Enrique's Journey Part 11

The next day just before noon, he stirs from his dirty mattress. He borrows some toothpaste, squats at the river, dips his toothbrush into the murky water, and cleans his broken teeth. They still ache from the beating he took on top of the train a few weeks ago. So does his head, which throbs constantly. A dark pink welt an inch long scars his left forehead like a cross. He still cannot see well with his left eye, and the lid sags. His arms and legs are mottled with bruises, and he has been wearing the same clothes for days. He brushes gently, methodically, then cups water into his mouth with his hands and gargles. He washes his face, tosses water on his hair. He stores the toothbrush on his portion of the upright mattress coil.

He is hungry. Hours pa.s.s. His hunger grows. Finally, he cannot stand it. He retrieves the first phone card from the friend who is holding it, and he sells it for food.

Worse, he is so desperate that he sacrifices it at a discount, for 40 pesos. He saves a few pesos for the next day and uses all of his money to buy crackers, the cheapest thing that will fill his stomach.

Now he has gone from two phone cards to one, worth only 30 pesos. He regrets surrendering to his hunger. If only he can earn 20 pesos more. Then he will go ahead and phone his old boss and hope that his aunt or uncle will call back, so he won't need a second card.

But someone has stolen his bucket. Without it, he is lost: he used it for sitting, chopping food, washing his feet, and earning a living.

When he thinks about giving up, he tries to rea.s.sure himself: "I know my day will come. I know I shouldn't get desperate." After his crackers, he lies on his mattress, stone quiet, and looks at the sky. His friend can see that he is depressed. Since Enrique has been at the river, he has watched thirty other men and boys sleep at the camp, pay a smuggler, then cross the river into the United States.

The friend tries to cheer him up. He urges him not to despair. There is nothing left to do, the friend says, but to risk the cops, go downtown and beg. They will do it together.

They go to Avenida Guerrero. It is filled with tourists who spill across the border to shop, drink, dance, and hire prost.i.tutes. Poor Mexicans flock there to beg. Five-year-olds tap the tourists on the arm and ask them to buy tiny packs of gum. Old women sit on sidewalks and extend their weathered hands, seeking a coin or two. Avenida Guerrero is thick with police. For Enrique, a Central American without papers, it is treacherous ground.

But he is desperate. His friend leans on his arm, drags a foot, and pretends to be lame. They approach every tourist they see. "Want me to show you where the train hit me?" the friend offers. Slowly, he lifts his cuff.

People recoil. "No, no. Here!" They give a peso and scurry away.

Enrique and his friend quickly lose their nerve. They retreat to the river before the police can catch them, with only enough to buy more crackers.

A friend at camp lends him a bucket. He trudges back out to the car wash across from the taco stand. He sits on the bucket. Carefully, he pulls up his T-shirt. There, in an arch just above his belly b.u.t.ton, is his tattoo, painfully raw.

EnriqueLourdes. Now the words mock him. For the first time, he is ready to go back home. But he holds back his tears and lowers his shirt. He refuses to give up.

THE MOMENT.

He considers crossing the Rio Grande by himself. But his friends at camp warn him against it.

They tell him the trek is treacherous from the moment you step into the river. A month ago, one of the camp dwellers saw a man's body float past. It was bloated. Sometimes, friends say, migrants are killed when whirlpools suck them under. Other times, whirlpools smash their heads against rocks. Sometimes their legs cramp and they sink. Other times INS helicopters fly too low, whip up waves, and swamp inner tubes, riders and all. They call the helicopters mosquitoes; they come down and bite.

Migrants at the car wash tell him about the trains. Eight to ten leave for el Norte every day. Security guards stand on a platform over the freight cars, watch for migrants, and pull them off before they cross the bridge. As soon as the trains reach the U.S. side, the cars are inspected again.

Then, at Milla 12, the first INS checkpoint north of Laredo, the trains stop inside a fence. It is impossible to run. Agents scan the cars with an infrared telescope to pick up body heat. And then come the dogs. The INS uses them at its second checkpoint, some eighty miles north, near Cotulla. The trains carry new Fords and Chryslers. Migrants like to hide in the cars or among them, and the dogs sniff them out.

One of the dogs is a Malinois, imported from Belgium for her keen ability to smell human sweat and saliva, even from outside closed cars with their windows rolled up. Her name is Franca. She takes commands in German.

Immigrants smear themselves with garlic to throw her off. She begins upwind of the train and runs alongside its length, straining at the leash until she gets a hit. She jumps up and down when she suspects that they are there, and she rarely misses. Agents open and inspect the double-decker boxcars. "Ten-four! We have bodies up here!" they announce. Agents praise the dog and let her play with a rubber toy.

Enrique decides that walking across Texas is out. Without a guide, his campmates say, it is easy to get lost and wander in circles in the sameness of the brush lands. The trek to San Antonio takes seven or eight days, in desert heat of up to 120 degrees, with diamondback rattlers, lacerating cactus needles, water slimy with cattle spit, saucer-sized tarantulas, and wild hogs with tusks. Some migrants, dehydrated and delirious, kill themselves. Their leathery corpses sway from belts around their necks on whatever is st.u.r.dy and tall. Water jugs lie empty at their feet.

A Central American youth rides a freight train through Mexico toward the United States. Each year, thousands of children cling to the tops and sides of trains as they journey north in search of their parents. Some say they need to find out whether their mothers still love them.

The view through a fence at the home where Enrique lived with his paternal grandmother. Across the valley were his sister and the phone on which they occasionally talked to their mother. Enrique ended the strained calls by saying, "I want to be with you."

Maria Marcos looks at photos of her grandson Enrique. As he began to rebel, she asked him: "Don't you love me? I am going to send you away." "Send me!" he said. "No one loves me."

Buzzards and children are compet.i.tors for trash at the dump in Tegucigalpa. The same fate might have awaited Enrique without the money that arrived from the United States. Still, he began to grow angry and rebellious. "I see so many children with mothers," he told his sister. "I want that."

Central American migrants headed for the United States ride in railroad cars through southern Mexico.

Migrants flatten themselves to avoid being hit by tree branches as their freight train rolls through Chiapas in southern Mexico. Enrique learned several lessons about the state known to immigrants as "the beast." Among them: Trust no one in authority, and never ride alone.

One migrant watches as another leaps from freight car to freight car during a train's brief stop in Mapastepec.

Thirteen-year-old David Velasquez, left, and seventeen-year-old Roberto Gaytan wait to be jailed after being caught in Tapachula, Mexico. The Guatemalans were headed for Los Angeles and North Carolina.

Migrants arrested in a dawn sweep at the Tapachula rail yard are behind bars before their probable deportation. Central Americans are sent back to the Guatemalan border on el bus de lagrimas, the bus of tears. Making as many as eight runs a day, the buses deport more than 100,000 pa.s.sengers a year.

Oscar Omar Valle of Honduras reboards a train after a stop in Cordoba, Mexico, where he sought food. Like Enrique, he is unprepared for the cold ahead. A migrant knows that if he doesn't run fast enough while grabbing onto a moving train, he can be jerked forward, lose his grip, and be pulled under the wheels.

Santo Antonio Gamay, hoping to make it to Toronto, shows the fatigue and tension from fifteen hours of riding a train. He has been arrested and deported three times before. In minutes, he will jump off to again try to outrun law enforcement officers.

Riders sit atop a northbound freight train as it rolls through lush Veracruz state in Mexico. Enrique's experiences in Chiapas taught him to fear the worst from people, but here he was stunned by kindness. People in many villages streamed toward the tracks with gifts.

The hands of migrants and food givers meet as a train pa.s.ses through Fortin de las Flores in Veracruz. A World Bank study found that 42.5 percent of Mexicans live on two dollars or less a day. In rural areas, the people who live along the tracks are often the poorest.

Enrique washes a car in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He needed to earn one hundred pesos to call Honduras to get his mother's phone number, which he had lost during a beating by train bandits.

Lourdes breaks down as she talks about her life and her separation from her son. Her nine-year-old daughter, Diana, who was born in the United States, offers comfort.

Central Americans emerge from the Rio Grande in Texas after wading across. In the plastic bags are dry clothes. Before Enrique entered the water, he tore up a sc.r.a.p of paper with his mother's phone number on it and scattered it on the bank. This time, he had memorized the number.

Some are shot by ranchers as they try to beg or steal food or drink. A few weeks after Enrique arrived in Nuevo Laredo, Mexican immigrant Eusebio de Haro Espinosa, twenty-three, went up to a rancher in Bracketville, Texas, forty miles from the border, and asked for water. The rancher, Samuel Blackwood, seventy-five, shot him in the leg with a .357 Magnum. He didn't seek medical help. Espinosa bled to death.

Texas ranchers have become increasingly riled by immigrants who trespa.s.s. "There are two kinds of wets," says retired trucker Jake Smith, who lives in a trailer on a ramshackle ranch in Martinez, near Cotulla, Texas. "Good wets. And bad wets." When immigrants are near, the dogs bark. Smith sits on the front porch with a pistol in his lap.

Bad immigrants pack drugs, break into your place, and steal things, he says. Even the good ones, who are in search of honest work, leave the gates open, let the cattle out, or break into your place looking for food and water, says Smith, a crusty, white-haired man who occasionally gets his gla.s.s eye cleaned by a nearby large-animal veterinarian.

Ranch owner Joe Crisp has installed three locks on each window of his home. Immigrants have broken in eight times. Once they rammed a hole in his wall to get inside. Another time, they broke through the roof. Such intrusions are so common that Border Patrol agents advise ranchers to leave water and food outside, beside their doors. Every rancher near the Crisp and Smith homes has heard about the incident when a rancher turned down an immigrant who asked to use his telephone. The immigrant tied the rancher to a chair and stole his pickup truck.

Some of Enrique's campmates say they were apprehended when a rancher pointed a pistol at them, told them to freeze, and then dialed the U.S. immigration agents on his cell phone. Many migrants trying to enter are caught by the INS: 108,973 near Laredo in 2000, the year Enrique is trying.

Enrique will have to outsmart Border Patrol agents on the other side who are skilled and dogged.

Tracker Charles Grout can spot a footprint from a moving Ford Bronco. His partner, Manuel Sauceda, can tell, within a range of a few hours, how old it is.

They are agents for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service based in Cotulla, halfway along a seven- to eight-day walk between the Rio Grande at Nuevo Laredo and San Antonio. Their job is to arrest immigrants who enter Texas illegally.

Salary increases for Grout and Sauceda are based partly on how many migrants they catch. They work together, along railroads and in the desert, taking turns tracking on foot and driving ahead in the Bronco, sometimes for days.

One Thursday in September 2000, Sauceda discovers footprints near a cattle trough southwest of Encinal. He knows immigrants drink from the trough, although the water smells like rotten eggs and is laced with green sc.u.m. He circles the footprints and draws closer.

If footprints are not windblown or caved in, they are recent. If no animals, such as centipedes, snails, birds, or snakes, have crossed them, they are fresh. If there are discarded food wrappers nearby and if the wrappers are not covered with ants, the tracks are brand-new.

Sauceda circles the water trough, sweat trickling down his face, searching among piles of cow manure for clues. He faces the sun and looks for tiny shadows.

Then he finds more tracks. They have been made that morning. He detects patterns: one track is waffled, another has fine lines, and another is shaped like the pointed toe of a boot. "I see at least four here," he says. He smiles. Like a bloodhound, he leans over and picks up his pace.

Changes at the Cotulla office show how much harder it has become to sneak past agents like Grout and Sauceda.

In 1994, Cotulla had 20 agents. Now, in Cotulla alone, Enrique will face 70 agents. Cotulla is one of eight INS stations north of Nuevo Laredo. In all, the INS has hired more than 5,600 additional agents since 1993 to expand its forces along the southern U.S. border.

In addition, agents use a growing a.r.s.enal of technology: helicopters, night-vision goggles, thermal imaging that picks up body heat, and seismic sensors that detect footsteps along immigrant trails. One INS officer's only job is to move the sensors to outsmart smugglers who try to plot their locations.

Earlier on this day, alerted by sensor 53, agents caught eleven Mexican men who had been walking across the desert for four days.

Grout and Sauceda are particularly dogged, partly because it means saving lives. Every two weeks or so, Sauceda says, he has to call an ambulance for an immigrant who has been bitten by a rattlesnake or hit by a train or has grown so dehydrated in the Texas desert that he is nearing collapse.

Sauceda follows the footprints at the water trough. He comes to a trail, climbs into the Bronco, and drives, opening and closing gates with keys from a ring that holds scores, given to the agents by ranchers.

The temperature climbs to 100 degrees-cool compared with the highs of 112 to 118 the week before, which had partially melted the asphalt on Interstate 35. The Bronco has a range-fire-prevention reminder on the dashboard: DO NOT OPERATE OFF THE ROAD IN DRY GRa.s.s OR BRUSH. Sauceda ignores it.

By 2 P.M., Grout and Sauceda have lost and found the tracks several times.

Whoever is leaving them seems to be angling toward a tower with an antenna. The two trackers search every big tree and water source. They come to a barbed-wire fence. Marks in the dirt show that their quarry has crawled under it. Grout picks up the tracks on the other side. "There they are, the same ones," he says. "Bigger than Dallas."

The track makers are headed for Encinal. If they reach town, it will be virtually impossible to find them, and the agents' half day spent in the cactus and the searing heat will be wasted.

Sauceda, dripping sweat, trots alongside the footprints. Grout drives ahead, to the edge of town. He spots an odd-looking dirt driveway. The right side has been dragged clean. It leads to a ramshackle house.

He parks. There, in soil leading to the driveway, are the footprints: waffle, fine lines, the point of a boot...

"I got 'em!" he says into a walkie-talkie.

"Where?" Sauceda asks.

"Same place as the last time."

Grout takes three paces toward the house. A rottweiler lunges from behind a tree. Grout reaches for his .40-caliber Beretta. A chain stops the dog a few feet in front of him.

Carefully, Grout presses forward seven more paces, then swings open the door to a yellow shed. Jammed inside are five surprised immigrants. He handcuffs them.

Back at the Bronco, he inspects their footwear. Waffle, fine lines, pointed boot. He smiles.

Many immigrants are glad to be tracked down. Isaias Guerra, from Veracruz, Mexico, looked relieved when Grout found him. Guerra had been lost in the wilderness for two days. He had survived by eating cactus. The first day, five coyotes had followed him. The animals got so close that Guerra hit two of them with a stick to force them to back off. That night, he slept in a tree. The next day, a large mound a dozen feet away from him that at first looked like cow dung started moving. A rattlesnake, coiled, as thick as his upper arm, prepared to strike. He saw three more snakes. At dusk, he spotted a bobcat nearby. He quietly backed away. Guerra gladly crawled into the back of Grout's truck, dubbed "the cage."

Migrants deported by the United States often return to the San Jose church. Enrique sees some of them. A tall man arrives at the church one evening with a vacant, dull look in his eyes. He hasn't eaten in five days. His brown shirt hangs in pieces on his body, torn to shreds by the cactus. His arms are cut up and bleeding, pinp.r.i.c.ked with thistles and thorns. He is caked in mud. The bottoms of both feet are covered by gargantuan yellow blisters. His toes are swollen like sausages. The nails have turned black. He stumbles forward on his heels, barely able to walk. He's done seventy miles in the past six days, killing five rattlers along the way. He begs for a gla.s.s of water and a shower.

Everything Enrique hears makes him terrified of snakes and scorpions. In the Texas desert, snakes come out to hunt at night, when it is cooler. That is when migrants are on the move. They fumble forward in the dark, afraid to use a flashlight. Some rely, instead, on superst.i.tions: Take a pregnant woman with you, and the snakes will sleep as you pa.s.s by. Put three peppercorns under your tongue for good luck. There are copper-head snakes, coral snakes, cottonmouth snakes, and the blue indigo snake, so long and fast it can kill a rattlesnake. There is a b.u.mper crop this year, and the drought has made them more aggressive.

Many times, when Enrique falls asleep, he has the same nightmare: A snake has bitten him in the mouth. He cannot call out for help.

El Hongo listens. Finally, he decides against going alone. "Why should I die doing this?" he asks himself. Somehow he will call his mother and ask her to hire a smuggler.

Nine rings of coyotes are said to operate in Nuevo Laredo. Each ring has at least fifty smugglers. But Enrique knows he cannot trust just anyone. Back home in Honduras, most smugglers are honest; they must uphold their reputations if they want business. Here they can rob, rape, or abandon their clients with impunity. Some take them straight to river bandits and get a cut. Only one smuggler in ten, says a nun at the Parroquia de San Jose, is trustworthy. Many migrants at the church return with smuggler horror stories.

Enrique has spent a lot of time around El Tirindaro. Enrique has seen him take a number of men and boys across the river, always at night, usually one or two at a time, paddling furiously in their inner tubes. They always disappear into the United States. When El Tirindaro takes them over, Enrique notices, they are never caught and sent back. El Tirindaro has studied the movements of the Border Patrol so long, says fellow patero Juan Barajas Soto, that he knows what each agent does every eight hours, during the shift change.

Enrique makes a decision: When he calls his mother, he will ask her to hire El Tirindaro. "I know," he says to himself, "that he won't strand me."

On May 18, he awakens to find that someone has stolen his right shoe. Shoes are almost as important as food and his mother's telephone number. He can think of every pair that has helped him come north. On this trip alone, there were seven. Blue shoes, white shoes, leather work boots, Nike sneakers. He has bought, borrowed, or traded for them. All have fallen apart or been stolen. But never only one.

He spots a sneaker floating near the riverbank. He snags it. It is for a left foot. Now he has two left shoes. Bucket in hand, he hobbles back to the taco stand, begging along the way. People give him a peso or two. He washes a few cars, and it starts to rain. Astonishingly, he has put together 20 pesos in all.

That is enough to trade in his 30-peso phone card for one worth 50 pesos.

He will use the 50-peso card to call his old boss at the tire store. If the boss reaches his aunt and uncle, if they know his mother's number, if his aunt or uncle will call him back...

PADRE LEO'S HELP It is May 19. There is only one way his plan will work. Father Leonardo Lopez Guajardo at the Parroquia de San Jose is known to let migrants phone from the church if they have cards. Each day, he serves as their telephone a.s.sistant. In flipflops, he pads to the door every fifteen minutes or so and summons someone for a return call. Enrique will have to trust the priest to find him if his aunt and uncle call back. He has already sensed what people in Nuevo Laredo know: when it comes to migrants, Padre Leo's heart is bigger than his collections.

The priest rarely uses his office. Most afternoons and evenings he sits by the door, behind a small wooden desk, in a room that doubles as a food pantry. The room is lined with shelves stocked with cans and boxes of food-donations to help feed migrants. There is a pile of overripe fruits and vegetables on the floor. Flies buzz around it. It stinks of rotting tomatoes and onions. Liquid has seeped from the decomposing vegetables and pooled on the floor. Here, one by one, he attends to a stream of migrants. Padre Leo takes down the migrants' information, then gives them a meal card or arranges to pick up money wired by relatives in the United States.

In Nuevo Laredo, Padre Leo is not a typical priest. When he was a boy, even his mother questioned whether he was priest material. So did his teachers at the seminary, who deemed him too playful and impatient with pomp and procedure; they delayed his ordination. It took him eleven years to graduate.

Other priests in town wear nice watches and rings and act important. Padre Leo is so disheveled that visitors sometimes mistake him for one of the poor, dirty migrants sitting outside. His clothes are always rumpled. He wears the same pants for days, stained and dirty from hauling boxes of ripe vegetables. His favorite pair has frayed cuffs and a small tear in the rear. He forgets to zip them up. The men in the congregation try to help. They point at his fly. "Ah, ah. Si, si, si," the priest says, hastily pulling the zipper into place.

Padre Leo emerges one night from his bedroom to say Ma.s.s. His flannel shirt is inside out and b.u.t.toned incorrectly. The church's other priest looks exasperated. "Where's your belt?" he asks. Leo shuffles back to his bedroom to take another stab at dressing himself. The only time he looks neat is when he visits his family; his mother sends him back to Nuevo Laredo perfumed with cologne and in a newly pressed shirt and pants.

Priests in town favor the latest-model Grand Marquis. Padre Leo rides everywhere on a rickety blue bicycle. People call him el Papa en la bici. He rides when it is cold, hot, raining. When he goes to other churches to say Ma.s.s, he carries his white floor-length robe in a small bag across the handlebars. In the evenings, Enrique watches the priest return to the church on his bicycle, loaded down with bags of donated bread.

During Ma.s.s, he doesn't read from the Bible much. He conveys his message through jokes or by spinning a lesson out of a popular movie or song. He does not stand at the altar; he paces up and down the church aisle's pink floors in his white robe, which he wears with broken-down tennis shoes. As he paces, he mops copious quant.i.ties of sweat from his balding head with a large white towel. A microphone in his left hand, the towel in his right, he preaches.

Like most in his church, secretary Alma Delia Jimenez Renteria says she has learned more from what the priest practices than what he preaches. In 1997, when she was new in her job at the church, the future mayor of the city, Horacio Garza, came to visit Padre Leo. A foul-smelling migrant with badly swollen feet also needed to talk to the priest. Alma asked the migrant to wait and started to usher in the future mayor. The priest stopped her. "No. Let the mayor wait. Let the person who is most in need see me first," he said. Says Alma, "He isn't a padre who tells you what to do. He shows you through his actions, through his example. He doesn't pray with rosary or Bible. He loves G.o.d by doing good toward others. That's how he teaches you to love G.o.d."

He is impatient to get things done, tackling too many things at once. He rarely sits down for a meal, living off a chunk of chocolate in one hand, a bit of bread in the other. He scoops some rice or beans out of buckets of food left in the pantry or eats from a can of food he plucks off the shelves.

He cannot sit or stand still. Often, in midconfession, his mind wanders to the next thing he must do for migrants. "Disculpe, ahorita vuelvo. Pardon me, I'll be right back," he tells people, usually just as they are opening up.

He is unfailingly polite, even formal, but he can be awkward, even curt, around people. When someone gives the church money, he responds with a simple "A. Bien." When he walks down the street, he is so distracted he often fails to say h.e.l.lo when he pa.s.ses a church member. It took the arrival of two nuns in 1998 to bring some order and rules to the padre's operations.

He is humble and lives modestly. He gives his salary to the church to help it pay staff salaries. When someone gave him a nice truck, he sold it to pay church utility bills. His car, which he rarely drives to save gas and help the environment, is a tiny Mazda purchased for $400. The driver's door won't open from the outside, the vinyl dash is shredded, and the front seat has a huge hole in it.

His focus is one instilled by mentors at the seminary: "Either we are with the poor, or we are not. G.o.d teaches us to most help the poor. Any other interpretation is unacceptable." To Padre Leo, the people most in need in Nuevo Laredo are migrants. They go for days without food, for months without resting their heads on a pillow; they are defenseless against an onslaught of abuses. He vowed to restore a bit of their dignity. "He saw that these people are the most vulnerable, the most disliked by the local population. So he gave himself to them," says a church volunteer, Pedro Leyva.

He tells church members that they, too, were once migrants. Saint Joseph was a migrant. The Bible was written by migrants. Running off a migrant, he says, is like turning against yourself. A person must be more than spiritual, he tells them. They must act. "Some people read the Bible and fall asleep," says Padre Leo. "For me, it was a jolt. The worst thing as a Christian is to go through life asleep."

People knew he was special from the day he arrived. A bus and caravan of cars-sixty people-journeyed with him from his old church in Anahuac to Nuevo Laredo to say farewell through tears. The priest knocked on every door in the neighborhood. "Good afternoon, my name is Leonardo. I'm the new priest. I'm here to serve you," he said. In a country where the church is conservative, Padre Leo announced in a newspaper article shortly after arriving, "Jesus wasn't killed for doing miracles. It was because he defended the poor and opposed the rulers and the injustice committed by the powerful."

Padre Leo gave up the two-bedroom priest's apartment attached to the church so that female migrants would have a place to sleep. He settled into a tiny room off the pantry, into which a narrow bed and chest of drawers just fit. His bathroom: the church's public restroom.

To help the migrants look more presentable, he brings a haircutter to the church. A doctor treats their illnesses for free. If they need blood, Padre Leo is the first to donate.

To clothe the migrants, he circ.u.mvents Mexican Customs, which inspects cars and confiscates used clothing coming into the country, in what Padre Leo believes is an attempt to protect Mexican clothing manufacturers. People crossing the border checkpoint on foot or on a bike are less likely to be inspected. Twice a week at dusk, Padre Leo grabs a large black duffel bag and pedals his bike over a bridge that spans the Rio Grande into Laredo, Texas. There, he buys used clothes for 20 cents a pound. With one strap hooked around each arm, he carries the bag stuffed with clothes across his back and balances another bag across the handlebars. In the gathering dark, he pedals back.

If the church stash is low or lacks a needed size, he gives away the few shoes and clothes he owns. Sometimes he slips the shoes off his feet and hands them to a migrant. "Padre, I don't have a shirt," a migrant says. The priest runs to his closet and pulls one out. These clothes are usually the shirts, pants, shoes, and jackets the members of the church's eight study groups have given the priest for his birthday, to tide him over for the year. "You give it to him, he admires it, then he gives it away," says Pedro Leyva.

To feed migrants, often more than a hundred each night, he collects food three days a week from stores in Nuevo Laredo. On Mondays and Wednesdays, he drives the church van to Laredo. At a Catholic orphanage, he hauls out leftover boxes of honeydew melon, oranges, and bread. Then he goes to a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Rosalinda Zapata's husband works at the H.E.B. supermarket. Her hallway is lined with boxes of recently expired crackers, salsa, and potato chips. Padre Leo heads back to Mexico with the food.