EL PASO, Texas (RNS) — On their spreadsheets, down the list on their prayer table and off their tongues after a long day of ministry roll the names — of the man who is slowly but unsteadily regaining his grip on reality after being deported to Cuba, of the woman facing deportation to Brazil after more than a year in detention fighting for asylum, of the son whose mother fell to the floor screaming “take me instead” as he was detained at immigration court.
Carlos was the name that launched Scalabrinian Sisters Leticia Gutiérrez Valderrama and Elisete Signor’s pastoral response to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Gutiérrez Valderrama met Carlos on a trip last year to witness the increased immigration agent presence at immigration court, and he looked “like he had won the lottery,” she recalled, when she offered to accompany him.
“He was the instrument for us to develop the ministry accompanying migrants at the courts,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told parishioners at a volunteer recruitment event at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on March 5.
There are still days at the immigration court when federal agents, waiting to potentially detain people after court, are staked out by the elevators or leaning on the atrium railing behind family members who nervously await their loved ones. But now, Gutiérrez Valderrama or her court volunteers are always there to sit with them.
With the help of about 30 volunteers, since June of last year, the ministry begun by the two sisters has accompanied more than 1,000 people in immigration court, and they’ve accompanied about 300 people in immigration detention each year.
When the immigrants finish, if the agents are there, the volunteers are afforded a short time to prepare them to face possible detention — they provide Sharpies to write families’ numbers on their bodies, prompt them to make a plan for their car and childcare and ask if they will share their information so another team can visit them in detention and support their families.
Though faith groups across the country are accompanying immigrants in court and detention centers, the integrated system built by the Scalabrinian sisters in the Diocese of El Paso is rare.
“As the sisters observe the trauma people experience while they’re detained — while trying to follow the legal process — they also proceed to support them in the detention centers and, with that, their families,” said Jesús de la Torre, assistant director for global migration at Hope Border Institute, advocating that more groups adopt the approach.
Raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, Gutiérrez Valderrama has run toward difficult ministries with people in pain since she first began considering religious life, first joining a group that ran a detox house and an outreach ministry for youth experiencing drug addiction.
Since joining the Scalabrinians, whose religious community focuses on serving migrants, she led the Mexican bishops’ conference migration ministry and worked in a Mexico City Scalabrinian comprehensive care ministry for migrants who have experienced torture, kidnapping and other serious crimes.
Signor and Gutiérrez Valderrama began working together in the diocese of El Paso in 2024, expecting to work in the area’s migrant shelters, as the city had thousands of migrants arriving weekly during the Biden era.
But with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, that project “changed by 180 degrees,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told RNS in Spanish.
This ministry “doesn’t only transform the experience of the people we accompany, but we ourselves are transformed,” Gutiérrez Valderrama said at the volunteer information session.
For the sisters and those volunteers, accompaniment can mean many different things. It can mean bouncing a newborn while the mother organizes her paperwork at immigration court, driving a truck to the owner in Juarez, Mexico, after they’re deported, sending a WhatsApp voice message to a worried mother in Brazil explaining how to find her son through the online ICE locator or preparing a backpack of clean clothes to hand off to someone before their deportation.
“We are going to encounter sacred people. What they are going to tell us is sacred,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told potential volunteers. “Because who we’re going to encounter is the Lord Jesus there,” she explained, drawing on Christian theology of Christ’s presence with vulnerable people.
After their visits, the volunteers report back to families whether their detained loved one lost weight or has been crying. Signor, who coordinates the detention center ministry, manages a WhatsApp group of over 500 family members of detained immigrants, in addition to constant phone notifications from individuals’ messages.
She frequently exclaims aloud while receiving those updates. “Oh my God, the Lord,” Signor said in Spanish, picking up her phone to see the notifications after a Saturday night visit to the detention center.
In early March, after receiving a visit request from Catholic Charities in Minnesota, Signor entered the detention center to visit with a Sudanese man she had not met before. The Department of Homeland Security had publicized the man’s robbery conviction, but the Brazilian-born sister was more worried about her English skills than about his criminal status.
“I go because he is a human being. He is a migrant who is, at this moment, possibly lonely, depressed, scared,” she told RNS in Portuguese. In the waiting room, she tucked her cross inside her shirt because she believed she would be visiting a Muslim, as she tried to entertain a toddler in a fuzzy red jacket who kept breaking away from her father to shout “Mami,” and run toward the visitation door.
In her visit, where she spoke slow, deliberate English into a phone connecting the plexiglass partition, she found out the Sudanese man, a new father, was Christian and had developed diabetes in detention. “He likes crosswords, and I’m going to buy him one tomorrow,” Signor excitedly told RNS.
The sisters rely on small grants to buy books for detainees and put money in their communication accounts.
At the end of the day, the two come together to reflect. “I admire her prudence, her calm” and her listening, Signor said of Gutiérrez Valderrama.
Gutiérrez Valderrama said Signor has a “commitment to accompany people until the end.” The sister said Signor “is generous to the max,” explaining that she sometimes tells Signor, “Stop for your health.”
“She hears but does not listen when it has to do with accompanying, protecting, defending,” said Gutiérrez Valderrama, who rests from the mission by rising every morning at 4:00 to pray and finding time to clean their house and iron, “relaxing” pastimes for her.
Although Gutiérrez Valderrama is the ministry director, she told RNS, “I am not the most important in this mission. No, we are all important because we all place a little grain of sand in the construction of the kingdom.”
Among the team at the courthouse are the Rev. Mike Gallagher, a Jesuit immigration lawyer who arrives as though dressed for a fishing trip in a Jesuit Refugee Service vest to provide basic legal advice, and a group of religious from the diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, who come once a week because immigrants in their diocese attend court in El Paso. Brother Joseph Bach, a Franciscan friar and favorite of the security guards, leads the Las Cruces team, which also coordinates New Mexico detention center ministry and is preparing to accompany migrants in criminal court.
Bach bases the Las Cruces trainings on lessons learned from Gutiérrez Valderrama. “Every time I’m with her, I learn something new,” he told RNS.
At court, Bach cracks jokes when appropriate, along with Assumption Sister Chabela Galbe, who makes remarkably accurate duck quacks at children, and her provincial, Sister Mary Ann Azanza.
The Scalabrinian sisters and their team of volunteers also see it as a cornerstone of their ministry to build relationships, not just with the families and those detained, but also with the team at the courthouse. Which, the group maintains, has allowed them to keep their buffer zone to counsel migrants pre-detention, uncommon in courthouses where agents often immediately detain migrants or staff block access.
“It helps the (migrants) for us not to be adversarial,” Azanza said. “The whole ethos of our ministry is we try to build relationships and not add to the division and the sense of animosity.”
The building’s staff now ask the team to pray for their families.
The religiosity of the volunteer team varies. Sigrid Gonzalez, who says she’s a “non-practicing Catholic,” volunteers at court and in Mexico during the week. On the weekends, she goes to the detention center, describing it as her “Mass.”
Alejandro Figueroa, another detention center volunteer, is a dedicated Mass-going Catholic. A former volunteer firefighter, he described struggling with having no tools when emptying his pockets and entering the detention center. “The only thing you have is the love of God,” he said.
Despite their help, Signor struggles to decide how to prioritize visits when there are not enough volunteers to reach everyone on her list. The team lamented that there isn’t the same volunteer energy that the migrant shelters drew, and the Scalabrinians told RNS that it is difficult to recruit diocesan priests.
Some priests, the sisters said, worry about their own immigration status, even as green card holders, but Signor notes that Gutiérrez Valderrama leads the ministry with just a temporary R1 visa.
Still Signor understands why some struggle to stick it out. “It’s not a mission for everybody, because it’s a very big emotional burden,” she said.
Signor said that in her 40 years working with migrants in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Tijuana, Mexico and Boston, “I never, never imagined myself working with detained people, because as migrants we are born to be free.” The transition for Signor, whose Italian family migrated to Brazil, has had challenging moments.
The sister said she struggled with nightmares until she began a new nightly prayer routine. “All the people I met — I entrust to God their realities. What I could do during the day I did — call their families, visit them, pray, deposit money. Now I can do no more, and may God take over.”
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