Ruben Garcia’s days start early, with a text message from Border Patrol. On a bright day in mid-January, the message arrived a little after 5:45 A.M. Ninety-two people who had crossed the border illegally as part of family units would be released today, the text said. Where would they go?
As the director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit shelter system, Garcia, who is seventy-five, has welcomed migrants and refugees arriving in El Paso for nearly fifty years. Record numbers of people are crossing the border, many of them into El Paso, one of the country’s busiest ports of entry. Ninety-two people was “very manageable” compared with the number on many other days, he said. Without Garcia’s efforts, “over the years, tens of thousands of people would have been on the streets of El Paso without food, without shelter, without comfort,” Veronica Escobar, the congresswoman who represents El Paso, told me. When Escobar took a congressional delegation to the border, earlier this month, she made sure her colleagues talked to Garcia, whom she refers to as “a saint who still walks the earth.”
Increasingly, people in positions of power are eager for Garcia’s expertise, even if they don’t always agree with his opinions on immigration; he has met with representatives of both the Trump and Biden Administrations. Last January, when New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, visited the southern border to better understand how to handle the influx of migrants to New York, he sat down with Garcia. “He was basically, like, ‘Why are you sending all these people to New York City?’ ” Garcia recalled. Garcia has white hair and a mild, tolerant manner that belies his underlying steeliness; he has little patience for people who see migrants as someone else’s problem. “This is us encountering our own humanity,” he told me. “This is what we were made for.” He encouraged the Mayor to enlist local faith communities to support migrants until they got on their feet. Wasn’t New York the wealthiest city in the world? Adams seemed unconvinced. “He was, like, ‘Ruben, you don’t live in my world,’ ” Garcia recalled.
The increasing political prominence of immigration has also put aid organizations in the crosshairs. This week, Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, announced a suit against Annunciation House, accusing the organization of “astonishing horrors,” among them “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.” (The lawsuit stems from a dispute over Annunciation House’s failure to turn over paperwork that the attorney general had requested with one day’s notice.) A ruling against Annunciation House might force the organization to cease operations in Texas.
Garcia was born and brought up in El Paso, where he attended Catholic schools. When he was in his twenties, he ran youth-outreach programs for the local diocese, but he hungered for a larger sense of purpose. Garcia and a group of friends began meeting regularly, trying to determine how to lead meaningful lives. It was the mid-seventies, and all around the country young people were embarking on soul-expanding quests. Garcia was emphatically not a hippie—“Chances are, if I had met a hippie, I would’ve said, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?’ ” he told me—but he was drawn to his faith’s radical practitioners, including Dorothy Day, who opened “houses of hospitality” to feed and provide shelter for the poor, and Cesar Chavez, who incorporated prayers into marches for workers’ rights.
During the months of prayer and discussion, Garcia kept circling back to the same realization: “The God of Scripture identifies first and foremost with the least among us. And we’re not that,” he said. “That insight was extremely helpful. Because it allowed us to understand that, if you want to find greater meaning and purpose and depth to your life, then go place yourself among the people that God does identify with, and they will teach you. At that time, in El Paso, there were two shelters, and neither of them would let you stay there if you were undocumented. So when we asked the question, ‘In El Paso, in 1978, who would be some of the people that God would identify with?’ The answer was, ‘The undocumented.’ ” That year, the Diocese of El Paso granted Garcia and his friends use of the second floor of a brick building a mile from the border. Garcia wrote to Mother Teresa, whom he had met a couple of years prior, telling her about their work. He says she replied, "Now that you have the building, you can go out and announce the good news.” Thus the name of the project: Annunciation House. In keeping with the tradition started by Day, Garcia and his co-founders referred to the residents of Annunciation House as “guests.” “We had one guest who was undocumented, and then we had two, we had three, we had four,” Garcia said. Volunteers and guests lived communally. Within a few years, they had taken over the first floor of the building, too. Garcia’s co-founders eventually left, but Garcia says he lived in Annunciation House and its network of shelters for thirty-five years, until his parents died, when he moved into their house.
Several weeks before Paxton sued Annunciation House, I met Garcia at Casa Papa Francisco, a former convent building that, in 2022, was repurposed as a shelter, one of several that the organization runs. Its guests had crossed the border illegally before either being apprehended or seeking out immigration officials to apply for asylum. The building had the tidy but functional atmosphere of a place that many people pass through on the way to somewhere else. A map of the United States was tacked to a wall, near a list of phone numbers for bus companies. In the kitchen, people stood chatting: the daily bus to New York had been cancelled, owing to bad weather.
Most people who come to Annunciation House shelters stay for a handful of days or a few weeks, before leaving to connect with friends or family or work prospects elsewhere. But some guests stay longer. That day, Garcia was taking two of them to a dentist appointment: Yara, a teen-ager who had arrived from Venezuela with her mother seven months before, and Wilson, a thin young man with lively eyes who had been severely burned in the March, 2023, fire at Juárez’s detention center. Garcia lifted Wilson, who uses a wheelchair, into the front seat of his work vehicle, a white Toyota truck with nearly two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, then hoisted the chair into its bed.
In Annunciation House’s early days, its blend of religious faith and civil disobedience was not unique. In the eighties, as civil wars—which were in some cases fought by U.S.-funded paramilitaries—ravaged Central America, the Reagan Administration enacted policies that made it difficult for those fleeing violence to claim asylum. Hundreds of congregations of many faiths offered themselves as shelters to undocumented refugees as part of the sanctuary movement. After the September 11, 2001, attacks and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, the border became increasingly militarized; in 2003, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Juan Patricio Peraza Quijada, a nineteen-year-old who was staying at Annunciation House. (A judge later ruled that the agent’s actions were justified.) Garcia still bristles when he discusses the shooting, and every year he hosts a memorial Mass for Peraza on February 22nd, the anniversary of his death. Peraza’s death marked “a low point” in Garcia’s relationship with the Border Patrol, he said.
Then, in 2014, Garcia says, representatives from the Border Patrol and from the El Paso office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested to meet with Garcia. “I’m, like, What the hell are they wanting? Because, at that point, there wasn’t really a relationship,” Garcia said. The officials wanted to discuss a shift in migrant populations. Instead of single adults hoping to find work under the table, many border crossers were now families planning to apply for asylum. Instead of attempting to evade the Border Patrol, they were seeking out agents, and ICE didn’t have the capacity to house family units while their cases were pending. (U.S. immigration courts currently have a backlog of more than three million cases.) “They said, ‘We want to release them to Annunciation House—will you take them?’ And that’s when I was able to say to them, ‘With certain conditions,’ ” Garcia recalled. He asked that the asylum seekers be released with papers that enabled them to travel, and that Annunciation House’s volunteers not be enlisted to monitor guests. “No enforcement,” as he put it. (An ICE representative was unable to confirm Garcia's account of the 2014 meeting before publication. C.B.P. did not respond to a request for comment.)
That meeting marked the beginning of Garcia’s new relationship with the border-enforcement agencies. Nowadays, once asylum seekers either are apprehended or turn themselves in to Border Patrol, they are processed into the immigration system, and, if released, brought to Annunciation House’s network of shelters, where they are fed, housed, and provided assistance to travel onward. “Otherwise, you’re going to see people sleeping in the streets,” Garcia said. (In the Rio Grande Valley, a similar support network is run by Sister Norma Pimentel.) Even as Garcia works closely with federal agents, Annunciation House rarely accepts government funding, relying instead on donations. “That’s given us a lot of freedom,” Garcia told me. Most important, it means that Annunciation House can help not just those who have pending asylum cases but also people who are undocumented. A few years ago, Garcia says, when ICE tried to officially recognize Annunciation House as a partner in its work, Garcia turned down the offer. “I’m sorry, no offense, no offense—but I couldn’t do it,” he told me.
As we sat in the dentist’s waiting room, Garcia explained that, during the Trump Administration, as the number of migrants continued to rise, Annunciation Houses’s resources grew strained. In one year, Garcia told me, ICE released more than a hundred and fifty thousand people to the organization’s shelters. “The reasons are always the same—I can’t feed my family, I’m afraid. It’s just that the numbers have gone up,” Garcia said. (According to a D.H.S. report, under the Biden Administration, C.B.P. has taken more than six million migrants into custody, deported approximately four million, and released more than 2.3 million while their cases were pending; the majority of those who arrived as families were released.) Annunciation House had always run on a shoestring budget, and the COVID-19 pandemic made things even harder; volunteer levels dropped, even as border crossings rose, after a brief lull in 2020, to record numbers. “We were doing all of it, and the city and county were doing none of it,” Garcia said. “We just couldn’t keep going at that pace.” In 2022, Garcia shut down Casa del Refugiado, one of Annunciation House’s satellite shelters, which had a capacity of more than a thousand beds—at the time, one of the largest shelters on the southern border.
The situation put El Paso, a city that has traditionally welcomed immigrants, in a bind. Declaring a state of emergency because of the migrant crossings would unlock state and federal funds, but some local lawmakers feared that doing so would accord with Governor Greg Abbott’s rhetoric about a migrant “invasion” at the border. The city did eventually issue a disaster declaration, and opened shelters of its own, but the money came with strings attached. “When the City of El Paso declared a disaster,” the El Paso County judge Ricardo Samaniego testified before the House Judiciary Committee, last February, “we did not get the resources that we needed but instead saw the state send Texas National Guard, the placement of concertina wire lined haphazardly in certain areas, and pseudo barriers of tanks and cargo containers.” “With the disaster declaration, you get the money. And you get the razor wire,” Garcia said.
Abbott’s busing program, in which chartered buses take migrants to cities elsewhere in the country, has also helped relieve the pressure on El Paso. Abbott was criticized for using migrants as pawns in order to make a political point. But Garcia pointed out that busing migrants away from border cities also helped make their plight visible to more people: “So, one-fourth of the population of Venezuela—probably six million people—has left Venezuela. But those six million people aren’t here. They’re in Colombia, they’re in Ecuador. Those countries have absorbed many, many more people than have come here. But our reaction—the richest country in the world!—has been that we’re overwhelmed. As long as the Venezuelans are overwhelming Colombia, we don’t give a shit. We don’t raise a finger. We only pretend to be concerned when they start showing up here.” Many Americans seemed to think of migrants as someone else’s problem; what if, instead, we considered them our collective responsibility? “All of us have skin in this game,” he said. But, as rhetoric around migration grows more heated, the humanitarian work done by organizations like Annunciation House becomes more fraught. An anti-immigrant activist recently filmed volunteers aiding migrants in Arizona, accusing them of “aiding and abetting the cartels.”
Later in the afternoon, Garcia visited a former church building that Annunciation House was converting into a shelter. He planned to name it Casa Rita Steinhagen, in honor of a Minnesota nun and peace activist who served time in prison for protesting the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training program for Latin American military officers. The shelter will use FEMA money as part of its operating budget, only the second time Garcia has accepted government funding. (It will remain separate from the rest of Annunciation House’s operations.) The church’s sanctuary was already cluttered with cots and stacks of boxes containing blankets from the Red Cross. “You’ve got enough blankets, at least,” Garcia told a volunteer. She eyed the boxes appraisingly. “Just enough, probably,” she said.
As we headed back to Casa Papa Francisco, Garcia checked his phone—another text from Border Patrol, then a call from a volunteer trying to sort out the disrupted bus schedules. Amid the constant work of coördination, Garcia began to muse on his eventual retirement. He’s decided that, when the time comes, he’ll step back all the way; he doesn’t want to become one of those people who hovers over what he’s built, unable to leave it behind. “Maybe then I’ll become a hippie,” he said. ♦
