Tucson’s Benedictine Monastery more than just a shelter for migrant families
Apr 21, 2019, 4:05 AM
(Nicole Ludden/Cronkite News)
TUCSON – Dozens of families and children file into the wooden pews of the Benedictine Monastery in Tucson. A small child wearing a white men’s XL T-shirt clenches his mother’s hand while another plays peek-a-boo.
They sit inside the historic monastery’s spacious sanctuary – some gazing up at the grand dome and the four-pillared marble altar canopy at the front of the room.
The sanctuary now holds dozens of army green American Red Cross cots in clusters, strewn with stuffed animals, pop-up cribs and tattered children’s books in Spanish.
Volunteers filter through each row of pews, offering reassuring smiles as they take families to further medical processing in separate areas of the church. This is the first step in the path each family takes as Casa Alitas, a program within Catholic Community Services, assesses their personal needs.
A Tucson developer bought the property in 2018, but it sat empty while he waited to begin building apartments around the monastery in early fall. The owner has allowed Casa Alitas to use the monastery since January, taking in hundreds of migrants weekly to provide personalized care in the often complicated asylum process. Just last Saturday, Casa Alitas housed 420 migrants in the monastery.
The migrants are led through a series of stations throughout the monastery, from an intake room that processes the families for their specific needs to a transportation check in location that aligns migrants’ departure from the shelter with another sponsor in the United States who can house them.
Migrants often enter Casa Alitas with hardships, but they leave with fresh sets of clothing, care packages of food and water and personalized guidance through the asylum process.
Because of a spike in the number of migrants entering the U.S., which has increased each month since October 2018, the overwhelmed Immigration and Customs Enforcement has depended on churches, shelters and even bus stations to house migrants seeking asylum until they can find more permanent shelter – most often with family members already in the U.S.
The migrants’ experiences vary, and they often face harsh conditions: Officials had detained some in an enclosure under a bridge in El Paso and dropped off others outside bus stations. But the organizers at Casa Alitas want to provide a different narrative for the migrants who walk through the arched doors of the former Benedictine monastery.
Not only are the migrants surrounded by the grandeur of the building, which was completed in 1940 in the pre-WWII Spanish Revival style, but about 150 volunteers see to their needs – from baby food and toothpaste to help securing a bus ticket.
“We’ve been able to meet the needs of the families as they come through here,” Casa Alita’s program coordinator Diego Pina Lopez said. “We welcome them to this sanctuary and say, ‘This is not the government. This is volunteers. We’re here to help you, and it kind of reassures them that way.”
Offering services
Migrants arrive at the monastery after initial processing by ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Often, their shoelaces are removed and they have tracking bands affixed to their wrists. They carry their belongings in plastic bags.
Most of the migrants are mothers, children and pregnant women from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and they have traveled for days or weeks, according to Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona.
“Pretty much every single person that comes through here is a parent with a child or a mom with multiple children, or sometimes it’s a couple with children. Many people have been hurt on the way in multiple ways. People who’ve violated trust or betrayed them or stolen from them,” said Kat Rodriguez, an intake coordinator at Casa Alitas. “All we can do is show them kindness and compassion.”