Shelter co-founder comforts migrants even as she deals with personal loss

San Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales adjusts to changing immigration landscape at Sonora-Arizona border

NOGALES, Mexico (Border Report) – Child in tow, the woman enters a building atop a hill while her husband unloads a large bag and two backpacks from a taxicab.

“Do you have food? We haven’t eaten all day,” the woman asks the caretaker.

The family from Peru has just arrived in Nogales from southern Mexico. Tired, scared and confused, they’re looking for a place to spend the night in safety while pondering their next move.

“It was horrible. We were robbed. We didn’t have a place to sleep,” says the woman, Mayra, while her child rubs his tummy and recalls sleeping on the cold floor of a church the previous night.

A while later, a middle-aged man walks through the door telling whoever will listen about his experience in a U.S. immigration detention facility.

“The Americans treated us like dogs,” the Mexican national from Chiapas says. “They detained my friend, who’s 17, for two days without any food. Then they dumped us here in Nogales.”

“Chuy” says his friend’s mom is coming from Chiapas to retrieve her son from a juvenile facility in Nogales. But while his travel companion will be going home, Chuy plans to rush the U.S. border one more time.

“I’m not going back. I don’t want to go back empty-handed,” he says in a firm voice.

Theirs were some of the stories shared by travelers from all over the Americas on a chilly mid-February night inside the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, the Mexican border city across from Nogales, Arizona.

The cozy refuge, started by an orthopedic-shoe salesman and his wife, turned 40 this year. Co-founder Gilda Esquer de Loureiro estimates 1.25 million migrants – from fresh-eyed young families headed north in search of the American dream, to tired, downcast deportees – have found a respite in the building during that time.

“We decided to help because too many people were staying at the town square, on railroad tracks in the cold without anyone looking after them,” Mrs. Loureiro said. “They didn’t have a place to stay when they got here.”

The couple initially invited a mother and her two young children to their home. But “they told us many more people were staying near the rail station. It was so many people they wouldn’t fit in our home.”

The merchant couple looked around and secured an abandoned building. “It had no door, no windows, but it provided a roof over their heads,” Mrs. Loureiro said. “We asked our friends for blankets and sandwiches to feed the people. That is how we started, and we have never closed our doors, not even during the (COVID-19) pandemic.”

The couple continued operating the shoe business and taking turns running the shelter. For the first three decades, the guests were mostly Mexican adult males. But the demographics of northbound migration have radically changed in the past few years.

San Juan Bosco today houses migrants from Haiti, Central America, Brazil, and, on occasion, people from as far away as Africa. Families are now the norm more than single adults. Guests spend most of the time in a chapel with a large portrait of the 19th-century Italian saint known for educating the poor. They eat in a dining room with a large “Welcome” sign on the wall and they sleep in dormitories for men, women and families.

The shelter founders have dealt with plenty of crying, heartbreak and desperation over the years. All they could do is provide temporary comfort and hope to the migrants.

“Some come to terms with how hard it is to cross the border. Others come here very sad because they borrowed money to come to the border or owe the coyote (smuggler). They sold what little they had. Those are the ones more likely to try again because they have nothing left,” Mrs. Loureiro said.

She says it’s smugglers who bring many of the migrants to Nogales. Her guests tell her as much but don’t like to divulge details about their handlers out of fear harm will come to them on the border or to their families in Central and South America. “They just tell us, ‘Somebody is going to get us across,’ and they leave.”

Grieving a ‘profound’ loss

Her husband, Juan Francisco, passed away more than a year ago, but Mrs. Loureiro and her son Juan Francisco Jr. carry on with the work.

“My greatest satisfaction is to have helped so many people who did not have a place to stay,” she said. “We had our business, and we had the shelter. We took turns being at the shelter, then our son started helping us and now our two granddaughters, who are doctors, volunteer here. The whole family has become involved.”

Mrs. Loureiro said the shelter provides comfort for her, too, as she continues to grieve the loss of her husband.

“Here we were happy, we were sad. We laughed, we cried. […] the death of my husband has been very painful. It’s an emptiness that does not go away,” she said.