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DEL RIO—What one woman interviewed by national media called a border, humanitarian, health and security crisis, some at Esperanza First Del Rio church call “heart-wrenching.”
The influx of illegal immigrants to Del Rio also is an opportunity to share God’s love, Jim Wilson told the TEXAN. He’s pastor of the 2005 Esperanza church plant that in 2018 merged with the congregation of First Baptist.
“There are two things going on here,” Wilson said. “About three years ago, about 150 people a day were coming through Del Rio. City leaders called a meeting and asked pastors for a solution for processing people.”
The city provided a facility. Members of the 40-plus churches in the town of 35,000—including Esperanza First—provided food, supplies, showers, and bus transportation as well as helping the migrants locate friends or relatives elsewhere in the United States.
“Very few needed money,” Wilson said.
While that ministry continues, the situation has drastically changed since Sept. 8, when President Biden announced he would no longer be deporting Haitian refugees. Word spread quickly. Nearly 15,000 illegal immigrants in less than two weeks have crossed the Rio Grande River and found shelter from summer temperatures under the International Bridge that joins Del Rio, Texas, U.S., with Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico.
Local law enforcement, with ranks swelled by sheriff’s deputies, National Guard and state police, work to contain the illegal immigrants under the bridge, maintain order and provide food, water, sanitation and medical care.
In some cases, yellow tape and a line of law enforcement personnel and their vehicles are all separating the illegal immigrants from townspeople. Elsewhere there is chain-link fencing.
“I have several members who are border control agents,” Wilson said. “They’ll call when they’ve had a particularly bad day after trying to help people while maintaining the law.
“We just need a lot of prayer. It’s a dilemma for Christians who just want to help people.”
“We just need a lot of prayer,” the pastor continued. “It’s a dilemma for Christians who just want to help people.”
While the illegal mmigrants come from many countries, the majority are from Haiti, officials say.
Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, experienced a massive earthquake in 2010 that killed more than 200,000 and left at least 1.5 million homeless.
The United Nations sent in Peacekeepers after the earthquake destroyed the island nation’s infrastructure. Cholera came with the Peacekeepers, a disease new to Haiti. Not until 2016 did the U.N. apologize for bringing in cholera. News reports said the lack of compensation for the deaths added to financial uncertainties.
The category 4 Hurricane Matthew, Oct. 4, 2016, killed nearly 600 people and brought new devastation to the nation still under siege from the massive earthquake six years before. Haiti was hit with a different kind of event on July 7 when its president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated.
Even as Southern Baptists and others streamed to Haiti to help after each of these events, Haitians who could, found ways to stream away, mostly by boat to Brazil. From there, the Haitians mostly made their way plodding southwest to Chile or northwest to Honduras.
There they stayed, some since 2016, until word spread in early September that the door to the “Promised Land”—the U.S.—was now open.
Southern Baptist and other Christian aid groups have been told they can’t set up disaster relief food, shower or childcare units because of the geography. There’s no room under the bridge, and law enforcement outside the bridge barriers are stretched too thin to maintain control, Wilson explained.
“The Haitians are in no man’s land. They can’t go back through Mexico [to Chile or Honduras] and they can’t go forward [into the rest of the U.S.],” the pastor said. “The situation has resulted in so many visiting law enforcement agents that there’s nowhere for [the agents] to sleep, so we have offered our dorms to them.”
Esperanza First has men’s and women’s dorms built for mission teams on the way to and from Mexico, which the church has opened to law enforcement.
“Now the focus is making sure law enforcement is fed and has drinks.” Wilson said. “We do whatever we can to help.”
“Our desire is to lead to Christ the people God puts before us, whether they’re people in the community, people wanting to come to America, or people charged with protection,” the pastor continued. “We want them to know everything we do, we do to the glory of the Lord.”
“Our desire is to lead to Christ the people God puts before us, whether they’re people in the community, people wanting to come to America, or people charged with protection.”
