Hope Springs in the Desert

March 25, 2025
In DC, my home for most of my adult life, the cherry blossoms are blooming in the rain. El Paso typically gets about 9 inches of rain each year, with most of that falling in the summer months. (For comparison, the average annual rainfall in DC is 42 inches, and New Orleans gets 66.)  El Paso has endured continuous drought since August of 2023 – one of the longest dry spells on local record. There was a dust storm in my first week here, when the air turned orange, and right now, my phone flashes High Wind and Red Alert Fire Weather warnings. Yet healthy mesquite, chinaberry, oleander, pine, and aspiring cypress trees green the city streets, with many others whose names I haven’t learned. Purple, red, and yellow cactus flowers surprise the eye. Clearly, their roots have adapted to go deep and wide for water.

Texas has other distinctions, including  the highest number of people incarcerated of all US states. It holds more ICE detainees than any other state, in 21 facilities statewide – with thousands of new beds being added and a new family facility underway. A 1,400-acre ranch in Starr County is being readied as a staging area for mass deportations, according to a March 14 story in the Texas Tribune. In February an 11-year-old girl in Gainesville, TX took her own life because classmates were taunting her about her family’s immigration status. Even with the border closed, people on both sides are struggling to adapt, to keep their own roots watered as they search for new moorings in a windstorm of change.

On Monday, March 24, the 45th anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Romero,  San Jacinto Plaza and the streets between the Plaza and Sacred Heart Church were alive with hundreds of people gathered to support the human dignity of migrants. (You can read a poem about it here by Kim Wagner, my El Paso compañera.) An avenue-wide line of Catholic bishops from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada led off this interfaith event, including El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz, who chairs the USCCB Committee on Migration; Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester, who authored a courageous 2022 letter calling nuclear weapons a theft from the poor; and Pax Christi USA’s Bishop-President, John Stowe, of Lexington, Kentucky. Pope Francis was represented by Cardinal Fabbio Baggio, Undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Integral Human Development. Bishop Seitz contrasted this beautiful display of community with the current “war on the poor.”

El Paso’s Annunciation House, which has given loving sanctuary to thousands of migrants over nearly 50 years, is now all but closed. It’s one of the places where I expected to serve when I began my formation with FMS. Right now I am visiting other sites and meeting lots of inspiring people as I develop a pattern for the years ahead. I am helping to distribute food at a nearby church center that served 16,172 (!) households in March and joining a courthouse witness for justice and peace that has gone on for decades. With Kim, I’m playing Jenga and card games, working on puzzles, and stretching my still-clumsy Spanish with children and teens in a facility on the Juarez side for minors who showed up at the border alone. They are there until they turn 18, a family member comes to claim them, or the facility itself is closed. 

Yesterday, I attended another flowering of hope and challenge in Jacinto Plaza, commemorating the birthday of Cesar Chavez. I was especially impressed with the range of issues the speakers and signs displayed, because I believe we’ll need broad, powerful coalitions and a renewed sense of the common good to change the direction of our nation. 

April 11
There are SO many flowering trees and bushes now – all springing out of the dry ground! Last weekend I took part in El Paso’s fine showing for the national and international Hands Off demonstrations. My homemade sign said HANDS OFF – HEARTS OPEN. 

As Lent turns toward Holy Week and Eastertide, I am even more grateful and optimistic. Babies continue to be born, water flows, even underground, and good things grow. Hope springs! We hold on to hope, for the dear life of our dear earth. Our God is a God of miracles.

Question for Reflection: Where do you find reminders of hope during this season?