Amid shifting border dynamics and tighter immigration enforcement, a Texas-based Jesuit priest is continuing a ministry built around what he calls accompaniment, even as the people showing up for help have changed over the years. Rev. Brian Strassburger, who heads the Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries, said his work along the U.S.-Mexico border has moved from ministering to large numbers of asylum-seekers in shelters to celebrating Mass with people who are detained and deported.
Strassburger said his mission is centered on embodying the Christian message “that God is accompanying you on your journey.” He also said that journey, whether migrants travel northbound or southbound, includes “a lot of suffering,” and he framed faith as a companion during that hardship. “We have a faith that speaks to us amid that suffering. We have a God who says, ‘I want to be one of you,’” Strassburger said.
Based in the Rio Grande Valley, Strassburger’s group has been providing Mass and other sacraments on both sides of the border since 2021, according to the account. In that period, he has described how the mood and scale of border activity changed, including the period after the Biden administration ended COVID-19 restrictions on asylum and the subsequent reduction in crossings during Trump’s second term.
He pointed to the time window from May 2023, when the Biden administration ended COVID-19 restrictions on asylum, until January 2025, when Trump declared a national emergency at the border at the start of his second term. Strassburger said crossings had been dramatically higher in the earlier period, with migrants cramming into overcrowded shelters daily before and after crossing. As that changed, he described continuing to cross between U.S. cities such as McAllen, Texas, and Mexican towns across the Rio Grande, where he joined Mass and ministered to people waiting for a chance to enter the United States.
Strassburger recalled being at a shelter run by Catholic nuns after the Trump administration canceled all border appointments that would-be asylum-seekers had made through an app to enter the United States. He said that, after he held Mass, many people told him they felt devastated, terrified and deceived; he described one woman’s response in Spanish: “The last thing we lose is hope.” He said he later reflected that if Sandra could say that “in the midst of the despairing moments of life,” then he could not lose hope in his own ministry.
Strassburger, 41, described his path into the priesthood as something that emerged through experience and assignments rather than a single plan. Raised in Colorado by Catholic parents, he said he initially imagined a life as a father, a math teacher and a basketball coach, after attending a Jesuit high school. He said that after college, while volunteering with the Augustinians—where he met the future Pope Leo XIV—he began to consider religious life, including while ministering to AIDS victims at a hospice in South Africa.
He later said he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 2011 and was sent to Nicaragua for more than two years about five years later, including despite knowing no Spanish. After returning and becoming bilingual, Strassburger said he spent time at the Kino Border Initiative in the two Nogales—one in Arizona and one in Mexico—and found his mission there as a bridge between languages and communities. After his ordination, he said a superior asked him to establish a Jesuit presence in the Rio Grande Valley, “literally at the country’s margins,” places where Pope Francis had urged the church to go, and he said the local bishop gave him a mission framed as reading reality and responding to it.
With the ongoing immigration crackdown, Strassburger said his ministry has shifted toward detained and deported migrants. He said he has been focusing on celebrating regular Masses at two large Texas detention centers as well as in shelters in Mexico. One of the Mexico shelters he visits, in Matamoros, is run by Mexican authorities for people who’ve been deported. Strassburger described a woman arrested after decades in the United States, whose U.S.-citizen children are described as ranging in age from 19 to 6, and he said she wondered whether pursuing court proceedings had been a mistake.
He also described William Cuellar, who was deported to Mexico about five years ago after leaving the country at age 4, and said Cuellar later began staying in a shelter in Matamoros to facilitate visits from his mother and adult children who remain in the United States. Cuellar said of Strassburger that “When I met Father Brian, I was like, ‘Cool, I can communicate in English with someone else,’” and that the priest “provides me with the time to hear me out.” Strassburger also said the consoling, listening presence of him and other Jesuits helps migrants beyond sacraments, and that the shelters offer access to Mass, confession and baptisms.
At a shelter in Reynosa called Casa del Migrante, Sister Carmen Ramírez said Strassburger’s ministry gives people hope. “They bring hope to people,” Ramírez said. “These men, they bring the Gospel, a glance of empathy, of compassion.” She described the shelter as hosting about two dozen people, mostly from Honduras and Mexico, and said that when the Jesuits visit twice a week, another 50 families come for Mass and activities focused on mothers and children, most of whom are from Haiti. Ramírez said she imagines Jesus when she sees children running to hug Strassburger and described his work as “listening, of sitting down to listen, looking at people straight in the face,” and telling them that “there is a God who loves them through this encounter.”