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In March, Victorino Narcizo developed a hacking cough. He and his brother-in-law Fidel, undocumented immigrants who had lived together for a decade, disagreed about what to do. Narcizo’s boss had threatened to fire him if he missed a shift. His mother, in Mexico, depended on the money he sent home, so he resolved to keep working. Twenty-five, and otherwise in good health, he doubted whether his symptoms were serious. Fidel, however, argued, “Stay home and get better. There’s work everywhere. This is New York.” Narcizo and Fidel moved around the city as a duo, more like best friends than like extended family, and they shared a studio apartment in Harlem with two roommates who worked in restaurant kitchens, as they did.
A few days later, Narcizo woke up gasping for air, and he and Fidel rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside, on Amsterdam Avenue. The waiting room was crowded, and a nurse in a mask and scrubs intercepted them. “Why did you bring him here?” he asked Fidel. “You’re going to get other people sick.” Fidel tried to respond, but his English faltered; they left in a daze, with Narcizo leaning on his brother-in-law. Eventually, a bilingual friend of theirs accompanied them to Bellevue, where Narcizo was admitted. Fidel never saw him again; on April 1st, Narcizo died, one of twenty-one thousand New Yorkers to succumb to COVID-19 this spring.
The following weeks were a confusion of mourning and logistics. Fidel broke the news to Narcizo’s family, who live in the Mexican state of Guerrero, and tried to raise money among friends on Facebook for a cremation. But, as businesses shut down in response to the pandemic, some of the friends were losing their jobs, and they couldn’t spare the cash. Fidel continued to go to work, at a sushi restaurant in downtown Manhattan, while trying to find someone to move into the studio apartment, to make up the rent. A question consumed him that he didn’t have the time or the energy to answer: If he’d also been exposed to the virus, why was he spared? Two weeks later, the hospital called to warn Fidel that city officials would bury Narcizo in an unmarked grave if he didn’t make other arrangements. When Fidel began calling Narcizo’s relatives in New York to ask for advice, an uncle who’d just been laid off as a sandwichero at a Bronx deli gave him the name of someone who could help: Juan Carlos Ruiz, a fifty-year-old Mexican pastor who leads a congregation in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Among undocumented immigrants in New York City, Ruiz has a reputation as a dedicated and implacable fighter for their community. Everyone seems to know him, or to know someone who does, and it isn’t hard to see why. On a recent day, he delivered meals to three apartments, received a truck full of donated food from a Bronx grocer, spoke at a street demonstration in solidarity with the city’s essential workers, and visited a local hospital to identify an immigrant’s remains. Other pastors have simply given him the keys to their churches. Lately, with grim frequency, he has been arranging for discounted burials at a funeral home in Park Slope run by an old friend. Ruiz has relatives in Puebla and Guerrero, and because of these ties officials and human-rights advocates there give out his phone number, too.
During their phone call, Ruiz told Fidel, “Yo me encargo de todo”—“I’ll take care of everything.”
On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. A cousin and two friends joined him, all dressed in black hoodies and wearing surgical masks, sitting silently around a folding table inside the empty church. They’d taken the subway an hour and a half, from upper Manhattan and the Bronx, to attend a funeral service that Ruiz had arranged, free of charge.
Ruiz entered a few minutes later, in a white robe, trailed by his dog, a yapping Havanese in a sweater. Ruiz is short and trim, with a chinstrap beard and square-framed glasses, and he has an air of constant activity. He greeted Fidel with an elbow bump, and guided the men to the pews, instructing each one to sit in his own row. Ruiz’s wife, Cinthya Briones, an anthropologist and a photographer, entered with a camera, and a friend of theirs, a Oaxacan named Próspero, who’s been volunteering at the church for the past year, set up a video recorder. “You want us to be able to film this, right?” Ruiz asked Fidel, who nodded. He planned to send footage of the ceremony to Narcizo’s family. There was a simple program for the occasion, with a black-and-white photograph of Narcizo, smiling, in a chef’s cap. An urn with his ashes rested on a small wood table.
Gesturing toward it, as the service began, Ruiz said, “Pain is a great abyss that invites us to perform an act of faith.” He listed the hardships that the men there had endured: the death of Narcizo, their darkening work prospects, homesickness, fears of contracting the coronavirus, and traumatic memories of crossing the border. The pews creaked as the men nodded. “God is out there,” Ruiz said. “But there are flames everywhere around us, and the smoke makes it so hard to see.”
Throughout the spring and early summer, Ruiz’s cell phone rang incessantly. People were losing work, going hungry, falling ill, dying. “It was like a war had started,” he told me. A man called Ruiz late one night, after a fistfight with his landlord over rent he couldn’t pay because he’d lost his job. Ruiz heard from an undocumented immigrant who’d been living for several days with the corpse of his brother in their shared apartment; he was afraid to call city authorities but unable to pay a funeral home to retrieve the body. Officials from Guerrero were regularly seeking advice on how to repatriate the remains of locals who had died in New York.
The pandemic has ravaged immigrant and minority communities, killing Blacks and Latinos at much higher rates than the rest of the public; the subsequent recession, in which New York City has lost more than a million jobs, has left them disproportionately out of work. The undocumented don’t qualify for unemployment benefits or severance, and they are excluded from federal aid programs designed to ease the financial blow of the coronavirus. According to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, three hundred and sixty-six thousand workers and forty-seven thousand business owners are undocumented. Although Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo routinely boast of their progressive accomplishments, neither has financed a relief fund for the undocumented, unlike municipal and state governments in California, Oregon, Washington, and Connecticut.
In April, the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic organization founded by the liberal financier George Soros, donated twenty million dollars to the city to aid immigrants. “It was a humanitarian intervention,” Gregory Maniatis, the director of the organization’s International Migration Initiative, told me. “But we’re going to meet only a tiny sliver of the need in the community.” The plan was to jump-start donations from other philanthropists, since the Mayor’s advisers, pointing to a budget shortfall, considered it impossible to spend public money on direct cash assistance to undocumented New Yorkers. So far, though, no other donors have contributed to the fund, and the Governor has kept his distance. “Cuomo’s not going to win or lose an election because of this issue,” a city official told me.
For Ruiz, the state’s failure to help hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need is the latest reminder that the city’s most vulnerable immigrants have always been on their own. Since the nineteen-eighties, he told me, Central Americans have been squeezed in the tightening vise of American immigration policy and its daily effects: poorly paid jobs, increasing cost of living, ever-expanding immigration-enforcement operations. Now, Ruiz said, immigrants were questioning whether the benefits of coming to the U.S. exceeded the costs. He said, “I think we’re reaching the stage when things are getting so bad that people who have sacrificed everything to come here and work in New York City are doubting what the whole point is.”
Ruiz came to the United States in 1986, with his own hesitations. He was sixteen, and studying to be a Roman Catholic priest at a seminary in San Luis Potosí, a state in central Mexico, where he was born and raised. His parents and five siblings had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, more than a year before, but he hadn’t wanted to join them. “We Mexicans have an ambivalent sense of el norte,” he told me. (He likes to cite a popular saying: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”) He finally visited his family on a tourist visa, planning to return home to continue his studies, but leaving them a second time proved too difficult.
After his visa expired, he fell into a legal limbo that lasted eight years. During that time, he attended high school, college, and seminary, but he didn’t get a Social Security number until he was twenty-four. His family, who had entered the country legally, lost their status after failing to renew their visas. “My parents were in the shadows for the first eighteen years of their lives in the States,” he told me. “There is another world here, the underground life, the clandestine life.” Seeing the need for bilingual ministers to support this population was an epiphany for Ruiz, and one of the reasons he decided to stay in the U.S. He and his family eventually obtained green cards, but he never fully shed the feeling of being undocumented. “You’re out of the formalized, official way of doing things,” he said. “You disregard the law. You’re not breaking it—you’re not trying to. But it’s the sense that you’re doing something unlawful all the time, and that begins to seep into everyday life.”
In 1993, he was a young seminarian living on the North Side of Chicago when he befriended the poet and Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and Berrigan’s brother, Philip, both of whom had served prison time for their activism against the Vietnam War. They were involved in the Catholic Worker Movement, and were fiercely opposed to American militarism and capitalist excess. “They put their bodies on the line, and my spirit was awakened,” Ruiz told me. In Latin America, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, a religious movement known as liberation theology brought Catholic priests into the fight against authoritarian élites for economic equality and human rights. Ruiz, who had studied with one of the movement’s founders while living in the U.S., found its expression in the decaying mill towns of Indiana, where he preached in Spanish on weekends. “In towns across the country, you had an invisible class of people, working in the restaurants, cleaning houses,” he said. “Are we a church if we’re excluding these people?”
A few years later, after returning to the Paterson diocese, Ruiz was posted to a series of small churches in rural New Jersey. Shuttling among towns like Parsippany, Sparta, and Morristown, he met hundreds of undocumented agricultural workers, who lived in squalid roadside motels and had no medical care or employment protections. Ruiz persuaded a local hospital to run a mobile clinic out of a donated Winnebago, and he organized a small group of pastors to form what he called the Migrant Ministry. “It was a floating parish,” he said. “One week we’d be in the Newton area, one week we’d do a Mass in Parsippany. It would move around like that, according to where the populations were.” If there was one thing the Catholic Church had in abundance, it was real estate: local congregations in majority-white towns lent their church spaces to Ruiz for his services. He said, “The way to engage the world is the social gospel that says God is found in the downtrodden, at the edges, beyond our limits. To really be a church, you have to be relevant to your community. Otherwise, we’re just a bunch of fanatics and fundamentalists.”
By the early two-thousands, Ruiz and the bishop overseeing the Paterson diocese were locked in a series of disputes over the need to respect Church hierarchy and follow formal practices—he felt that the bishop wanted him to restrict his pastoral work to his own parish and to soften his political stances. Mostly, though, the disagreements were personal, and the Church put Ruiz on leave. He moved to New York, where he spent two years living in the Chelsea Hotel, and started working with a Latino advocacy group called the Asociación Tepeyac, pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. In Washington, legislative talks were starting in a new atmosphere: the Department of Homeland Security came into existence in 2003 and was receiving unprecedented resources to carry out arrests and deportations in the name of national security. The traditional compromise that congressional leaders entertained—a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in exchange for tough enforcement measures—struck some immigrants’-rights advocates as a wager with an uncertain payoff.
Before long, Ruiz clashed with his boss. (This is a recurring theme in his professional life; he has rarely stayed at a job very long.) Ruiz argued that compromises and legislative dealmaking were undermining the whole point of immigration reform. In political terms, he was plainly wrong, given the composition of Congress and the cautious cast of the national debate; in moral terms, he felt that his case was unassailable. “I told them ‘amnesty’ would be the word we need to reclaim—full amnesty, in the religious sense of the word,” he recalled. This was a decades-old, bipartisan taboo in Washington. Legislators tended to tolerate compassion in immigration policy only if they could accent it with toughness; the result was a pattern in which enforcement was funded to set the stage for legalization measures, which never materialized. “The temptation is not between bad and good,” Ruiz said, paraphrasing a lesson he’d learned from the Berrigans. “The temptation is between good and better.”
In 2006, he launched a new project, with Donna Schaper, a pastor at Judson Memorial Church, on Washington Square, a longtime home of progressive activism in the city. Called the New Sanctuary Coalition, it was a revival of the activist movement from the nineteen-eighties that had sheltered Central American refugees fleeing U.S.-backed military regimes. The idea was to form a citywide coalition of clergy, lawyers, and activists to provide legal assistance to those in deportation proceedings, and to accompany immigrants when they had appointments in court or at Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters. “The absence of forgiveness is written into the heart of the immigration laws,” Schaper told me. The coalition’s work, she said, was to restore a sense of human dignity to the law, and to deal with the new reality of the Department of Homeland Security. As Ruiz put it, “How do we stand in the way of this machinery, to slow it down?”
Ruiz wasn’t one to delegate tasks, and he would stop to help someone he met on the street only to show up a few hours late to a scheduled meeting. His roving spiritual style chafed against the organizational needs of the New Sanctuary Coalition as it expanded in the Trump era. In 2018, the staff grew from four to thirteen people, and the coalition now has a million-dollar budget and five thousand trained volunteers. Ruiz admits that managing an organization of this size was less appealing than creating another one from scratch, starting each day with a renewed sense of fighting against the odds. “So few of us can do what he can do,” Schaper said. When I asked her what she meant, she mentioned his “Christlike-ness,” which seemed to be both a strength and a weakness.
By then, Schaper said, Ruiz was living out his true calling, as a “renegade priest.” He withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church, and converted to Lutheranism. When I first met him, in 2017, I wouldn’t have recognized him as a pastor if not for the setting: we were in the Holyrood Church, in Washington Heights, where he was helping a Guatemalan mother and her two small children as they sought sanctuary from immigration agents. Carrying a canvas tote bag, he wore jeans, motorcycle boots, and a long wool cardigan. And he moved with such relentless, almost boyish energy that it was hard to imagine him leading a life of contemplation. Yet I came to think that only a deeply spiritual person could work as fanatically as he does. “I could sell the Bible to the Devil,” he once told me. Briones, his wife, shares his interests in immigration and in activism but isn’t particularly religious. She is never without her camera or a notebook. In 2011, she came to New York for an ethnography she was writing about an indigenous family from the mountains of Veracruz who were migrating to Flushing, Queens. The family considered her one of their own, despite the fact that she was from Hidalgo, the state just north of Mexico City.
In 2018, Ruiz left the New Sanctuary Coalition to head the Church of the Good Shepherd, a Lutheran congregation of fewer than a hundred members. The church used to draw middle-class residents whose families had lived in Bay Ridge for generations. When Ruiz arrived, there was an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants, and many of the old parishioners left. Ruiz saw this as an inevitable transition. Bay Ridge was changing, and now the church was, too. Father Luis Barrios, the pastor of the Holyrood Church and an old friend of Ruiz’s, told me, “Most people, as they get older, grow more conservative. Juan Carlos just keeps getting more radical.”
After he started the job, Ruiz and a few of the church’s board members decided to host a weekly dinner for congregants to get to know their new pastor. They called it Breaking Bread with J. C., a conceit that Ruiz, a charmer well aware of his own magnetism, could carry off. “He is sacramental to his bones,” Schaper told me. “He thinks everything is holy. He does whatever is in the moment.”
On the morning of May 19th, about fifty people in masks gathered at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. An organizer from New York Communities for Change, a local activist group, used a bullhorn to instruct them to maintain social distance. Later that week, the state legislature would be considering a plan to cancel rent in New York, and activists across the city were staging simultaneous rallies in support of the proposal.
For Ruiz, the call for rent cancellation was a vindication of sorts: dramatic action to save the community was now widely seen as the only way forward. But, when it was Ruiz’s turn to address the crowd, he spoke in abstract terms, alternating between Spanish and English. “Why do we have so many poor among us? What is our responsibility? Why do we already victimize the most vulnerable?” he said. “We already have a virus in our society. Racism. Exclusion. The coronavirus didn’t cause this!”
On the outskirts of the crowd, a mother and her young daughter were bent over a piece of yellow poster board cut into the shape of a cross. The daughter was writing a name in black marker: Fernando Zempoalteca. When she finished, she carried the cross to one of the organizers, who hung it on a fence along the sidewalk. The mother, Verónica Díaz, a thirty-four-year-old with long hair and dark eyes, was crying softly. Zempoalteca, a twenty-two-year-old construction worker, who died from the coronavirus in April, was her nephew. He left behind his girlfriend and their two-year-old son. The girlfriend, who was in her early twenties, came to the U.S. when she was five, and she was five months pregnant with their second child when Zempoalteca died; they were due to marry in May. “He’s been dead more than a month, but my niece still talks aloud to him like he’s there in the apartment with her,” Díaz said.
Díaz had been keeping her two young daughters inside, but their neighbor offered to drive them to the rally in his car. For twelve hundred dollars a month, the family rents two rooms in a four-bedroom apartment, which they share with three other tenants. At the start of the pandemic, Díaz lost her job cleaning houses in Park Slope, and she hadn’t been able to pay rent in three months.
Despite her precautions, Díaz had come down with COVID-19 in late March. She had a high fever, and couldn’t breathe if she lay down, so she slept sitting in a crouch, wedged along the windowsill of her bedroom. As her condition deteriorated, her daughters pleaded with her to go to the hospital. When she finally agreed to go, she instructed her eldest, who’s fourteen, to move with her sister to their aunt’s apartment, in the Bronx, in the event that she didn’t return.
At the hospital, a nurse told her that she could be admitted and sent into quarantine or could take her chances at home. She opted for the latter, taking six to seven pills (Motrin, Tylenol, sometimes both) every four hours, for several days, to try to reduce her fever. “At a certain point, the bigger risk was poisoning myself from all the drugs,” she said. “But it worked.”
Díaz and her daughters are now living off church donations—a box of food is delivered every fifteen days by members of a local congregation. “We try to make it last,” she said. She used to send two hundred to three hundred dollars every eight days to her sisters and her mother, who was on dialysis, in Mexico. But her savings are gone, and in April she had to stop. A month and a half later, her mother died. “I crossed a desert to get here. I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever experienced,” Díaz told me. “But, no, this is the worst—being stuck.” She’s now lived in the U.S. for eighteen years, longer than she ever lived in Mexico, and her children, who were born here, are U.S. citizens. “They should have a chance,” she said. “But I can’t help them. This isn’t living. This is barely surviving.”
Each day around lunchtime, a line of women with carts and bags forms in front of Ruiz’s church and stretches down the Bay Ridge Parkway. Trucks pull up with food from grocery stores and restaurants whose owners know Ruiz, and a team of volunteers, many of them Mexican men newly out of work, dispense vegetables, grains, and canned goods in cardboard boxes. On the morning of June 1st, a thousand crates of fresh tomatoes were piled in the church’s banquet hall, and the volunteers were calling Ruiz, who was wearing Capri pants and flip-flops, the “tomato king of New York.”
Before the pandemic, immigrants across the city had created community associations for dealing with neighborhood emergencies. Most of the time, the situations involved roundups by ICE: mass text messages were sent, warning people to stay inside, and churches welcomed anyone who didn’t feel safe at home. When the pandemic hit, these groups shifted their focus. They raised money to send the remains of COVID victims to their families in Mexico, and delivered food to people who were stuck at home and beginning to starve.
Fabiola Mendieta, a thirty-eight-year-old community organizer from Mexico, who also works in the office of the New York City Public Advocate, met Ruiz five years ago, when her brother was deported. (“Go find Juan Carlos,” her sister told her while their brother was in detention.) In March, Mendieta formed a mutual-aid organization called the Brooklyn Immigrant Community Support Group, which within two months raised nearly nineteen thousand dollars and delivered food to more than four thousand people. Her phone number circulated among starving families who were searching social media for help. One call came from a thirty-five-year-old woman who lived with her infant and toddler in a rented room in Kensington, just south of Prospect Park. Mendieta found her emaciated, her hair falling out in clumps. “She was going hungry, and she was scared, but her neighbors didn’t know a thing,” Mendieta said.
By the spring, Ruiz’s church, where Mendieta is a parishioner, had become the group’s main base of operations. But Ruiz, who was spending hours of his time coördinating food orders and making home deliveries, was beginning to feel conflicted about the work. “We’re going to be living with this disaster for months and months,” he told me late one night, after making the day’s final delivery. “I want us to be doing more, something more lasting. We can’t just turn the church into a permanent food pantry.”
He found himself in a familiar position, trapped between performing triage and plotting more radical action. The pandemic exposed the limits of one and the impracticability of the other, so Ruiz attempted both: he hired three workers to perform tasks around the church, from carpentry to cooking lunches, and paid them in cash. But he also asked them to join a coöperative he was trying to form, which would be “fully documented,” he said—it would pay taxes and operate on a modest budget, while serving as a collective for laborers to pool their resources. “We could bring more people in for different jobs,” he said. “And the workers would be protected. They could get medical care, for instance.” One evening in early June, Ruiz and his wife met with two female congregants in a windowless office at the church. The women proposed a clothing drive: members of the community would donate old garments for the coöperative to repurpose into grocery bags and masks. They could sell them cheaply at church events and gatherings.
The coöperative was supposed to meet again the following night, but that day Mayor de Blasio imposed an eight-o’clock curfew. After George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, in late May, tens of thousands of protesters had flooded the streets of New York.
One afternoon shortly afterward, I was at the church with Gerardo and Joel, two genial men from Mexico in their late thirties, who had worked in construction before losing their jobs when the city shut down. They hung around the church all day, unloading delivery trucks and dispensing food. It was volunteer work, with perks that accommodated their pride. When Ruiz and the others broke for a brief lunch of pozole, made in the church’s basement kitchen, Gerardo and Joel received generous portions, and Ruiz casually insisted that they take home some groceries.
They were carrying boxes onto Fourth Avenue when about a hundred Black Lives Matter protesters passed by, heading to a rally down the block, surrounded by police vans and dozens of cops on foot. When the officers got close, the protesters chanted louder and raised signs. Gerardo and Joel quietly backed into the foyer of the church, waiting until the crowd passed before continuing their work.
The police aren’t supposed to make immigration arrests in New York, yet in cities with large numbers of protesters immigration agents have been dispatched for crowd control. “When you’re undocumented, you can’t take chances,” Luis Reyes, a forty-seven-year-old father of three, told me. He had stopped by the church that day to show Ruiz a receipt he’d received from a crematorium in New Jersey, where he’d taken the remains of his best friend, who died of COVID in April. Ruiz was helping Reyes with the arrangements, and every time Reyes received more paperwork he brought it to the church; it reassured him to confer with Ruiz.
Reyes works at a fish market in Manhattan. His workday ends at seven-thirty, a half hour before the curfew, and the commute to Sunset Park, where he lives, takes more than an hour by subway. The first two nights that week, he had decided to take a thirty-dollar cab ride home. As he sat in the back of the car, he realized that the situation was untenable: he made only two hundred dollars a week. Friends in similar positions had stopped going to work—after a few days, it was costing them more money to commute than they earned.
The following day, Ruiz drove his white Toyota Prius to pick up a gangly twenty-six-year-old Mexican named Erick Díaz-Cruz from his mother’s house, in Gravesend, and take him to Maimonides hospital to retrieve some paperwork from a recent surgery. In February, Díaz-Cruz had travelled to New York on a tourist visa to visit his mother. One morning, two ICE officers in street clothes arrived to arrest his mother’s longtime boyfriend, who ICE claimed had been deported twice before and faced a new order of removal, for a 2011 assault conviction. Díaz-Cruz stepped outside to find out what was going on, and one of the officers shot him in the face. Díaz-Cruz underwent a series of emergency operations, and he and his family eventually sued ICE. While a team of lawyers in Manhattan handled the case, the family approached Ruiz for guidance and practical assistance.
In the car, Díaz-Cruz wanted to know more about the police protests across the city. “Racist policing is a big part of this country’s history,” Ruiz told him. “What happened to you, what ICE did, is part of the same system. It’s why we need to speak up about your case, so people can see the connections.” In the spring, Ruiz had taped a handwritten sign on the windshield. “Free Them All,” it read, a reference to the thirty thousand people in U.S. immigrant-detention centers. Now the sign also applied to the hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters being arrested each day in New York—“political prisoners,” Ruiz called them. “Come by the church, we’ll arrange a press conference for you,” he told Díaz-Cruz, who was going to meet his lawyers after the stop at the hospital. A film crew from Telemundo would be there that afternoon. “You can talk about what you’ve gone through.”
When Ruiz and I returned to the church, a Telemundo reporter was waiting outside, wearing a suit and a surgical mask; he held a microphone at the end of a long black metal pole. A cameraman emerged from behind a van and began filming as Ruiz spoke. He stood upright, with his hands at his sides, talking in a booming, even voice as pedestrians parted around him. Gerardo, Joel, and Próspero, the church volunteers, came down the steps to watch from a distance. They couldn’t hear him, but they didn’t need to. ♦
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