ELPASO IS the U.S.-Mexico border in miniature: Once a permeable landscape, the Texas city is now separated from its sister to the south—Ciudad Juárez— by a harsh apparatus of walls and wire. Thousands of people travel between the two cities daily, splitting their lives between two nations, all while debates rage over who may cross the border and how.

When five young Catholics set out to help El Paso’s most vulnerable residents in the late 1970s, these questions weren’t their primary concerns. “They were reading the Bible and saying, ‘Where do we encounter God in this world? If we take our faith seriously, what kind of actions does that call us to?’” says Mary Fontana, a member of the board of directors (and longtime volunteer) at Annunciation House, a nonprofit that shelters and aids migrants.

“They kept returning to the idea that the God that they read about in the scriptures in the Bible was someone who identified first and foremost with the poor. And then they looked around their community of El Paso and said, ‘Who are the poor in our midst?’” In El Paso, that “was primarily people who are undocumented,” Fontana explains.

The Catholic Diocese of El Paso loaned the group a vacant floor in an old building, and in 1978 Annunciation House opened its doors. Its mission is “to provide hospitality and accompaniment for the poor in migration,” says Fontana, offering “shelter, food, and clothing” to the city’s “poorest of the poor.” Annunciation House says it has helped “hundreds of thousands of refugees” since its founding.

This was meant to be a humanitarian mission-something many churches and religiously informed nonprofits view as an expression of faith rather than politics.