This Catholic leader shelters migrants. Texas says he runs ‘stash houses.’ (2024)

The United States agreed to grant him humanitarian parole so that he could enter the country and be treated by specialists in Texas, but he’d need ongoing therapeutic care, the kind that is hard for many Americans to get, let alone an immigrant.

Who might take him in?

“How could I say no?” recounted Ruben Garcia, looking at Wilson, who sat in a wheelchair before him. “There was no one else.”

The influential patriarch of Annunciation House, a faith-based network of shelters based in El Paso, Garcia has taken in tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants he calls “guests” for nearly five decades. Working in collaboration with U.S. immigration officials, he provides them food, clothes and a first home in the United States, and some of his expenses are reimbursed by the federal government. It’s work he sees as a religious calling — to help the most vulnerable, no matter how they arrived.

But as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) clamps down on illegal immigration, state investigators are raising questions about Garcia’s humanitarian work. In court records, they contend that his shelters are “stash houses” sheltering the undocumented from authorities.

Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is asking a judge to shut down Garcia’s Annunciation House shelters and force him to turn over all of his organization’s records — including the names of people he is housing. Garcia has refused, setting up a legal battle between the state of Texas and a religious leader whose work is key to the federal government’s management of border crossings and who has drawn praise from the highest echelons of the Catholic Church.

The case is tied to a bill passed in 2015 that makes it a state crime to “encourage or induce” someone to enter the country illegally by “concealing, harboring, or shielding” them from detection. The legislation was approved shortly after Abbott became governor, and marked the first in a string of bills he has backed challenging federal authority on immigration. Garcia has not been charged, but Paxton’s office is using the organization’s refusal to turn over internal documents he demanded as a reason to shut it down.

That action has drawn alarm from humanitarian workers stepping in to help the massive number of people arriving at the border. Pope Francis has denounced the investigation into Annunciation House as “madness.”

The probe has saddened and angered Garcia, 75. He wonders why the state is targeting him now, when he has been doing the same work most of his adult life. He tried but failed to contain his emotions as he led a group of college students from Massachusetts on a tour of one of his shelters on a recent afternoon.

“The attorney general of my state has the audacity to refer to what is holy ground as a ‘stash house,’” he said, his voice quavering as it echoed inside an old chapel. “I’m asking you, is that what you see?”

Hundreds of migrants needed his help that March day. There was the Guatemalan woman beaten so badly that local police initially thought she was dead. The Colombian family who left their crime-ridden hometown and now, after crossing the border, had nowhere to go. The 25-year-old mother who learned she had cancer after crossing nine countries to reach the border with her 3-year-old daughter.

And then there was Wilson, who has become well known in El Paso’s immigration circles and is widely known by his first name.

He recently celebrated his 22nd birthday by taking several labored steps on his own with a walker around the shelter’s cafeteria. He couldn’t feed himself, dress himself or say what hurt weeks earlier, but now he was preparing to deliver a speech that night for a vigil marking a year since the blaze. Stringing together full sentences was still tough, but little by little, his voice was starting to return. He uttered each word as if he’d just run a mile to spurt it out.

“Make a wish, Wilson!” the other shelter residents yelled as he leaned over a chocolate cake. He nodded, signaling he had made one and flashed a worried glance over at Garcia — the man who had become his keeper and protector — before he blew the candles out.

Wilson was counting on him.

Garcia is a native son of El Paso. The border has defined his life — not as a line dividing two nations, but as a suture uniting a region otherwise ripped apart by war, poverty and violence. He crossed the border so many times as a child to visit family in Mexico that, over time, two countries melded into one home.

As a young adult, he led youth programs for the Catholic Diocese of El Paso. But he was restless. He wanted to live a life of purpose, and he was struggling to figure out how.

He found the answer in Segundo Barrio, one of the city’s oldest and poorest neighborhoods. In his 20s, he moved into the vacant top floor of a church building there with a small group of other idealistic young Catholics. Together they set off on a mission to help the neediest.

One day, Garcia came across a homeless man. He pointed him to two shelters run by the city in hopes of helping him find a place to stay. But the man soon returned. He’d been turned away “porque no tengo papeles.” He didn’t have papers.

“Over time, they understood the great need was housing and services for people who were undocumented, because those people were rejected by other social services,” said Mary Fontana, a former volunteer who is writing a book on the history of Annunciation House. “So they became a house of hospitality.”

The diocese donated the building to Garcia and his colleagues in 1978. They called it Annunciation House, inspired by Mother Teresa’s response to a letter he sent her. In it, she implored him to announce the good news and bring people in from the streets.

Some of the earliest guests were Nicaraguan officials with the Somoza dictatorship who had been detained after fleeing the 1979 Sandinista revolution. Federal officials asked Garcia to house them temporarily, he recalled, a decision for which he was criticized because of that regime’s repression of its people. But he saw them simply as people in need.

Garcia is known as a straight talker, but whatever edge he has softens with migrants, who to him are all “refugees from something.”

Archbishop Óscar Romero is one of the inspirations behind his work. The Salvadoran priest was shot to death in 1980 while celebrating Mass during his country’s civil war. He advocated for the poor and broadcast homilies on the radio denouncing the atrocities committed by both the right-wing government and armed guerrilla groups.

Garcia, who shares more than a passing bespectacled resemblance to Romero, welcomed thousands fleeing the violence to his border shelter. He also later adopted and raised six children from El Salvador who were orphaned during the conflict.

“I would think that, as a people, this is what we would want to embrace,” Garcia said of his work. “It’s part of who we are.”

Throughout its history, Annunciation House has generally had little contact with the federal government. In 2003, Border Patrol agents shot and killed a young man staying at the shelter during a routine sweep. Agents accused the man of charging at them with a pipe, though witnesses said he did no such thing.

Garcia has long insisted on a separation between the work of the nonprofit and that of immigration authorities. But as the number of people arriving at the border has risen, the work of both agencies has become more closely intertwined. In the past, most of those crossing the border were Mexican men. By 2014, that demographic changed radically. Children and families from all over the world began surrendering to authorities and requesting asylum.

By law, families with children cannot be detained for long periods. Officials soon realized they’d need help. And so, they called Garcia.

Annunciation House expanded its operations and recruited more volunteers. Looking back, longtime volunteers said that moment felt quaint compared with what happened in 2022, when migration numbers exploded again.

The organization went from providing shelter to several hundred people at a time to having to find housing for up to 10,000 per day. Garcia pulled in other houses of worship and nonprofits to help. Donors helped him book blocks of hotel rooms. People donated blankets and food. Every day, federal law enforcement officials let Garcia know how many people they planned to release, in hopes that he’d offer them shelter.

Local officials, immigration attorneys and advocates in the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez area all know that in a crisis, they can turn to Garcia. When emergency responders found a woman who broke her neck after falling off the border wall, the hospital released her to Annunciation House. When a social worker discovered a Venezuelan couple and their children living in inhumane conditions after being exploited by a con artist, she called Garcia.

“When you leave your home, you never expect what you’ll encounter on the journey,” said Nivia López Cruz, an immigrant from Guatemala who remembers crossing the border with a smuggler but not what came after.

Police found her without a heartbeat. The 32-year-old was left for dead, discarded alongside garbage. Emergency room doctors resuscitated her but could not save her leg. Detectives and physicians later told her she’d been sexually assaulted and badly beaten. Her wounds were infected. Sepsis would kill her if they didn’t amputate. The hospital released her to another shelter, but workers there did not know how to care for her. So they called Garcia.

“She was lying on the floor and crying. And it was one of those moments where I was caught up in the immensity of her complete aloneness,” Garcia recalled.

After six months living alongside other special-needs migrants in Casa Papa Francisco, one of Annunciation House’s shelters, López Cruz recovered enough strength to walk on her own again.

Garcia’s leadership changed El Paso. The welcoming reputation the city and county have is the result of Annunciation House’s faith-driven work, several elected leaders said. And so, for many, the state’s targeting his shelters felt not just wrong, but personal.

“It feels like retaliation,” said Crystal Sandoval, who is assisting with Wilson’s legal case for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. “El Paso has demonstrated how to stand in the breach and put humanity back into the migration equation. This feels like an attack against us, and to me as an El Pasoan and fronteriza.”

The Rev. Bill Morton, an Annunciation House board member, thinks the state government’s goal is to stop all border nonprofits from offering help to migrants.

“If you want to kill a movement,” Morton said, “you go to the heart of the movement.”

Scrutiny of border nonprofits has been building in right-wing circles since President Biden entered office and began undoing some of former president Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The Biden administration leaned heavily on faith-based groups such as Catholic Charities as crossings rose sharply. The federal government reimbursed their costs to temporarily shelter and feed migrants.

That rankled congressional Republicans. House Judiciary Committee members demanded the email communications between the administration and nonprofits, and accused organizations like Catholic Charities of using taxpayer money to facilitate illegal immigration. A conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, published an investigation in 2022 alleging that humanitarian workers were trying to resettle immigrants in every congressional district, a conclusion they reached after purportedly tracking mobile devices.

Conservative Catholic groups have also accused some charities of exceeding their religious calling and creating a welfare state for migrants.

Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.) introduced legislation to defund nonprofits that are “complicit in human smuggling and exacerbating the crisis at our southern border.” He demanded records and peppered Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with questions: “I’ve seen this with my own eyes,” Gooden said during congressional hearings last year. “They are welcoming folks and sending out the message that the border is open.”

Not long after Gooden first raised the issue, Abbott, the Texas governor, called on Paxton to investigate border nonprofits.

“I stand ready to work with you to craft any sensible legislative solutions your office may propose that are aimed at solving the ongoing border crisis and the role that NGOs may play in encouraging it,” the governor wrote to Paxton in late 2022.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to multiple interview requests. The Texas attorney general’s office and Gooden also did not reply.

Annunciation House does not rely on federal funding, but in recent years it has received reimbursem*nt for sheltering and feeding thousands of people. And as an influential nongovernmental organization at the border, it has not escaped unwanted attention.

A former FBI agent, a longtime homicide detective, a lawyer and a researcher with Paxton’s office all spent days scoping out Annunciation House, according to court documents.

One noted how Garcia delivered groceries in his beat-up white Toyota pickup. Another watched “several Hispanic individuals” coming in and out of the shelter, according to court records. Prosecutors said one investigator saw laundry hanging on a clothesline, indicating to them that people were living at the shelter. They pointed to a 2023 news article about Annunciation House’s legal workshops for asylum seekers as the basis of their inquiry.

On Feb. 7, the Wednesday before Lent began, prosecutors served the Catholic nonprofit with a demand to examine everything Annunciation House leaders had.

More than a year later, investigators knocked on the door of Annunciation House. Garcia told them he needed time to talk to his lawyer. Attorney Jerome Wesevich asked for the customary 30 days to respond. But the attorney general’s office’s subpoena gave them 24 hours to produce everything, he said, including hard drives and documents dating back a half-century.

The nonprofit asked the court for a restraining order. After a judge in El Paso blocked Paxton’s initial subpoena, the attorney general filed for his own injunction. Now, Annunciation House is asking the judge to make a decision.

The authority the attorney general used against Annunciation House to inspect records on demand was granted by the Texas legislature more than a century ago to ensure that state businesses and nonprofits operate within the law. It’s a statute of the Texas consumer protection laws Paxton has increasingly employed to demand records from nonprofits and for-profits alike.

Legal experts say the powerful tool is reminiscent of Colonial-era writs of assistance that British American courts used to randomly search any business or household suspected of smuggling and then seizing what they found. Anger over this “arbitrary power,” as attorney James Otis argued then, helped spur the American Revolution. (Otis is often credited with coining the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny.”)

Annunciation House’s legal team is planning to argue that Paxton is violating the organization’s First Amendment right to religious expression and hopes the case will protect other humanitarian nonprofits from further attacks, according to three people familiar with the strategy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University who has spent years studying Paxton, said what the attorney general ultimately cares about is sending a message to Republican primary voters.

“He’s already achieved what he wants to achieve,” Jones said. “His goal is to gain the publicity for going after Annunciation House and also putting pressure on it and other nonprofits to be more cautious.”

In a 66-page pleading, Paxton’s office argues that Annunciation House has potentially committed several state crimes. The prosecutors say the nonprofit’s staff sheltered immigrants they knew had entered illegally and evaded federal detection. In that way, state attorneys contended, Annunciation House may have broken the recently amended Texas smuggling statute.

Annunciation House’s lawyers say that the case has no merit and that there is no need for a trial. While the nonprofit does not dispute that it has housed undocumented people, the organization’s legal team said that it’s largely at the request of law enforcement and that it hides no one.

At 21, Wilson decided his future lay north.

He and his father left their home in Guatemala and journeyed to the U.S.-Mexico border. But before they could cross, Mexican authorities apprehended Wilson.

Under pressure from the U.S. government, Mexican officials had begun cracking down on illegal migration. Law enforcement conducted sweeps at bus and train stations, placing men and women in overcrowded detention facilities. Then came the fire.

For at least 13 minutes, Wilson was trapped in a cell as flames darted around him. According to the Mexican government, inmates had set the fire in protest. The detainees kicked the bars and screamed for help. Immigration officials had the keys to the cells but did not free the detainees. By the time firefighters broke into the building, Wilson was nearly dead.

He arrived in the United States months later, disfigured and disabled. Little by little, he learned how to move his toes and fingers again. His stiffened limbs began to loosen. Another migrant bathed and fed him. The volunteers and newcomers at Annunciation House wanted to love him back to a version of himself he might recognize.

Why would the state of Texas want to impede that, Garcia wondered aloud.

“I don’t have a solution for the exit of people from their home country. But they’re human beings,” he said, sitting in the cafeteria of one of the shelters as migrant families ate lunch. “And when we mistreat them, it’s our humanity that’s lost.”

The conflict with Texas leaders has had a chilling effect throughout the border region. Humanitarian and faith-based organizations regularly call Annunciation’s legal team seeking guidance.

But the support has also been overwhelming.

Garcia was taking a break to eat lunch at a Mexican restaurant on a recent afternoon when immigration attorney Albert Armendariz Jr. walked over, patted his back and shook his hand.

“No se dejen,” he said. “Don’t give up.”

Later that day, Garcia attended a march and vigil that El Paso’s faith and immigrant advocacy community had organized in support of Annunciation House and those who died in the detention center fire. But before heading downtown, he had to check on someone.

Wilson was preparing to deliver remarks that evening, and he was nervous. Garcia sat down next to Wilson’s wheelchair and scanned the large bold letters printed on two pages. His speech consisted of fewer than 60 words, but Garcia knew Wilson would have to wrestle with his body to say each one of them.

Garcia put the pages down and looked him in the eye: “It’s perfect, Wilson.”

That evening, hundreds marched from El Paso’s downtown plaza to Sacred Heart Church. When it was finally time to introduce Wilson, Garcia rose and walked to the lectern. Cheers broke out, the assembly stood and then silence enveloped the sanctuary.

Garcia rolled Wilson’s wheelchair toward the lectern. He gently wrapped his arms under Wilson’s armpits and lifted him from his chair. Wilson looked out at the crowd and his eyes grew red and watered as he struggled to form his lips around words and push out sound.

The words were soft and muffled, but they bounced off the church’s walls with the help of a microphone. Garcia kept him anchored, steadying his shoulders with his hands.

“Many of my friends did not have the opportunity to survive,” Wilson said. “Immigrants need support.”