But ever since the Trump Administration cracked down on people living in the country illegally early this year and sent masked federal agents to make sweeping arrests in immigrant-heavy communities, the families are too fearful to gather in the open.
The line is gone.
Operations Director Alfonso Mendez tried to reassure them that if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up, he would rush them into the building and lock the doors. Still, they weren’t convinced.
“I’m very sad because everybody has the right to receive food,” said Mendez, who relied on these food boxes for his wife and two small children when he fled Columbia in 2000. “It’s not a good thing that they feel afraid to come.”
So now, like other local nonprofits with clients experiencing the same fears, Santa Maria Urban Ministry is taking food to the people, setting up market-style giveaways at schools and taking pallets of groceries to secret places where immigrants feel safer.
“We are doing things to get food to people without drawing attention to them or to us,” said Louis Powell, director of the nonprofit.
Because the need is so great, Powell reached out to the Bay Area News Group’s annual Wish Book charity drive. A donation to Wish Book will help Santa Maria Urban Ministry transport food to its clients, buy more groceries to augment decreasing donations and expand its literacy programs.
Established in 1983 as an outreach ministry of the local Episcopal diocese, the nonprofit also delivers bagged meals, clothing and sleeping bags to the unhoused. It offers classes for their clients to become literate in English and Spanish, and courses to help them learn to file their taxes.
The Bay Area, so far, has largely escaped the kind of ICE tactics seen in other cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. A threat by President Trump to send federal agents to San Francisco fizzled in October after Mayor Daniel Lurie and tech executives implored him to stop. Ever since Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops to L.A. in June, however, the number of daily food recipients here dropped 40%, from roughly 100 to close to 60, Powell said. Taking food into the community has restored those clients, and found even more who are grateful for groceries.
On a recent fall morning, only a scattering of people showed up.
“People need food,” Powell said, “and when that need is greater than their fear of stepping out their front door, they come.”
Merli Flores is one of them. The mother of two from Guatemala, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with eight people, worries about sending her children to school for fear of ICE. Family members are reluctant to appear at their asylum hearings for the same reason,
“I am always on alert,” said Flores, 23 through an interpreter. “I check anything suspicious because I heard they are wearing just regular clothes.”
On a recent morning, she needed diapers for her 2-year-old, and eggs, chicken, milk and vegetables to feed her family. Donations to Santa Maria Urban Ministry from Second Harvest and local grocery and retail stores have dropped in recent months, but the ministry still filled Flores’s box.
Mendez understands the desperation. Before he crossed the southern border in 2000, he said, he had a government job as an agricultural engineer in Columbia, convincing farmers to pull out their coca plants used to make cocaine and switch to other crops. Drug cartels targeted him after that, he said. They shot up his car and handed a note to his wife, who ran the family shoe store, threatening to kill her husband and kidnap her children. They fled to the U.S., with $2,000 in Mendez’s pocket and just one suitcase among the four of them. They found a tiny room to rent in a house. With no furniture or mattresses, they slept on their meager pile of clothes.
“I had to pay $800 rent, then a second $800, and I had to buy milk for my kids and I had no money,” Mendez recalls, choking up at the memory.
Someone told him, “Go to Santa Maria. They can support you.”
In gratitude, he began to volunteer. When he found a job two months later stocking merchandise at a Kmart store, he helped on his two days off every week.
“Most of the families that come here are families like my family, immigrants,” said Mendez, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen. “God put me in this place and honestly, I feel happy. I feel that I’m doing something good for other people.”
After nine years of volunteering, he was hired part time and soon was promoted to one of three full-time staff members running the nonprofit. Some 20 volunteers a day, including teenagers from local high schools, help out.
For the past 15 years, Patricia Lozano, a Mexican immigrant who received her first box of food from Santa Maria Urban Ministry in the early 2000s, has been giving back every morning, sorting groceries and handing out boxes of food. A mother of six daughters who stayed home while her husband worked two restaurant jobs, Santa Maria was there for her when she needed them most. The nonprofit not only provided a heaping box of food every two weeks, but offered an after-school tutoring program for all her girls. They thrived in school, receiving scholarships to local Catholic high schools. With loans and scholarships, two of them are now studying at the University of San Francisco. One of them is planning a career in the medical field, another as a therapist for autistic youth. She published a first-person essay on the nonprofit’s website expressing her gratitude.
Watching struggling parents and children sift through donated clothing reminds her of her early years with her daughters here — and the impact this ministry has on every recipient.
She remembers one of her girls looking in wonder at all the clothing before her.
“Mom,” she asked, “can you buy for me all these clothes?”
“Choose whatever you want,” she said.
The experience, she said, “is on my heart forever.”
ABOUT WISH BOOKWish Book is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization operated by The Mercury News. Since 1983, Wish Book has been producing series of stories during the holiday season that highlight the wishes of those in need and invite readers to help fulfill them.
WISHA donation to Wish Book would help Santa Maria Urban Ministry transport food to its clients, buy more groceries to augment decreasing donations and expand its literacy programs. Goal: $50,000
HOW TO GIVEDonate at wishbook.mercurynews.com/donate or mail in this form.
ONLINE EXTRARead other Wish Book stories, view photos and video at wishbook.mercurynews.com.