(RNS4-MAR04) Men line up for meals in a cold parking lot prepared by Miryam Torres of East Orange, N.J., who distributes food each week for illegal immigrants who live in poverty and are scared to go to soup kitchens. For use with RNS-IMMIGRANT-FEED, transmitted March 4, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Mark Dye/The Star-Ledger.
(RNS4-MAR04) Men line up for meals in a cold parking lot prepared by Miryam Torres of East Orange, N.J., who distributes food each week for illegal immigrants who live in poverty and are scared to go to soup kitchens. For use with RNS-IMMIGRANT-FEED, transmitted March 4, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Mark Dye/The Star-Ledger.
(RNS4-MAR04) Men line up for meals in a cold parking lot prepared by Miryam Torres of East Orange, N.J., who distributes food each week for illegal immigrants who live in poverty and are scared to go to soup kitchens. For use with RNS-IMMIGRANT-FEED, transmitted March 4, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Mark Dye/The Star-Ledger.
ESSEX COUNTY, N.J. — It is 30 degrees on a Friday evening, just 14 with the wind chill. Twenty-one Hispanic men, all undocumented immigrants who could use an extra layer or two, bump into each other as they form a shivering, ragged line across an empty parking lot.
They arrived at this spot with hope that around 6 p.m. a cheerful woman in a fur hat would drive up in a blue Nissan Altima laden with food she cooked herself, and some donated clothes.
“When I reach the parking lot, they are looking to see if I’m coming,” says Miryam Torres, who lives in East Orange and allowed a reporter to follow her as long as her feeding site was not publicized.
“And when they see me, they get so happy. … After a hard week of work, their smiles — and knowing that at least they are eating today — make me happy.”
Let others debate the finer points of immigration policy, the pros and cons of amnesty, deportation and raids directed toward the estimated 11 million people who are in the United States illegally. Miryam Torres, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Ecuador in her 20s, deals with the immigration problem in her personal way: with pots and pans.
No agency or church is involved. Torres, whose day job is field representative for the Essex County Division of Senior Services, cooks and delivers the food on her own, with some help from her brother Wilfrido.
She has been doing this since October, after learning during a chance encounter that undocumented immigrants were checking Dumpsters behind nearby fast-food restaurants for scraps.
Now, once a week, she turns her home into a mini-soup kitchen. Each Thursday she cooks four chickens with pinto beans. She serves it the next evening, with rice, to immigrants who are afraid to rely on established soup kitchens because of rumors that federal agents may be waiting there for them.
The cost of the food is about $60 a week, or more than $3,000 over the course of a year, all borne by Torres. A mother of five children ages 28 to 40, she makes $44,500 a year in her county job.
“I wish I could do it more often, but all I can afford now is one day a week,” she says. ” … I can’t stop now, because I can’t go to sleep knowing that there’s people who are not eating and looking for food in the garbage.”
Distribution is fast. Seconds after pulling up, Torres and her brother pop out of the car and open its back doors. The seats are packed with bags of clothes, 24 Styrofoam containers of hot food, and bottled water.
The clothes go first. All are distributed in four minutes.
“Es una camisa grande!” Torres’ brother shouts, holding a large shirt.
Torres, holding a button-down shirt, touts it as good “para iglesia domingo” — for wearing to church on Sunday.
“Thank you,” one man in a grimy jacket says in Spanish after receiving a shirt and sweater. “I haven’t changed clothes in three days.”
The wind is noisy and frigid, and the rumbling of street traffic and passing trains make this a truly miserable place to dine. But the men here, who months or years ago crossed the Mexican border dreaming of a better life, are — for the moment, at least — excited.
The food is ready for dispersal. The line, disrupted for the clothing giveaway, re-forms. Plastic silverware and napkins are distributed, and then, one at a time, each man in line receives a Styrofoam container and a “Buen provecho!” — “Eat well” — from Torres.
Without exception, each man takes his container and a bottle of water to the side wall of a store facing the parking lot, then sits down or squats to eat. They are a foot or two from each other, but there is no talking, just chowing down. Conversation would let the food go cold.
“It’s a blessing for the food,” says a man from El Salvador named David, 47, after eating. “We’re thankful. Thank God.”
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It was hard to find anyone, even in the contentious arena of immigration politics, who thinks what she is doing is wrong.
“It basically sounds like a voluntary humanitarian action, the equivalent of a personal soup kitchen,” said Mike Hethmon, general counsel with the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C., which litigates against illegal immigration.
Although federal laws prohibit hiring, harboring and sheltering of undocumented immigrants, exceptions allow institutions such as emergency shelters and soup kitchens to provide assistance, as long as those providers are run openly and don’t turn non-immigrants away, Hethmon said.
Torres has long been active in her community, but this is the first time she has acted as a one-person soup kitchen.
“I learned this from my parents,” she says. “I remember, my father used to have a bakery. We had a plate of food every day, and enough to eat. And so my father said, all the kids in the neighborhood that don’t have anything to eat, they can come and eat in our house. And that’s how I learned that we have to share.”
(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. Staff writer Tanya Batallas contributed to this report.)
