Missioners offer hope and accompaniment to migrants in detention centers.
Every week, Adrián (not his real name) eagerly looked forward to a visit from Scalabrinian Sister Leticia Gutiérrez at the Camp East Montana immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas. “It’s my only opportunity to see people beyond the barracks,” Adrián would tell her. “Listening to you and talking with you lifts my spirits.”
Adrián, a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Guatemala, was arrested last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while working in construction in Philadelphia. He was detained in a local facility for several months and then moved to another in Buffalo, New York. In December, he was transferred to El Paso.
Adrián is among hundreds of detained immigrants visited by a group of volunteers, including Maryknoll missioners, led by Sister Gutiérrez, director of the diocesan Migrant Hospitality Ministry. The Migrant Ministry, explains Sister Gutiérrez, follows a pastoral accompaniment model of attending court hearings, visiting people in detention centers and reaching out to their families.
Volunteers go to El Paso’s two immigration courts three times a week. Outside the courtrooms, they recommend that people going to hearings take a photo of their alien registration number to send to family members, so that if they are arrested, loved ones can monitor their status. “We suggest that they memorize a phone number or write it down somewhere on their body,” Sister Gutiérrez says.
Executive Director Ruben García welcomes a young migrant with disabilities at a shelter run by Annunciation House, which he founded with friends in El Paso 48 years ago to serve migrants. The nonprofit has since grown into a network of shelters. (Octavio Durán/U.S.)
After their hearings, individuals with a deportation order — despite having the right to appeal within 30 days — are detained by ICE. Before they are handcuffed, they are given a chance to share a spiritual moment with volunteers. Maryknoll Father Kenneth Moody describes this time as intense.
Hearings might take up to three hours, he says, “while the act of offering support and prayer lasts only three minutes.” The missioner says, “It involves reassuring detainees that the Lord is always with them, and that they can turn to him.”
Father Moody, who spent 24 years in Venezuela and 14 years in Bolivia before starting his border mission in 2021, counts his Spanish skills and a willingness to listen as key assets for this work. Sister Gutiérrez says that in their second task of accompaniment, the volunteers go to detention centers to make “friend visits.”
“We conduct weekly personal visits to those who were detained in court,” she says. Sometimes, she adds, their family members reach out for help. “In Adrián’s case, his fiancée visited him and, worried about his emotional health, asked us for assistance.”
At Camp East Montana, one of the country’s largest detention centers, facilities are like warehouses. In a “barracks,” as detainees call it, over 70 overwhelmed people sleep in the same space, Sister Gutiérrez reports.
The Migrant Ministry ensures they receive at least one initial phone call and deposits $25 into their accounts for family contact. “We bring them prayer books and word search puzzles to help pass the time,” she says.
“We pray with them whenever they ask and accompay them until their deportation or release.”
The diocesan Migrant Hospitality Ministry is run by Scalabrinian Sister Leticia Gutiérrez (left), who organizes a host of volunteers including Maryknoll missioners, and Scalabrinian Sister Elisete Signor, the ministry’s director of operations, to respond to the needs of detainees and their families. The sisters are shown attending a march and vigil on March 24. (Octavio Durán/U.S.)
Father Moody used to celebrate Mass once a month at detention centers for 60 to 80 detainees. “I encouraged them to seek God during their hardest moments,” says the missioner, who recently returned to Maryknoll headquarters in New York. “The detention centers were harsher than jails. In jail, up to six people shared a cell, but in immigration centers, detainees were packed into large open spaces.”
The third objective of the pastoral accompaniment model, Sister Gutiérrez explains, is engaging with family members. “They suffer from anxiety and depression. We use listening therapy — showing them we are there for support,” she says. The detention experience is unsettling for the whole family, she adds. “One day, detainees might be kept in this detention center, and the next, transferred to another at midnight — creating a profound sense of uncertainty for their loved ones.”
Sister Gutiérrez visited Adrián from December to late January. His fiancée, with the help of organizations that assist immigrants, paid his legal costs and filed a habeas corpus petition. He was released on bond with an electronic ankle monitor.
Adrián, whose asylum case continues, was moved to Annunciation House, a volunteer-led organization in El Paso that has been welcoming immigrants and refugees for 48 years. Currently, the house hosts 10 to 15 people daily who are released from ICE custody.
Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, Washington Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar, and Bishop Jose Guadalupe Torres Campos of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, take part in a vigil and protest in El Paso March 24, 2026, against mass deportations and the immigration policies of the Trump administration. (OSV News photo/Fernando Ceniceros, courtesy Diocese of El Paso)
Another shelter within the network — the Papa Francisco (Pope Francis) shelter — serves women and families previously authorized to live in the United States. Many have lost their work permits due to ruptures in immigration protocol and cannot support themselves, says Ruben García, founder and director of Annunciation House.
The people living at the shelters are either in the asylum process or actively seeking another type of immigration relief, García says. Often, they held official documents, such as a work permit, a temporary Social Security number or a driver’s license. Previously, people in that situation would not have been detained. However, under the Trump administration, ICE has been instructed “to set those documents aside and detain them,” he says. “That is catastrophic for families.”
Many of them believed that because their cases were still pending, they would not be detained, García explains. “They come out deeply shaken and visibly distressed.”
Many of the individuals released from detention arrive without their personal belongings, copies of their documents or case paperwork, he says. Volunteers help them organize their travel back to the cities where they had previously lived.
The work of volunteers, including the long-term service of many Maryknoll missioners, is crucial, García says. It is up to us to listen to God’s Spirit and then respond to his call, he adds.
Kevin McCarthy, who promotes mission for Maryknoll’s Mission Formation Ministry, moved to El Paso last year. Every week he visits a detention center.
McCarthy says that he is concerned about a 27-year-old detainee from Ecuador. “She seems very depressed,” he says. “She told me, ‘Today marks two years that I’ve been locked up.’” The young woman, who is considered at risk of selfharm, has been placed in a small cell with only one other woman.
Maryknoll’s message — and that of Catholic Social Teaching — is to uphold the dignity of every human person, McCarthy says.
For Sister Gutiérrez, the ministry of accompaniment strengthens the faith of religious workers and volunteers, giving them a deep spirituality rooted in their encounters with detainees.
“For the inmate, God is the only true support,” she says. “Let us persist in spreading God’s tenderness through listening, dialogue, and acts of kindness, and keep our hope and faith in God, who continually accompanies his people.”
Featured image: At a march and vigil March 24 attended by hundreds of people including five bishops, protestors hold posters of people who died in ICE detention or were killed by agents. The event, set on the date St. Óscar Romero was assassinated in 1980, was sponsored by the Diocese of El Paso and Hope Border Institute, in partnership with several other faith and community leaders. (Octavio Durán/U.S.)
