Progressive mayors pretend to welcome migrants, but it’s churches that actually care for them.
In December 2020, the Democrat-dominated Council of the District of Columbia voted in favor of the Sanctuary Values Act, enshrining Washington’s status as a “sanctuary city.” But until earlier this year, when Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona decided to bring the border to Washington, the city’s commitment to caring for migrants had not been put to the test.
So far, nearly 9,400 migrants have arrived in the District, and Mayor Muriel Bowser — not to mention President Biden — has bungled this slowly unfolding crisis. Although both leaders have been quick to criticize Abbott and Ducey for using “desperate people to score political points” and treating migrants as “political pawns,” they have otherwise been at odds.
Indeed, Biden’s Department of Defense repeatedly denied Bowser’s request for National Guard assistance, leading the mayor to declare a state of emergency and create a new Office of Migrant Services last month. One week later, the mayor of the “sanctuary city” had to acknowledge: “We’re not a border town. We don’t have an infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration to our city. . . . We’re not Texas.”
Various politicians and officials assumed that the buses were little more than a Republican publicity stunt. But even as they were predicting it wouldn’t last, actual sanctuaries all around Washington stepped up. One Catholic church in particular, St. Peter’s on Capitol Hill, has played a key role in providing aid to migrants since July, when Father Brendan Glasgow noticed that large groups of migrants were congregating in Union Station, and he reached out to SAMU First Response, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, to see how his church could help. Since then, he reports that St. Peter’s has received nearly 80 migrants per week from Arizona and Texas for a total of roughly 700 overall.
Tatiana Laborde, managing director of SAMU, which is at the center of D.C.’s efforts to assist the migrants, told National Review that Catholic Charities was one of the first groups to attend to the new arrivals in April. In other words, while the so-called sanctuary city’s civic authority scrambled to marshal its resources, the ecclesial authority — which already had a ministry dedicated to serving as good Samaritans — stood in the breach. That it did so highlights the importance of strong local institutions in responding to crises that often originate at the national (or in this case, international) level.
Laborde also commended Catholic Charities for the way it has worked in conjunction with SAMU, which received a grant from FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program in June. “Understanding that it is a big project,” she explained, “they stepped back and let SAMU step forward.”
Laborde said she was “not surprised that a lot of help comes through the faith community,” explaining that “churches serve as a safe place” for many migrants throughout their journey. On the U.S.–Mexico border, for example, Laborde says that some of the shelters that provide the best service to the greatest numbers of people are Christian.
Volunteers at St. Peter’s have assisted nearly 700 immigrants in the past three months. (Evan Myers)
Any given week, you can find similar services being provided at St. Peter’s, just a block from the U.S. Capitol. It’s quite the operation: After a near 40-hour bus ride from Arizona or Texas, groups of roughly 30 to 50 arrive at the church and are ushered into a basement where church volunteers and SAMU employees work together to provide clothes, shoes, and toiletries. There are also toys for the children and shower stations where migrants can clean up before receiving a meal.
Last week, National Review had the chance to interview some of the migrants arriving at St. Peter’s as well as the volunteers assisting them. Their stories are more interesting and more complex than Mayor Bowser would have people believe. They call into question the investigation that D.C. attorney general Karl Racine opened on October 14, which aims to determine whether Abbott and Ducey deceived migrants into boarding buses to the District.
Ramino Luna, who fled gang violence in Villavicencio, Colombia, with his wife and two children before crossing the border into Yuma County, Ariz., called Governor Ducey’s bus “a lifesaver, an angel, a miracle of God for me. That they offered me the bus, that was, wow.” He is on his way to reunite with an old friend in Greenville, S.C., where there is a large Colombian community. “I didn’t have money to get to Greenville,” he explained, but “I’m closer to my final destination now.”
At the end of our interview, he added: “I am a Christian. I believe so much in God; He is the reason we’re here. He is the only one that has made it all possible for us to be here alive, healthy. . . . My God, He has done it all.”
Katarine Valencia, who also fled from Colombia with her seven-year-old son, expressed similar gratitude. After being extorted by Mexican police and coyotes, she was strapped for cash and worried that she would not be able to reach New York City, where a friend has offered her space in group housing for a week. “I’m worried it will be difficult to find work,” she said, but added, “I am grateful that God got me here without being killed or raped.”
Other migrants have arrived from halfway around the world and are even less sure of their plans. Roman, a photographer from war-torn Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Russia — only an hour’s drive east of the Ukrainian border — was also on the bus from Yuma, along with his wife and two young children.
Roman and his wife fled Russia when they were reported to the federal security service for their opposition to the war in Ukraine. (Evan Myers)
“We had to urgently leave Russia on September 9,” he explained. “Since we did not support the war, someone reported us to the federal security service.” Starting off with $20,000 and what they could pack in their suitcases, he and his family flew “from Russia to Turkey . . . then to the United Arab Emirates, then Mexico.” By the time they reached Yuma they had only $80 left.
“We don’t have anyone here,” he said. “In Russia everyone thinks that we are traitors since we left, and now we have nowhere to go.” When he spoke to NR, Roman and his family were planning to go to Pittsburgh.
For some, D.C. is the last stop on their journey. The Peruvian family in this video, for example, was reunited with family members who already live in the States just hours after being dropped off at St. Peter’s.
These sorts of moments motivate volunteers such as Jamie Driggs to keep coming back. Driggs said she initially became interested in St. Peter’s because she was “looking to do good.” But she volunteered a second time because she loves to “see the smiles” on the faces of migrants. At the end of the day, she said, “it just goes back to Jesus’s message.”
Other volunteers, however, have more complicated motives for helping out. Pamela Barthel, for example, who has been volunteering at St. Peter’s twice a week for about a month, said it “was kind of a hard decision.” “I’m a conservative; I’m a Republican,” she said. “I do believe that the U.S. has no obligation [to let people in], but as a Catholic person also, I want to help.” She was especially affected by a Colombian family she met who were “escaping from the FARC” (a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army), saying that when she “saw their faces” she knew she needed to be there.
For many Christian conservatives, the dual commitments of caring for “the least of these” — no matter where they come from — and preserving the integrity of the United States border can present a challenge. And this tension may be especially significant for Latino voters, who are more likely to be Christian than white Americans are, and are often immigrants themselves.
This is precisely Barthel’s situation. Originally from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, she immigrated legally to the United States in the early 2000s and raised a family with her husband. Her mother and brother are still in Bolivia, but Barthel is planning to start the paperwork this year to help them come legally. “I’d love for my brother to come,” she said, “but it’s not correct to just walk in.”
And from Barthel’s perspective, that message — that there is a right and wrong way to come to the United States — is often getting lost in translation. “There is not really a clear message,” she explained. “They just say ‘welcome’ to your new life.” Here, Barthel has her finger on the pulse of a larger problem: Who is going to help these people integrate into American society?
It’s the sort of question that only someone wrestling with the tension of Christianity’s universalism and its concept of covenantal nations would think to ask. And the fact is, across the United States — and especially in progressive cities such as Washington, D.C. — there are fewer and fewer such people.
Rather than integration, then — which requires policy-makers to think about how to care for migrants as people, and thus to consider how many migrants might be too many — our debates about immigration increasingly focus on migrants’ legal status and whether they will be future Democratic or Republican voters. But there is more to citizenship than a civics test and more to politics than voting.
Pamela Barthel knows this. Governors Abbott and Ducey — despite all the accusations of their cruelty — seem to know this. But D.C. Democrats don’t. Earlier this month — only weeks after Bowser declared a state of emergency because of the influx of migrants — the D.C. Council advanced a bill that would allow the city’s 800,000 noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, to vote in city elections. After their long journey, these migrants have simply been leveraged for use by the District’s partisan machine.
Meanwhile, as more buses arrive in Washington each week, it will be left to churches to care for the migrants, feeding and clothing them in the short term and integrating them into the larger community in the long term. As it turns out, sanctuary cities are no substitute for real sanctuaries.
