Currents News Staff
A whole new chapter is unfolding for families waiting at the McCallan bus station in Texas.
Freddy Antonio Bonillo crossed the Rio Grande days ago, with his 5-year-old daughter and wife who is pregnant.
“We’re going to start from zero, he says, without any possessions,” he said through a translator.
Bonillo says he fled violence and poverty in his native Honduras.
And the groups he followed to get here, he says, are growing in size.
Bus after bus of immigrant families were dropped off by the government at a former nursing home run by Catholic Charities and Sister Norma Pimentel.
“We are doing our best to make sure that the families are not out in the rain and in the streets,” said Pimentel.
Many of these families will need to spend several days here before they can catch a bus to a city where their relatives live.
“Mostly because of the fact that they were over capacity at the processing facility and they needed to release more people so that way they could bring it down and be able to process the newly-apprehended people that were arriving,” she added.
Now the center is scrambling for volunteers and for food.
Bonillo says he could tell the United States government was stretched to its limits the day he crossed the border and entered the Border Patrol detention center.