting.

"I'll only say that this man is not Christian if he says this," said the Pontiff.

"We have to see if he said these things. And . . . I give the benefit of the doubt."

Responding to the Pope's comments, Mr Trump said: "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful."

"I am proud to be a Christian and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened . . . ."

Mr Trump said Mexican authorities told the Pope only "one side of the story".

"He didn't see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States," Mr Trump said.

The Republican Party contender added: "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened."

Also on the papal flight, the Pontiff was asked about Mr Trump's comments last week that Francis's visit to the US-Mexico border made the Pope a political pawn of the Mexican state.

"Thank God that he said I am political because Aristotle defines the human person as animal politicus(political animal)," the Pope quipped.

"At least I am human!"

"Am I a pawn?" Francis asked. "Maybe. I don't know. I'll leave the judgment to you, to the people."

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian," said the Pontiff.

"This is not in the Gospel."

Mr Trump softened his tone later, saying he has a lot of respect for the Pope.

"I don't like fighting with the Pope actually," he said.

"I don't think it's a fight, I think he said something much softer than originally reported by the media."

A Vatican spokesman later said the Pope's comments were in no way a personal attack or an indication of how to vote.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• National Catholic Reporter
• Daily Mail/Reuters
• Reuters
• Image: Breitbart

On Wednesday, the final day of his visit to Mexico, Francis went up a ramp overlooking the river and the border, to a makeshift memorial representing migrants killed in their attempts to reach the US.

Shoes of migrants who died were laid beside crosses at the memorial.

The Pope said a blessing there.

Those gathered on a levee across the river in the US waved and shouted, "Te queremos, papa!" — "We love you, Pope."

Among the people on the levee were families seeking asylum in the US.

Pope Francis did not cross into the US.

Tens of thousands of people gathered on both sides of the border to hear the Pope.

Pope Francis celebrated a Mass in Ciudad Juarez, just 80 metres from the border.

People in El Paso in Texas watched him via large television screens.

In his homily, Francis delivered a blistering salvo at injustices in Mexico and apparent indifference in the United States.

He did so without mentioning either country by name.

Francis called the "forced migration" of thousands of Central Americans a "human tragedy" and "humanitarian crisis".

"Being faced with so many legal vacuums," the Pope said before a congregation of more than 200,000 people, "they get caught up in a web that ensnares and always destroys the poorest".

"Injustice is radicalised in the young," the Pope continued.

"They are 'cannon fodder,' persecuted and threatened when they try to flee the spiral of violence and the hell of drugs."

The Pope asked for prayers for conversion, for tears, for an opening of hearts.

A Vatican spokesman said US presidential hopeful Donald Trump's previous criticism of the Pope's visit to the border was "very strange".

Sources

• CNN
• Los Angeles Times
• Reuters
• Crux Now
• Image: Yahoo News

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, told the House Judiciary Committee on June 25 that violence in their homelands is the root cause of so many children immigrating illegally.

Bishop Seitz said authorities must let religious groups and individuals minister to these children once they have arrived at the border patrol stations and shelters.

He said various requests to do so have been denied.

The bishop also called for efforts by Congress to address the root causes of such migrations.

He said simply deporting the minors "is akin to sending these children back into a burning building they just fled".

The United States Department of Homeland Security has reported that 52,000 illegal child migrants that have been apprehended at the border this fiscal year, up from 15,700 last year.

Three quarters of them are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Bishop Seitz said gangs in these three countries are increasingly targeting children, attempting to recruit them into their networks and threatening violence against the children and their families if they refuse.

He said migration should be "orderly, safe, controlled and consistent with the common good".

Bishop Seitz lamented the state of overcrowded detention facilities for the children, and emphasised the importance of due process and legal representation for migrant children.

In early June, leaked photos were published showing dozens of children crammed into bare rooms.

President Barack Obama spoke of an "urgent humanitarian situation".

There are around 5000 immigration cases pending for every qualified judge, so dealing with individual children's cases in the judicial system could take years.

Republican lawmakers and others believe the surge in child migration has come about because of the Obama administration's lax enforcement of immigration laws.

But Bishop Seitz said the relatively stagnant numbers of migrants from other Central American countries shows violence, not policy, is the primary factor in the surge.

Rumours have spread like wildfire in some Central American nations that US laws have been relaxed.

The Obama administration blames unscrupulous people-smugglers trying to drum up business for starting the rumours.

The White House has promised more help to Central American countries and to appoint more immigration judges.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• The Economist
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: The Telegraph

Hundreds of would-be migrants trying to cross from Mexico into the US die each year in the desert of dehydration or hypothermia or in shootings by border patrols or vigilantes.

The bishops also gathered to urge the US Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

On April 1, Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston gave the homily, speaking of the role immigrants play in US society and the suffering they endure to reach the country.

"Despite the xenophobic ranting of a segment of the population, our immigrant population contributes mightily to the economy and wellbeing of the United States," Cardinal O'Malley said in Arizona.

The cardinal quoted Pope Francis's comments on the Italian island of Lampedusa last year about the "globalisation of indifference".

"We have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters," Pope Francis said.

Cardinal O'Malley quoted Pope Francis further: "The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people."

People from Mexico attended the Mass on the other side of the border fence and received Communion through the iron fence slats.

The previous day, the bishops had walked along rough desert paths used by migrants.

They crawled under strands of barbed wire, scrunching low to walk through a culvert beneath a road, and dodged cactus and sticker bushes.

The group then met with the Border Patrol at their regional headquarters, before crossing into Mexico to serve dinner at a church-sponsored "comedor," or soup kitchen.

The "comedor" serves people who have been deported or who are figuring out whether they want to try to sneak into the United States.

Sources

• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Fox News Latino