Political Padre: Raymundo Chávez Vázquez and Illegal Immigration

When an invitation came to visit the United States, he wasn't sure he wanted to come — even for a vacation. In the end, though, he accepted. He thought his stay in this country wouldn't last long. "Then a bishop told me there weren't enough priests to minister to the immigrants," he said. "I thought I would only be there for a month and then go back home."

Before he knew it, though, he had settled in Tyler, Texas, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It was no longer a vacation, but he enjoyed it. He worked as an assistant for an Anglo priest, and there were just a few Hispanics. He felt welcomed by Anglos. "I wanted to hide under the altar, my English was so bad," he says. "It was embarrassing."

At this point, Father Raymundo wasn't sure what he was doing in the United States, especially in the affluent, English-speaking parish he served. "Then one night," he says, "I woke up in the middle of the night and said, 'What the devil — excuse my language — am I doing here? Why am I in the United States?' I still don't really know why, but here I am. You can't escape from God even when you want to. God won't let me escape."

The bishop wouldn't let him escape either. After a brief stint in Nacogdoches — a town he describes as "friendly and quaint" — he landed in Bryan in 2005. His initial experience in the Brazos Valley, he says, "was an eye-opener." He saw immigrants deported back to Mexico for minor traffic violations. He saw well-known contractors refuse to pay immigrants for a day's work. He saw workers getting paid two to three dollars below minimum wage.

The abuses were pretty typical for a growing town with a booming immigrant population. The exploitation of day laborers in Bryan wasn't much worse than in other cities in Texas. The main difference was that immigrants in Aggieland had no one to turn to, except for the occasional do-gooder who came in from Austin or Houston.

Austin-based immigrants' rights lawyer Alan Cooper was one of the first people to reach out to Father Raymundo. The first time Cooper met him, he wasn't sure what kind of a reception he would get. Cooper is a Quaker. "When I told him that I was a Quaker," he says, "Father Raymundo made it clear that if I was here to help workers, I was welcome in his church."

Cooper recalls Father Raymundo hosting an immigrants' rights meeting in his parsonage when the power got cut off. There were 25 people in the building and without hesitating, Father Raymundo flipped his cell phone open to shed light on the meeting. "The situation in Bryan is different from other cities in Texas," Cooper says. "In Houston or Austin, there are social services or nonprofits immigrants can turn to. They don't have that in Bryan."
_____________________

When CPS took custody of Pedro and Juana's youngest child last summer, they weren't sure what to do. Juana was eight months pregnant with her seventh child when her 18-month-old got sick. The couple took the infant to a clinic and got a prescription for his cough. After a couple of days of treatment, Pedro Jr. wasn't getting any better.

Finally, the couple decided to take their child to the emergency room. Juana says that a doctor wanted to do blood work while she waited in the lobby. A couple of hours later, a Spanish-speaking police officer met her in the emergency room. He wanted permission to search Pedro and Juana's trailer on the outskirts of Bryan. Pedro says that the cop was convinced they had drugs. "I've never even tasted a beer," says Juana. "I had no idea what was going on."

Juana says that the hospital had found something — she still isn't sure what — in the child's blood that convinced the doctors that the couple was drugging their children. Pedro, a carpenter from San Luis Potosí, sat in disbelief as the cop rifled through their mobile home. Juana says that the cop interrogated her so harshly that she almost passed out and had to be hospitalized. When Juana came to, the same cop was promising to take away Pedro Jr. He called her a "pendeja" and told her CPS was going to take away "the one in her belly" as well.

After CPS took custody of Juana's newborn, the couple turned to Santa Teresa for help. García Alonzo and Father Raymundo helped them find a lawyer and get into counseling with a Spanish-­speaking psychologist. García Alonzo says that the couple probably misread the label on the prescription and gave the child too much of the medicine, which contained codeine.