It was late afternoon on a Friday when I heard a knock on the door. My heart sank because I had no choice but to answer, even though—utterly exhausted—I wanted nothing more than to leave this place behind. I had spent the day visiting immigrants and asylum seekers being held at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, with an overwhelmed group of first-time volunteers. After an emotional debriefing, they were finally gone, and I was packing my minivan for the two-and-a-half-hour drive home to Atlanta. 

I released a long exhale, then opened the door, because I, like many of us at El Refugio, took seriously the charge in Hebrews 13: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Our new neighbor, Marty, stood before me with a loaf of home-baked bread in one arm; the other was wrapped around the shoulder of a grinning twenty-something, who had bright eyes and a head of shaggy, dark curls. Marty, a lawyer, had just helped the young man, whom I’ll call Yordani, achieve the near-impossible: release from Stewart Detention Center. 

For almost seven years, El Refugio’s volunteers had been welcoming the loved ones of immigrants to our hospitality house and visiting lonely immigrants and asylum seekers detained at Stewart, only a mile down the road. Until Marty, with a penchant for baking and a fire for justice, moved next door, not a single immigration attorney had called Lumpkin home, even though an immigration court with a loaded docket was always running inside the facility. In those seven years, Yordani was only the second person I had ever seen released from that place. 

I wrapped Yordani in a hug, eliciting jubilant laughter and an even bigger grin. “Welcome!” I exclaimed, and I meant it. 

At El Refugio, we often talked about our simple work as “radical hospitality”—a phrase I first heard from Anton Flores-Maisonet, one of the organization’s founders. When people traveled to visit their loved ones in immigration detention, we gave them a free place to stay, no strings attached. We slept in bedrooms adjacent to theirs, prepared and shared meals, and offered any assistance we could as they navigated the confusing and heartbreaking system of immigration detention and deportation. When detained immigrants and asylum seekers had no one to visit them, we brought volunteers with no special skills or training to sit and talk with them for their allotted weekly hour of visitation on a staticky telephone through a filthy glass partition. We also made valiant but almost entirely fruitless efforts to advocate on behalf of detained immigrants and asylum seekers. But political advocacy was, in my opinion, never our most important work. Our most important work was carving out a space of radical welcome in an inhospitable place. 

In 2018, when Marty and Yordani came knocking at our door, Stewart Detention Center was the second-largest immigration-detention facility in the United States—an all-male facility with 1,900 beds, always full. Approximately 97 percent of those held in the facility were deported, and only five percent of asylum seekers whose cases were heard in the Stewart Immigration Court were granted asylum. In this context, our primary job was to be a ministry of presence: to accompany detained immigrants and asylum seekers and their families through crisis, to refuse to turn away from their suffering. We bore witness to what was happening in this remote Southwest Georgia town; we opened our home, set a simple table, and welcomed strangers to join us there. 

While we sipped on coffee, Marty explained that Yordani had family awaiting him in South Florida. All he needed was a ride from Lumpkin to the Greyhound bus station in Atlanta. Would I take him? 

I had never met this young man. I knew nothing about him, except that he was an asylum seeker from Cuba who needed a ride. I was a woman, alone. My gut reaction: stranger danger. Isn’t that what we teach our children, after all? 

But then I recalled my experiences around that very table, over many years. We regularly hosted families in financial and emotional disarray because one of their members—generally the father and primary breadwinner—was put into immigration detention. These families had so much to fear as they faced the likelihood of a long, distressing, and financially crippling separation. The asylum seekers we visited faced extreme violence, in some cases death threats, if they returned home to their war-torn or otherwise dangerous communities. 

What astounded me again and again about our guests was that, even so, they chose love. They carried so much uncertainty about their futures and had so many reasons to be afraid. But they made a deliberate choice: they decided not to be overcome with fear, but instead to be driven into action by love. Children visited their fathers, smiled and pressed their hands against the glass that separated detainees from the outside world. Mothers stood in our kitchen and waited anxiously for calls from their sons, and then whispered into the phone that all would be well. These families took courage. They made plans for an almost impossible future. They sought creative ways to stay together. And then, in the evenings, they gathered around the dinner table with us, their hosts, and they expressed gratitude, despite it all. 

Accompanying people through these brutally heartbreaking circumstances slowly taught me how to overcome fear and resist despair: by putting love first. They taught me that love drives us into right actions—even when those actions appear unrealistic, inconvenient, outlandish, or even absurd. And so I said yes.

Within the hour, Yordani and I were climbing into my minivan and setting off toward Atlanta. As we cruised north on the interstate, Yordani marveled, “I can’t believe I’m free. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is America.” He delighted in the billboards advertising fast food and personal-injury attorneys; he marveled at the late-model cars that rode alongside us. I let him borrow my phone, and he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and began to call friends and family. They laughed, joked, and whooped with pleasure that Yordani was finally free. 

But the real blessings came, of all places, at downtown Atlanta’s rather grubby and disordered Greyhound station. There, Yordani and I experienced remarkable, even lavish hospitality. 

It began from the moment we walked from a nearly abandoned parking lot into the low-slung building. Yordani didn’t have proper photo ID to obtain his pre-purchased ticket, but the woman behind the ticket counter made a few phone calls, and voila! When I explained to her colleague that Yordani did not speak a word of English, and I would need to leave him before his bus arrived, she ushered us behind a red rope to the VIP section. The ticket-taker assured me that she, personally, would find him when it was time to board and help him to his seat. She called ahead to her colleagues in the city where he would transfer and asked them to make sure he got on the right bus. When I bought Yordani a cheeseburger and Coke from the grill, I forgot to get fries. The chef told us not to worry and heaped a huge pile of free fries into a bowl for Yordani and me to share. His first burger and fries ever—and they were delicious. 

While we waited for his bus, I snapped a photo of Yordani, half-eaten cheeseburger in hand, a big, goofy grin across his face. These days, I think of that photo often as I read or listen to the news, hearing angry voices fret about the costs, the dangers, the risks of welcoming asylum seekers into the United States. I see Yordani’s wide smile, I recall those bus station employees generously extending hospitality to him, and I wonder: Where are the accounts of the blessings, the joys, the utter delight? 

In his remarks for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees in 2017, Pope Francis said, “Every stranger who knocks at our door is an opportunity for an encounter with Jesus Christ, who identifies with the welcomed and rejected strangers of every age.” I believe, with all of my heart, that we who met Yordani that day encountered the living God through him. Our new Cuban friend was, in that moment, the living promise of the Gospel proclaimed in Matthew 25: Christ is the hungry person we feed, the thirsty to whom we give drink; Christ is the asylum seeker who we shuttle to a Greyhound station. 

When we open our hearts, homes, churches, nation, and yes, even minivans, in Christian hospitality, God assures us that we will entertain angels, and we will be abundantly blessed by their presence. This is, indeed, good news.