How Volunteers, Church Groups and NGOs Aid Migrants at the Mexican Border

If you're looking for an emergency on the Mexico border, ask Teresa Cavendish.

Every morning in Tucson, the director of operations for Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona gets a call from workers at the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. They ask her how many beds she has or, more often, just tell her how many migrant adults and children they will be driving over later that day.

Cavendish isn't alone. In late March, during her term as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen sent an SOS to DHS agency chiefs asking employees to volunteer at the border to assist with transportation, food distribution, medical assessments and a duty called hospital watch.

"Prior immigration experience is not required," she wrote.

To fill the void on the ground in Tucson and elsewhere on the border, private citizens work for free or are sometimes paid by nongovernmental organizations, like the Red Cross, usually funded by philanthropy. They have, in other words, assumed the job