© Eduardo Verdugo—APA young girl from Honduras waits for a northbound freight train to depart in Mexico as she makes her way to the U.S. border
The woman from Honduras was tiny and extremely pregnant. "When are you due?" asked Sister Norma Pimentel, the director of Catholic Charities in the Rio Grande Valley. "Ya," the woman replied in Spanish: "Already" - she was past due. She had left Honduras to save her daughter, who is 12 - peak poaching age for the killer gangs that are wreaking havoc in that country these days. "A man came into our house and tried to kill my girl with a machete," the woman said. "I stopped him." She showed Sister Norma her right hand, which was slashed down the middle and had healed crumpled. The man also slashed her daughter's arm, but they managed to fend him off. The woman paid a coyote to get herself and her daughter across the border as soon as possible.
It seems clear to Sister Norma - and to the hundreds of volunteers who staff her processing center on the grounds of the Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas - that this summer's tide of Central Americans crossing the border are refugees, not immigrants. They have fled, terrified, from countries that are the Latino equivalent of Syria or Iraq - but in Central America it's anarchy, not religious fanaticism, they are fleeing, the rampaging of militant drug gangs. The refugees here are a lucky subset: they have verifiable family members in the U.S. The Border Patrol releases them to Sister Norma with bus tickets to the places where their families are living. Catholic Charities then provides a way station, a place to take a breath, take a shower and get a meal, new clothes and a medical exam. The center processes as many as 200 families a day. When a family arrives, the entire staff applauds. No doubt, Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh would be appalled, but when you see the relief and smiles and tears on the faces, which seem far more humble than menacing, you cannot help but be moved.
Comment: Might this be a strategy to fool the public into believing the UK government is 'cleaning up its act' and to stem the tide of public outrage over the pedophile scandals?
UK government ignored warnings about pedophiles: "There's too many of them"