Ágape Misión Mundial

We were taken to Ágape Misión Mundial, an albergue housing about 160 migrants awaiting asylum hearings (about half were children) by Luis Rosales, of Psicólogos Sin Fronteras. Luis and PSF have been working there for some time. Prior to our first time there, Luis had already taken a number of ARIA discs we had provided to him there to give the children and, in a twist, not only threw with them, but used them as canvases for painting. He tells us they still fly well even with artwork on their undersides. When we were able to come visit, we brought more discs as well as canvases for the painting (see gallery).

The pastor of Ágape, Albert Rivera, is a truly remarkable advocate for the migrants. At the time of our visit, one of the migrants at the albergue had been denied entry into the US for her asylum hearing by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in violation of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a treaty between the US and Mexico signed in early 2019 that provided that migrants seeking asylum and entering the US along the southern border would be assigned court dates and returned to Mexico to await their hearings there. This illegal denial of entry to migrants with court orders to appear resulted in the migrants losing their asylum cases for a failure to appear. Pastor Rivera spearheaded a successful protest campaign to publicize what CBP was doing, and got the Mexican Embassy in the US and other government entities involved. CBP was forced to apologize, and to stop the practice. The outcome was broadly covered on Mexican TV, and thus the large numbers of migrants who had lost their cases due to this same practice learned that their cases had been reinstated. In February 2020 an appeals court upheld a lower court injunction against the MPP and the Remain in Mexico policy themselves, but a stay was promptly issued, so the policy remains in effect, and in fact, with the pandemic, many migrant claims remain in limbo.   But thanks to the activism spearheaded by Pastor Rivera, at least the migrants’ rights to appear for their court dates issued under this treaty were reinstated, and the practices of CBP in blocking it were reversed.

More recently, Pastor Rivera has been fighting toxic waste dumping on land immediately adjacent to his albergue. This practice began in January 2020. Waste waters and sludge that seeps from Mexico to the US under the border wall has been being collected by trucks and brought back to Tijuana by trucks, under the auspices of CESPT, the state commision for public services in Baja. These “black waters” (lodos) are being dumped on open land rather than being treated in waste treatment facilities. Many people in the albergue and in the surrounding colonia have gotten ill from the exposure to these untreated black waters and have been protesting for months. The Mexican equivalent of the ACLU, COSI, has been helping the Pastor try to fight this dumping in the courts, but conflicts having to do with overlapping jurisdictions and unclear liabilities have made it difficult. Plus, access to the courts have been limited due to the pandemic. The pastor has already paid several thousand dollars in legal fees to pursue the matter and protect the health of those in his care.

As with all the albergues, donations have been harder and harder to come by, especially as surrounding churches that used to donate can now no longer hold services, and thus lack funding themselves to provide humanitarian support.