A young Jesuit priest arrived in Texas hoping to cultivate hospitality toward migrants. During the past four years, he’s watched that possibility slip away.
Father Brian Strassburger, at his home, in Brownsville, Texas.Photographs by Joseph Rushmore for The New Yorker
On the day President Joe Biden flew into Brownsville, Texas, to deliver a speech at a border-patrol station, Father Brian Strassburger woke up in his twin bed in the city, got into a minivan, and left. It was a gray, windy morning, and stray dogs wandered through the streets. On the priest’s phone were texts from friends asking him if he would try to see Biden. Strassburger told them that he had decided not to. “I didn’t want to change my day around,” he said. Instead, he would keep his Thursday ritual: drive an hour west to a migrant shelter in the city of Reynosa, in northern Mexico, distribute aid, perform a Catholic Mass, and then cross back into the U.S. and give a second Mass at a shelter in Texas. Strassburger is forty, and Brownsville is his first assignment in the priesthood. A structured week has been useful to him, in the same way that his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience have been useful to him. Every day, he wakes up and knows exactly what he’s supposed to do.
The other passenger in the minivan was Father Flavio Bravo, a Nicaraguan immigrant who, like Strassburger, is a Jesuit. At the wheel was Joseph Nolla, who was six years into his priestly training. (Studying to become a Jesuit priest—part of a process the Catholic order calls formation—can take up to twelve years.) Every Tuesday and Thursday, the three men wake up early in their shared home and drive to Reynosa. The smell hits them before they reach the border checkpoint. Reynosa is a factory town, and a mix of industrial fumes from the sprawling maquiladoras and soot from burning trash scents the air and blankets buildings in smoke. It is also one of the most dangerous cities along the Mexican border, and for years, drug cartels have battled for control. The State Department has a Category 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for the state of Tamaulipas, where Reynosa is located, putting it at the same level as Afghanistan and Ukraine, and that has dissuaded many N.G.O.s from sending aid workers to the city, even as migrants have arrived in the tens of thousands in recent years. Strassburger said that he’s felt uncertain in Reynosa, but he has never let himself feel afraid. “We go where migrants go,” he told me.
Nolla navigated the minivan to the dirt streets of a neighborhood called Aquiles Serdán, near the banks of the Rio Grande, which has made it notorious for drug smuggling. Outside the high metal gate of a building with “Casa del Migrante” written on its side, he honked the car’s horn. As the gate opened and the men drove in, children, recognizing the minivan, ran up, screaming and laughing, and they jumped onto Strassburger as soon as he opened the door. Inside the shelter, Strassburger greeted the residents. “Bonjou, buenos días,” he said, walking among them and switching between Haitian Creole and Spanish. He’s tall and white, with a bushy brown beard and a muscular build; he’d look much more at home in a Denver brewery than a Mexican migrant shelter. But, during the months that many people spend at the shelter, Strassburger becomes a familiar figure. He asked residents questions—“Did your kid sleep O.K. last night?” “Have you heard from your cousin in North Carolina?”—as he helped a group of them transform the crowded shelter into a makeshift church. Folding chairs were arranged into pews, and a heavy wooden lectern was lifted to the front of the room.
As residents filled the seats, Strassburger pulled on a simple white alb and a purple stole and began the Mass. The Bible reading that day, the third Thursday of Lent, was one of Jesus’ better-known parables, a harsh morality tale. In the story, a sickly beggar named Lazarus lies outside the gates of a rich man’s house; the rich man ignores him, spending his money on finery instead. Later, after the two men have died, the rich man looks up from Hell and, across a great gulf, sees Lazarus in Heaven, in a place of honor next to the great patriarch Abraham. Abraham states the reason for the rich man’s fate: in life, he failed the man in need outside his gates. The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazurus to his family’s house to warn his five brothers to live differently, “lest they, too, come to this place of torment.” Abraham responds without pity: “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.”
Strassburger started his sermon by asking the migrants if they knew that, some fifty miles away, the President of the United States was arriving at the border. There was an excited commotion and a chorus of nos—no one had heard the news. Strassburger then asked them if they knew that, that same day, Donald Trump was touring the border farther west, in Eagle Pass. Another round of nos. “Here’s the thing,” Strassburger told them. “They’re not going to meet with any of you—they’re not going to meet with any migrants.” As a murmur of disappointment filled the room, he explained that, as people, we are not good at noticing one another. “But God sees you,” he said. “Even though the most powerful politicians of the world might pay no attention to you, our all-powerful God cares. He calls you by your name.”
By evening, the wind had picked up, whipping against the cracked windshield of the minivan as Nolla drove the priests back to Brownsville. From his phone, Strassburger read a transcript of the speech that Biden had given, flanked by local politicians and green-clad Border Patrol agents. Biden made a dare to Trump. “Join me,” the President said. Together, they could pass the “toughest, most efficient, most effective border-security bill this country has ever seen.” To Strassburger, the speech was a capstone of his time on the border. He first came to Brownsville in 2021, just a few months after Biden began his Presidency. In those days, Strassburger was hopeful that the new President might establish a more welcoming policy toward migrants. During his campaign, Biden, a devout Catholic who is known to carry a rosary in his pocket, spoke of healing the “soul” of the country, and called for an immigration system that “reflects our values.” In the Trump years, Strassburger was among the many Americans who had heard a recording of children in detention crying after having been torn away from their parents; who had seen the photo of Óscar Martínez Ramírez and his daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande. The outrage registered in polls, which found that sympathy for migrants was the highest it’s ever been.
Biden took office as perhaps the first President with a mandate to welcome immigrants, and he acted quickly to reverse many of the policies of the Trump Administration—halting work on the border wall, ending travel bans, and rescinding a national emergency that Trump had declared at the southern border. But, since then, the sympathy toward migrants that had grown under Trump has drifted away like the smoke over Reynosa. By 2022, a poll had found that more than half of Americans believe that there is an “invasion” on the southern border.
Strassburger is not naïve; he recognizes that what Catholics call “welcoming the stranger” does not come naturally to most of us. It’s a distressing thought: that we may have moral responsibilities to the homeless person on our stoop, or to the migrant sitting on the other side of the border. Strassburger understands the arc of his own life, and his long years of priestly study, as the training he needed not just to see these obligations but to take them on readily, and happily. “There’s something about my experience, my makeup, that I can do it,” he told me. Along the border, shelters are losing workers to exhaustion and burnout; asylum lawyers are choosing new careers. It is not so with Strassburger. “I feel on fire with my mission here,” he said.
Growing up in Denver in the nineties, Strassburger never planned to become a priest. He had the notion that he’d teach high-school math, which would let him pursue his true ambition: coaching basketball. He has two siblings, a brother and a sister, and his brother recalled that, as a child, Strassburger loved God, but he also loved the Denver Nuggets. Though he looked forward to church every Sunday, Strassburger had the impression that men who were destined to be Catholic priests received a clear sign. “I always thought the priesthood was this giant cross, and, if you’re called to carry it, you carry it,” he said. “I mean, you don’t have a family, you don’t have a spouse, you can’t have sex for the rest of your life—why would you possibly choose that unless you had to?”
Strassburger studied math at St. Louis University, where he was the president of his fraternity. After college, he joined the Augustinian Volunteers, which ran a service program in South Africa in which men and women lived in a faith-based community while working to serve locals. At that time, “missionary work” and “colonialism” were still separate concepts in Strassburger’s mind. “I went there with this naïve sense of purpose—I’m going to be part of changing people’s lives,” he said. Since then, he has learned more about the Church’s history in the Americas—the hundreds of Indigenous children who died in Catholic residential schools, the tens of thousands of Africans who were enslaved by Jesuit missionaries. He thinks reconciling that “terrible scar” should include not just apologies but reparations. Still, he also believes that modern missionary work, if done conscientiously, can be salvaged from this history.
In South Africa, Strassburger worked in a hospice clinic for AIDS patients. One day, a patient had a miraculous recovery, regaining her strength to the point that her doctors decided she could go home, and they asked Strassburger to drive her. Upon dropping her off, Strassburger watched her family celebrating in disbelief. “There was a sense of resurrection,” he said. Before going back to the hospice, he went to pick up a man whom he had heard needed treatment. He found him nearly dead, lying sweaty and agonized in his bed, covered in his own feces. Strassburger struggled with the number of deaths he witnessed, and, finally, he asked a priest for his counsel. The Augustinian sat down and looked at him. “Why have you sought out spiritual direction?” he asked. Strassburger didn’t expect the answer he gave him: “I’m thinking about being a priest.”
Afterward, Strassburger felt confused. “I was, like, Why did I just say that?” he recalled. But something had begun to crystallize for him. “Those were the hardest days of my life, but they were also the time when it was easiest to wake up in the morning,” he said. Strassburger was single at the time, and, in a way, he was already living a priestly life: service, communion, purpose. “I began to think, What if the priesthood is something you do because it helps you be your best self?” he said.
In 2011, Strassburger entered the Jesuit novitiate in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. His priestly education continued with graduate-level study in philosophy, theology, and international development at Fordham. Then the order told him it wanted to send him to Nicaragua for three years of on-the-job training, or regency. “I never, ever would have chosen to go,” Strassburger said. He didn’t speak Spanish, and, because he was in his thirties, he assumed that it was too late for him to learn. His fears were seemingly confirmed when he landed in Managua; he was quickly more isolated than he had ever been. During that first year, he looked forward to days on a lagoon outside the capital, where the Jesuits owned a small shack for reflection and prayer.
After two long years, Stassburger got more comfortable with the language, but he didn’t see much use in it—his dream then was to return to South Africa after taking his final vows.That didn’t change until he got back to the States. Soon after he returned, Strassburger flew to Nogales, Arizona, where he crossed the border to visit a Catholic soup kitchen. Joking with Mexican nuns, and then translating for American volunteers, he had the realization—he laughs at how shocked he was—that knowing Spanish made him useful.
Strassburger fell in love with the borderlands, with its slew of cultures and agile Spanglish. But what he saw in the soup kitchen disturbed him. This was 2018, the height of family separation and ICE raids. Strassburger met dozens of migrants who had been deported. One, a middle-aged woman, sat in a corner, staring blankly at a wall. Strassburger learned that she had moved to the U.S. in the nineties, bought a house, and raised children. Then the police came to her home, responding to a domestic dispute. Three days later, she was deported. “I had the sense that something is deeply wrong here—something is broken,” Strassburger said. Hiking into the Sonoran Desert with aid workers and volunteers, he saw migrants’ abandoned belongings lying alongside the saguaro and brittlebush, baked rigid in the sun.
Strassburger left Arizona to continue his formation at Boston College, where he focussed his studies on migration and the border. He was reading the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that some virtues like charity are not natural to the human spirit and that we cannot achieve goodness through raw will power. The solution was to cultivate a practice of goodness—to work to become a bit more honest, a bit more charitable—until the righteous act comes naturally. In its simplest interpretation, Aquinas’s philosophy holds that one can cultivate a practice of virtue in the same manner one can learn to run a marathon—or, say, speak Spanish. One simply practices until the act not only stops being onerous but becomes easy, even joyful. Reading this theology alongside the history of Nicaraguan migration and the latest news on the Trump Administration, Strassburger came to a conclusion: “Hospitality is a habit.”
Now when Strassburger goes to confession, he thinks, What were the moments when I failed to bother? Who are the people whom I ignored, or didn’t offer help to? That phrase—failure to bother—is from James F. Keenan, a theologian at Boston College. In a moral-philosophy seminar that Strassburger had taken, Keenan noted that, in the Bible, Jesus rarely criticizes people who have done bad things; he refuses to condemn adulterers and shares meals with avaricious tax collectors. But he is scathing toward those who decide not to do good: the priest and Levite who walk past the injured man on the side of the road in the story of the Good Samaritan, or the rich man who steps over Lazarus as he leaves his house. For Keenan, this “failure to bother to love” is the very definition of sin. The concept moved Strassburger, and troubled him. If sin is a failure to bother to love, what were the boundaries of his obligation? “In some ways, you know, we have to draw limits and parameters,” Strassburger said. In Boston, he was thousands of miles from migrants on the border, but he wondered if, for each moment that he failed to help them, he was surrendering to sin.
He would soon lose the insulation of geography. In the fall of 2020, Strassburger received a call from his provincial, who said that he wanted to send him on a mission to South Texas, along the last great sweep of the Rio Grande. The newly ordained Father Brian Strassburger and two other clergymen would become the first American Jesuit priests based in Brownsville.
One could speculate that the Jesuits’ choice to send Strassburger to the border reflected a belief that Trump would be reëlected. Under the Trump Administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, tens of thousands of asylum seekers had been forced to remain in Mexico as their cases wound slowly through the court system. In cities such as Matamoros, down the river from Reynosa, enormous camps had sprung up, filled with those waiting to cross. During the winter, floodwaters would wash the tarps into the Rio Grande, and, in the hundred-degree heat of summer, tents became greenhouses.
Part of the idea for the Brownsville mission was for Strassburger to minister to the people in those camps. But, when the young priest arrived on the border, there was a new President, who, hours after his Inauguration, suspended the M.P.P. The program was officially ended that June. In McAllen, the Humanitarian Respite Center, one of the largest shelters in South Texas, was overwhelmed by migrants during the wind-down of the camps, and when Strassburger arrived with the newly ordained Jesuit Father Louis Hotop, it was still busy. Strassburger and Hotop quickly learned that they could be most helpful to shelter staff by making sandwiches. “We were just making hundreds and hundreds of sandwiches,” Strassburger said, laughing. Peeling cheese slices while swatting at cockroaches wasn’t what he imagined his work on the border would be, but he was glad to feel useful.
One day in September, Strassburger and Hotop walked into the H.R.C. to find it nearly empty. In the same large room where, a week before, hundreds of families had slept on mats, there were just a handful of people. A staff member explained what had happened: after taking office, Biden had decided not to lift Title 42, the public-health statute that the Trump Administration had activated early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the statute, anyone who crossed the border without authorization could be subject to immediate expulsion. It was clear what was going on: Biden Administration officials were afraid that, if they reversed the order, countless people who had been waiting to seek asylum would rush the border. As the staff member explained to Strassburger and Hotop, there was a problem with that logic: the migrants had shown up anyway. In Reynosa, thousands had arrived, and, as the months had gone on, they had set up tents. The old camps, with all their destitution, were back.
That week, Strassburger and Hotop crossed into Reynosa for the first time to visit a large camp built in a plaza just across the border bridge. Tents and tarps pushed up against one another, covering every inch of the plaza. It was above ninety degrees, and the smell was atrocious; there was a single place for migrants to wash their hands and nowhere to shower. As they talked to migrants, the priests discovered that many of them had at some point crossed over to the U.S., only to be expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. (During Biden’s first year in office, there were more than a million expulsions without trial.) Others, fearing fast-track deportations, had decided to wait in the camp until Title 42 was lifted.
The priests’ first attempts to help these people were clumsy, and possibly did more harm than good. Each day, the two parked on the U.S. side and wheeled a beach wagon of supplies over a narrow pedestrian walkway. The reaction was pandemonium: people swarmed the wagon, trying to get soap, shampoo, toothpaste. “They were all in desperate need, and it always led to chaos and confrontation,” Hotop said. Eventually, a Mexican social worker approached the priests and tactfully asked if she could show them how the camp worked. Walking around the plaza, she introduced them to the leaders of the four kitchens that the migrants had established in the corners of the square, and, from those leaders, the priests learned how they could actually be helpful. After two months of more coördinated aid distribution, the priests asked one of the kitchen leaders if they could use her space to hold a Mass for the Catholics waiting in the plaza.
The next time the priests returned, they brought a Bible, a cloth, and a golden chalice for wine. They wore albs—the heat made wearing their full vestments an impossibility. During Easter in the Reynosa camp, in 2022, Strassburger felt as if he had been transported back to the days of the early Church. When he performed the tradition of washing parishioners’ feet, he got down on his knees and washed feet that genuinely needed to be cleaned. When he swung a censer full of incense, it actually perfumed the air, easing the smell of the portable toilets situated along the edge of the camp. In secular parts of the U.S., it can be easy to ignore how important church can be to some people. But, in Reynosa, there were migrants who saw the Eucharist—the consecrated bread and wine that the priests distribute at Mass—as a priority equal to any other food and drink. Strassburger thinks that, “without a doubt,” these Masses are the most important thing he does on the border. Other organizations distribute aid more industriously and successfully than the Jesuits. In Catholicism, Mass is something only the priests can offer. “That’s our value-added,” Strassburger said.
During that Easter Mass, Strassburger had more than one reason to rejoice: earlier that month, the Biden Administration announced it would soon lift Title 42. And, though he was upset that the order had remained in place for as long as it did, he had evidence that the Administration cared about the migrants in Reynosa. He had recently become involved with the Rio Grande Valley Welcoming Committee, an informal coalition of aid workers on the border. The group had regular calls with D.H.S., and the White House would sometimes reach out for input. On these calls, Strassburger didn’t hide his anger at the Administration over its border policies, but he felt compassion for the officials. “I think there are probably a lot of people in the Administration who don’t like the decisions they have to put in place,” he told me. As Strassburger gave out the eucharist that Easter, it seemed possible that, in a matter of weeks, the camp would finally be empty.
The next year, however, new camps had metastasized around Reynosa and into Matamoros. Republicans had sued to keep Title 42 in place, and the order remained in force as the case made its way through the court system. In the spring of 2023, Strassburger made several visits to a tent village that aid workers called the Río camp. Almost all of the residents were Haitian. (Facing racism in the shelters, many Black asylum seekers choose to live in their own communities.) I had also visited this camp. The conditions were the worst I’d ever seen. There was only one bathroom, and, along the steep banks leading down to the Rio Grande, there was a foul, dense field of feces, dotted with smoldering piles of burning trash. Acrid white smoke from these fires drifted over the edge of the river before blowing back into the camp.
There were migrants who were pregnant, who were sick, who had run out of their medications. “People were pressed in so hard,” Hotop recalled. Even with Title 42 in place, the number of people crossing the border had been rising; migrants were so desperate that they were willing to risk expulsion. Seeking to create some semblance of order, the Administration had expanded access to a smartphone app called CBP One, in January, which migrants could now use to sign up for official appointments at ports of entry to request exemptions to the statute. During their Easter Mass at another camp by the Rio Grande, Hotop called up migrants with appointments in the coming week, and invited congregants to raise their hands and bless them. “I go back to that image quite a bit,” Hotop said. “The raw humanity, and the incredible need.”
Father Strassburger leads morning Mass in a temporary chapel of the San Felipe de Jesus Catholic Church, in Brownsville, Texas.
In the summer of 2023, Strassburger had begun to notice a disturbing trend. Kidnappings had never been uncommon in Reynosa and Matamoros, but the number of reports had shot up. By the start of this year, the migrants whom Strassburger met at the camps frequently told him that they’d been held for ransom in buildings where gang members had tortured and sexually abused them while their families listened on speakerphone. Strassburger shared what he was hearing with the White House, but officials had other priorities. In December, 2023, as border crossings had reached an all-time high of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand migrants that month, Biden had abandoned one of the last pieces of his pro-immigration platform. That winter, the Administration signalled to Republicans that it was willing to revive some of the most stringent Trump-era restrictions, including new limits on asylum. When Republicans balked, the Administration prepared to issue an executive order that would do the same job.
Among the thousands of migrants still trying to reach the border was Jesús Manuel González, a Venezuelan who made the journey north in April with his wife and their two sons. In the Darién Gap, the roadless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama, they had walked for four days; by the time they reached the first roads in Panama, bandits, and the jungle itself, had claimed most of their belongings. They were on a bus to Matamoros when the driver pulled over. Two men who identified themselves as members of the Gulf Cartel climbed aboard. “We’re going to help you cross the border,” one of them said. They spoke in friendly tones, but González and the other migrants knew exactly what was going on. González and his younger son were taken to a building filled with kidnapped migrants. There, men called his family in Venezuela and beat González with a bat until his entire backside was one dark, bloody bruise. The torment lasted for three days, only ceasing after his brother sold his house to come up with the money the kidnappers were demanding. On Easter Saturday, González and his son were released, and they walked into the Casa del Migrante shelter. The next day, during Easter Mass, González’s wife and their oldest son walked through the doors of the shelter. They were reunited.
Two weeks later, Strassburger held a Mass at the shelter. González, wearing a blue polo shirt, rose, smiled politely at Strassburger, and took the microphone to give the Bible reading. With the deliberate pace of a student in class, González recounted that, after Jesus’ Resurrection, some of the apostles had been arrested for preaching in the temple, spreading the news that Jesus had risen. When an angel opened the prison doors to free them, the apostles, instead of fleeing, returned to the temple and continued to preach. After González sat down, Strassburger, giving his sermon, asked, “Were the apostles crazy or what?” This drew some courteous chuckles. Strassburger said that the apostles had returned to the temple because they were testigos—witnesses. They had seen Christ come back from the dead. Strassburger told the gathered residents that, in their own lives, they could be testigos. They may not have seen miracles. “But, in your long road here, I know there were people who helped you—there was someone who extended their hand,” Strassburger said. “You can be witnesses of that.”
When I asked González about that idea a few months later, he said that, on his hardest days, the person who had reached out to him had been Father Bravo. As González had recovered from his torture, Bravo had comforted him, and the men prayed together. “It was when I finally began to feel I could be O.K.,” González said. Once the family had reunited, Bravo told them that he could help them cross the border, even though they’d missed a CBP One appointment because of the kidnapping. In late April, Bravo walked with the family across a pedestrian bridge into the U.S., where the priests explained to Border Patrol what had happened; González showed agents the paperwork for the appointment. The agents let the family in.
Strassburger says that almost never happens anymore. In June, Biden announced his long-awaited executive order, built around an asylum ban on anyone crossing between ports. That same day, a small group of migrants tried to cross. Some were kidnapping victims who had missed their appointments; others were in the final weeks of pregnancies. For more than a year, the Jesuits had worked with Border Patrol to help particularly vulnerable migrants like them cross. That day, however, the agents shook their heads: no one was to cross without an official appointment, on orders from Washington.
As the country turns against migrants, Strassburger’s work has become more fraught. His brother told me that he’s had tense conversations with family and friends who are upset that Strassburger is helping migrants enter the country. Strassburger has heard some of the same things firsthand. In the spring, he spoke to a church congregation in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, over Zoom, about his ministry. After Strassburger gave a short speech, the moderator asked if anyone had any questions. A man in the back raised his hand and, in an elaborate philippic, accused migrants of bringing fentanyl, sex slaves, terrorists, and trafficked children across the border. Strassburger focussed on one of the man’s central points: the notion that too many people are crossing. Even if two million people had entered the country last year—a high estimate, he noted, given how many people had been turned away—that’s less than 0.6 per cent of the U.S. population. “Imagine if you have a school of a thousand people and six new kids enroll—is that a disaster?” Strassburger asked. Most of the other students wouldn’t notice. For those who did, our psychology has a reliable mechanism: the more time we spend with someone, the more comfortable we tend to feel. Strassburger concluded by making the same invitation that Jesus made to John, Peter, Simon, and Andrew, his first disciples: “Come and see.” ♦