God Bless the heros who are trying to protect innocent immigrants from unwarranted deportation! Have Mercy!

Resistance to Trump's immigration cruelty is already building | Houston Chronicle Editorial

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is probably too blinkered by his Trumpian ardor to realize that closing down a border migrant shelter founded by Catholics in El Paso will do little to discourage Texans, Christian and otherwise, from providing protection and justice to desperate people.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” is a quote from the Bible, Matthew 5:7.

Nearly a year ago, Paxton’s lawyers showed up at Annunciation House, a nonprofit network that has provided food, shelter and clothing to migrants for almost 50 years. 

Accusing the organization of “astonishing horrors” and conspiring to help people enter the country illegally, the lawyers wielded a subpoena demanding “immediate access” to the private records of migrants past and present who have received assistance from the organization. Otherwise, the AG would shut down the venerable facility a few blocks up the hill from the concrete culvert known as the Rio Grande. After an El Paso judge put the kibosh on Paxton’s evil effort, he appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

Even if he prevails, Paxton will still have work to do. Up and down the Rio Grande, from Brownsville to El Paso, as well as towns farther from the border, individuals, organizations and ad hoc groups are continuing to minister to the strangers, the sojourners, “the least among us.” We spoke to over a dozen of these better angels, but are not sharing names to protect them from being harassed. Their quiet work of resistance to Trumpian chaos and cruelty includes religious groups offering pastoral care to immigrants, their families and others caught up in the immigration system. Churches are creating preparedness plans for members who come in contact with migrants in the workplace, in their children’s schools, in their neighborhoods. Individuals and non-profits are providing legal and material support for those anticipating a knock on the door from law enforcement. They’ve drawn up “know your rights” instructions for interacting with ICE. “We have to be creative,” a small-town border priest tells us.

In South Texas, a deputy sheriff will continue to carry gallon jugs of water in the bed of his pickup, knowing he’s likely to come across desperate people wandering through semi-desert thickets of brush and mesquite during the withering heat of summer. In the trans-Pecos, a sympathetic motel owner, quietly, will continue providing migrants a place to stay at no charge. A border-area rancher — a Trump supporter, no less – will continue providing food, water and shelter when he encounters desperate people traversing his land; the rancher concedes that coming face to face with individuals in need is quite different from holding steadfast to a political position.

And, yes, a Border Patrol agent who encounters a young family will quietly call places like Annunciation House and McAllen’s respite center instead of allowing the family to be separated. One priest who counsels agents experiencing something akin to PTSD puts it this way: “Their heart is saying one thing, and their protocol is saying another. This is the source of their moral wounding.”

The power to resolve this moral conflict — to enforce immigration policy in a humane manner — is in Washington. Lasting solutions require bipartisan congressional action. Instead of pursuing this path, Donald Trump’s allies blocked a tough border bill last year in a cynical move to boost his election prospects and now that he is president, the White House has cut hundreds of millions in migrant aid funding, a quarter of which goes to Texas nonprofits and cities.

Annunciation House states on its website that it receives no government funding and is sustained by donations. The AG’s office claimed that the shelter had impeded law enforcement efforts to detain undocumented immigrants, alluding to an episode in which an immigrant was shot and killed outside Annunciation House after fleeing Border Patrol agents trying to arrest him. That happened in 2003.

Annunciation House maintains that it operates under an agreement with the federal government that it will accept people who have crossed the border but will assume no law enforcement role. The shelter maintains that it “has cooperated with federal authorities for a decade, under presidential administrations of both political parties” and has kept “hundreds of thousands” of newcomers off El Paso streets.

Paxton, true to his typically outrageous modus operandi, claims that Annunciation House isn’t religious enough to qualify for protections under this state’s religious freedom restoration act. (Texas is one of 28 states, along with the federal government, with similar protections.) The AG argues that the organization doesn’t hold Catholic Mass regularly; does not offer confessions, baptisms or communion; and does not try to evangelize or convert its guests. “In other words,” as New York Times columnist David French observes, “Annunciation House isn’t Catholic enough ❓ ✝️ to earn "Pope Paxton’s" seal of approval.”😕😢

French, an attorney and evangelical Christian, also points out that “serving the poor is one of the purest forms of religious service that exists. It’s mandated or endorsed in, by one count, more than 2,000 passages in Scripture. It’s also one of the most ancient manifestations of Christian service and identity.”

In light of a Trump administration that has embarked on its “Day One” anti-immigrant crusade — a crusade that’s likely to rely on 10,000 federal troops — and a Texas governor willing to spend billions in hard-earned taxpayer money to fund his own crusade (plus a Legislature eager to give him what he wants), as well as a regularly compliant all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, Annunciation House is the David facing a Goliath in this story.

Paxton also has gone after McAllen’s Humanitarian Respite Center, a shelter run by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. The organization’s nationally known executive director, Sister Norma Pimentel, has — like Ruben Garcia, founder of Annunciation House — worked for decades to provide shelter, food and compassion to vulnerable men, women and children.

Paxton, a self-professed evangelical Christian, apparently sees no connection between Christian fealty and service to others, particularly the poor and dispossessed. In fact, it’s hard to see how his religious beliefs have had any bearing whatsoever on his professional priorities. As his fellow Texans well know — and fellow Republicans try to ignore — our chief law enforcement officer remains under federal investigation for public corruption and was impeached by his fellow Republicans (and acquitted amid partisan cowardice in the Senate). Surely, a man of moral principle would find better things to do than unleash the powers of the state on charities helping people in distress.

This Houston Chronicle editorial board has said many times before and will say yet again: We do not advocate open borders. This nation cannot tolerate drug traffickers, sex traffickers and other criminals who seek to do us harm, not just along the border but in cities and towns across the country. We believe in border security and support the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people here illegally who have committed violent crimes. 

Along with the late Barbara Jordan, we believe the federal government should set limits on legal immigration and assist communities in absorbing and integrating newcomers. Immigration courts need the resources to adjudicate asylum cases quickly and send home those without legitimate claims.

At the same time, we will continue to speak out against a system of immigration so complex, chaotic and convoluted that would-be immigrants have few realistic options except to wade a river, scale a fence or evade authorities while they work in the shadows to build new lives (and contribute to the economy). We will speak out against outrages that could be imminent: racial profiling, raids on schools and churches, family separation, and inhumane conditions at internment camps at Fort Bliss or newly purchased state land along the border.

Regardless of what Stephen Miller*, President Trump’s relentless in-house xenophobe, expects to accomplish, regardless of the efforts of Trump lackeys like Paxton, the fact remains that we are a nation of immigrants, a nation strengthened and refreshed by waves of newcomers. Until Congress quits its cravenness and (some day) a responsive White House makes a good-faith effort to fix the system, we’ll have to rely on Ruben Garcia in El Paso and Sister Norma Pimentel in the Valley, as well as countless anonymous Americans on the ground — including many Texans — to show us what it means to live up to this nation’s ideals.

*In my opinion, Stephen Miller is proof of reincarnation. He is a doppelganger for Nazi Joseph Goebbles.