Mother Teresa in Federal Prison

There are some things that pierce the heart. Seeing a desperately sick child in a hospital room; observing the grief of those burying a loved one; watching a proud woman, bound in chains, have to stand before a federal judge.

Last week I watched my neighbor Teresa C. as she underwent that humiliation and I was deeply saddened and angered that this sort of thing could happen to anyone—but especially an innocent, good woman.

Teresa is one of those rare gems in humankind that mysteriously, wondrously catches the shared light of our days and refracts it into colors that light up the souls of those who know her. She is a woman who, finding a teenager living on the street, takes her into her family’s home and treats her as her own daughter. She is generous, but also a funny woman. I think that Mother Theresa would enjoy sharing the same saint's name. Teresa is just plain good to have around.

She was born in Brownsville back in 1968, to a midwife, her parents being poor, and birth by midwife a rather common occurrence. Her parents moved back to their native state of Durango, Mexico, where Teresa was raised. After she finished high school, Teresa came back to Brownsville, married her husband Jose and had three daughters.

Five or six years ago, Teresa applied for a passport. In 2004, she received it in the mail, from the Federal Government. She used it for travel back and forth to Mexico.

Until three weeks ago, when, returning from a Sunday afternoon visit with family and friends in Matamoros, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and trotted off to the “Icebox” as the local holding cell is called by those who have been inside it (“you feel like you are buried away—and it is freezing cold, like the way I imagine dying” was the way one young person described the place).

At her arraignment, the government insisted that Teresa not be given a bond. When the federal judge disagreed, offering to accept the couple’s home as collateral, the Immigration Services stepped in and with their authority (different court, different judges, different justice), refused to let her go.

The charges? As far asI can understand them, Teresa is charged with having a fraudulent passport. She is not being charged with creating a fake passport, but with having applied for a passport using the birth certificate signed by a midwife (and approved by the State of Texas).

She is accused of not being born in the United States, although her mother and her father, her midwife, the state of Texas and the Federal Government all agreed that she had been.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

Now she languishes in jail. She has lost her job; she is away from her children. She is being treated like a criminal. Her husband, a grocery stockboy, has wagered all of his meager savings on a local attorney.

We all wait, wondering just how something this bizarre will turn out. I worry, knowing that we live in the culture of Guantanamo Bay and justifiable torture, and knowing that she is poor and a woman and a Mexican American, and that our government is proud and afraid and, perhaps, unbending.

I pray, too, that her good heart, filled with the precious hope and love not be dried up as she awaits her fate, trapped behind those bars that we have erected in our own exercise of terror.

(To read the local paper's story, go here: http://amorehumanborder.blogspot.com/)

(Photo by Sr. Sharon Horace, DC. The original (below) is from a tire repair shop in Matamoros, Mexico)

Cameron Park Votes

For the first time in history, the people who live along Florencia Avenue exist.

Florencia Avenue is a two mile long road in the parish that is home to ninety-seven families. For the past thirty years, people who lived along this street, located in the fifteenth richest entity in the world (Texas), did without a paved road. There were no police patrols, intermittent garbage pickup, and unreliable school bus service. If it rained, cars slid off of the road into the ditch; when it was dry, axles were broken and wheels were bent. Residents kept mailboxes on the side of the county highway, where the mail was routinely stolen.

Although monies had been appropriated for paving, county leadership never acted on the projects. "Why would we?" they responded to requests for help, "You people don't vote. It is like you don't care. You are lazy."

The residents were not lazy, not by any civilized measure. Everyone in the household that could work does work--otherwise, there is no food, there will be no electricity and the water would be cut off. They paid their taxes, proportionately more than the wealthy neighbors on the other side of the highway. But the services that the rest of America takes for granted were denied to these folks. It was as if they were invisible.

In 1998, the parish got involved in politics. Not partisan politics--the parish never said whom to vote for--but we encouraged people to exercise their right and honor their obligation to be heard. We organized debates and meet-the-candidates fora.

In the 1996 presidential election, only 151 people out of the more than 1,500 registered voters actually voted. In the 2000 election, the parish helped turn out a 1,000 voters. We became one of the highest voting precincts in the region.

We do indeed exist, and in a time of close election races, we had to be taken seriously.

Slowly the fruits of that effort have been seen. This morning, ten years after we launched our Get Out the Vote campaign, trucks began laying down asphalt.

The Florencia Avenue mailboxes stood attentively, awaiting their opportunity to serve.

(Top photo by Anthony Padilla, Brownsville Herald. Other photos by M. Seifert)

Visitors

The writer Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street) is one of those people gifted with the ability to peer inside the hearts of others and bring forth those jewels of beauty hidden beneath the layers of the ordinariness that marks our lives. She passed through the parish last week, asking questions about the Border Wall. For a couple of hours she just sat and listened and observed. She had no notepad, but you could hear her heart filing away notes for later consideration.