President Donald Trump has been relentlessly attacked by pro-illegal alien activists for highlighting the rape epidemic against women trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
While the case of the two illegal aliens charged in the rape of of a 14-year-old student in a Maryland high school bathroom has garnered national attention, a report filed from Sonora, Mexico by Alice Whitwham published last Friday by the Guardian describes the horror of rape of women trying to illegally enter the United States as being so prevalent a Catholic priest is violating church doctrine to arrange for birth control so the women do not get pregnant from being raped.
Graphic via Fusion.
Father Prisciliano Pereza, screen image via YouTube.
The priest helping women get birth control at US border: ‘Lesser of two evils’
“Unfortunately, the woman who is going to migrate, she knows that she will be violated,” Father Prisciliano Pereza told me. We were standing in a sun-beaten central plaza outside Our Lady of Guadalupe church, in Altar, a languid town in Sonora, Mexico.
Wearing a corduroy jacket, a cowboy hat and a broad smile, Father Prisciliano – or “Prisci”, as he is locally known – is uncharacteristic of Mexican Catholic priests. He adapts Catholic teaching to minister to migrating women during their perilous journeys across the Sonoran desert into the US. Especially shocking to some, he helps them to acquire preventive birth control, because of the risk of sexual assault.
“There are groups that are networks,” he told me, when I asked him who he thought was responsible for the sexual violence. “It’s not just one guide, there are several … From their place of origin until their destination, there are going to be five to eight people guiding the migrants. It makes women more vulnerable.”
He was referring to the guías – local people who are familiar with the routes in different towns and cities – who accompany women on their journeys north. They are organized by coyotes, businessmen who determine the cost of making these connections. The tensions Prisci navigates are political as well as spiritual; he serves the guías who grew up in his church, as well as the women who fear them.
Prisci’s understanding of the women’s fears developed over years. For a long time, at the shelter he runs on the outskirts of Altar, he’d been administering hygiene packs containing Band-Aids, clippers to pull out cactus spines, and chlorine to purify water. But he recalls that in 2006, as narco-cartel groups seized areas close to the Mexican border and co-opted guías into kidnapping and extorting migrants, violence and sexual assault towards women escalated. Fearing violation from guías, cartel members, other migrants and sometimes even border patrol agents, they came to Prisci.
“They told me, ‘Father, you don’t have contraceptives?’” he said.
Though contraception is a venial sin in Catholic orthodoxy, Prisci began giving women his blessing to take birth control and contraceptive injections. He also developed a relationship with the Santa María pharmacy, an unmissable bright orange building down the road from his church, where he has since directed hundreds of women.
“It is the lesser of two evils,” Prisci said, as we walked across the square. “Since she cannot prevent violation, she protects herself so that she won’t get pregnant.” The priest adjusted his cowboy hat. “Life is above everything. Life comes first.”
A 2013 video of of Father Prisciliano Pereza talking about his work on the border.
A 2014 report by Fusion estimated 80 percent of females attempting to cross the border from Mexico are raped. report states women forced to trade sex for passage have a phrase, ‘using the body like an ATM.’
“Before they can reach the American Dream, many migrant women have to survive a Mexican nightmare. A staggering 80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way, according to directors of migrant shelters interviewed by Fusion.”
When will supporters of mass illegal immigration be held accountable for the sexual holocaust against migrant women and when will we as a nation out a halt to it? President Trump has stood against it, will the Congress join him?
