Recently, perhaps the two greatest public policy challenges facing south Texas, the pandemic and immigration, collided and provoked an explosion of local passion. All over a hamburger.
In the center of that collision was perhaps the biggest local celebrity this region has seen in a long time: Sister Norma, a Missionary of Jesus Catholic nun and executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Her full name is Norma Pimentel, a native of Brownsville, Texas. Over the years, her singular focus – “restoring dignity” to people in need – has evolved into her ministering to the thousands of migrants seeking political asylum now overwhelming US immigration officials.
She has been called Pope Francis’s favorite nun after the pope mentioned her during a livestream broadcast and asked: “Is it appropriate for a pope to say this? I love you very much.”
In addition to several private audiences with the pope, Sister Norma has visited the White House and has spoken at the United Nations in New York at the invitation of the permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN. In 2018, she was the recipient of Notre Dame University’s Laetare Medal, considered the highest honor for a US Catholic and bestowed on John F Kennedy when he was president.
So it was shocking to see the enmity against this gentle but committed woman when news broke in late July that she was arranging for migrants who tested positive for Covid-19 to be isolated in hotels throughout south Texas. Over the years, Sister Norma has worked out an agreement with US Customs and Border Protection. After migrants who are seeking asylum are processed by immigration officials and it’s determined that they can stay in this country, they are typically bussed to what Sister Norma has named the Humanitarian Respite Center. There the migrants get a meal, a bath, a change of clothes, sleep and help navigating the US transportation system so they can travel to family or sponsors in other parts of the country.
In the age of Covid, Sister Norma worked with the city of McAllen, where the center is located, and the state of Texas to establish a testing site outside of the facility. Those who tested negative were allowed into the center; those testing positive were sent to nearby hotels and kept in isolation until they tested negative. As variants of the coronavirus began overtaking the country, especially the Delta variant, more migrants began testing positive – just as was happening in much of the rest of the country.
Sister Norma began running out of hotel space as migrants who tested positive, as well as their family members who tested negative, were being isolated. She contacted a motel in the small town of La Joya, not far from McAllen, at the western end of Hidalgo county, and began placing people who tested positive there. But she failed to notify local authorities and, despite admonishments to the migrants to stay in the room and assurances that food would be brought to them, one family decided to grab a bite at a nearby Whataburger restaurant, a Texas fast-food staple.
Customers in the restaurant, concerned by someone coughing inside the Whataburger, called the police. When police investigated, a migrant told them he had indeed tested positive for Covid-19, as had other migrants in a nearby hotel. The police immediately posted a warning on social media and the south Texas community exploded with indignation.
The timing couldn’t have been worse, as a national debate was exploding over vaccines and mask mandates. Local anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers began to blame the migrants and Sister Norma for a new surge in Covid-19 cases. Within days, she moved the migrants out of the La Joya hotel. And within a week, elected officials closed an isolated county park and set up temporary tents to house the migrants who had tested positive for Covid.
But the migrant-blaming continued virtually unabated. During the public comment section at a local government meeting, some residents accused Sister Norma of profiting from federal funds to care for migrants. And privately elected officials chastised her for not telling them about the hotel program in La Joya.
For the first time in the nearly 10 years that I have known Sister Norma, the weight of her singular focus seemed to be affecting her. When I last spoke with her and said I know you have been to hell and back, in her humility, she simply smiled and said: “Sometimes it’s hard.”
Health records consistently show assertions about migrants spreading Covid are untrue. Since mid-February, when Sister Norma initiated the Covid testing program with city and state officials, more than 130,000 migrants have been tested for the virus. A total of 10,061 migrants have tested positive for a positivity rate of 7.5%. Hidalgo county’s positivity rate, which does not include migrants, hovers in the 17.5% range. The state’s positivity rate stands about 12%.
I was in McAllen in 2014 when I began hearing stories about families suddenly wandering the streets of our central business district. It was the first hint of US immigration officials dropping off migrants at the bus station, as a new type of migration occurred that would eventually bedevil three presidencies – Central Americans seeking asylum instead of Mexicans coming to work in this country and often returning to Mexico several times a year.
This “catch and release” policy led to my introduction to Sister Norma. I watched her take over a Catholic parish hall for several years to minister to the growing numbers of migrants. Then I witnessed when she moved to a shuttered nursing home to accommodate more migrants and then moved again to a former nightclub adjacent to the McAllen bus depot to accommodate even more migrants, which became the largest non-profit migrant shelter in south Texas.
And just as her new facility was ramping up, Donald Trump introduced a new policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which put an end to the catch and release policy and forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico. Initially, they gathered by the hundreds in a plaza in Matamoros. Then they overtook a nearby park on the banks of the Rio Grande, growing to thousands in a tent city that hosted some migrants for several years. The primitive conditions forced them to bathe and do laundry in the dirty waters of the Rio Grande and live among a growing population of rats and snakes.
It was here where I met Jill Biden, who came at the invitation of a local congressman, around Christmas 2019 (months before the 2020 election), to serve tamales and witness the migrants’ living conditions. I have often wondered if her visit prompted a much more humanitarian approach by her husband, who quickly dismantled the MPP program when he became president and began allowing these migrants into the US to await their immigration court hearings.
Then last month the US supreme court supported a lawsuit that forces Joe Biden to implement the MPP program once again because he failed to properly demonstrate why he was stopping this policy. It seems an extraordinarily arrogant court ruling given that reimplementation of the program involves Mexico’s assent.
Sister Norma reacted to the ruling in her typically understated fashion. Recently, she posted a photo on Facebook showing a mini-tent city in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the border from McAllen. It was reminiscent of the Matamoros refugee camp that is now all but gone. “Almost 5,000 immigrants waiting under these tents protecting themselves under any kind of shade they find from the unforgiving sun,” she wrote.
When I asked her if she expected the court decision to create a reprise of the Matamoros encampment in Reynosa, which is considered a much more dangerous city because of drug cartel activity, Sister Norma said: “I hope not. That’s not who we are.”
Carlos Sanchez is director of public affairs for Hidalgo county, Texas. He was a journalist for 37 years and has worked at the Washington Post and Texas Monthly magazine, as well as eight other newsrooms. He can be reached at borderscribe@gmail.com