The Day Pope Francis Cracked the Gate
The first Latino Pope rolled up in a Fiat, side-eyed the Deporter-in-Chief, and blessed the people Washington forgot.
WASHINGTON—Pope Francis is dead. The first Latin American pontiff, the first Jesuit to don the papal white, and the first in generations to make the Vatican feel less like a fortress and more like a field hospital, has passed away.
He died as he lived—understated, resolute, and with his eyes fixed not on the cathedrals of Rome, but on the borders, prisons, and shelters where the forgotten huddle. His papacy was never about grandeur. It was about presence. And for a fleeting decade, Jorge Mario Bergoglio turned the world’s most powerful pulpit into a soapbox for the marginalized, the mutilated, the migrant, and the meek.
Witnessing Pope Francis
On September 23, 2015, Pope Francis made his first and only trip to the White House to speak with Barack Obama, the deporter-in-chief. Obama won his first and second election by marketing an amnesty to Latino voters who backed him with historic support at the polls.
But in the White House, Obama had become the most prolific deportation president in American history, expelling over three million people, mostly Latinos, many with permanent bars on ever returning again.
Francis knew all of this when he pulled up to the White House at 9:40 AM Eastern Time in a small black Fiat 500L provided by the Vatican's Apostolic Nunciature. The Marine Corps band awakened a crowd of thousands gathered on the South Lawn.
Obama introduced the first Latino Pope, who opened in English: "As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families,” said Francis, giving Obama a side-eye that we could see from the cheap seats—
The First Miracle: Los Mutilados
We went nuts. You could feel it: the weight of judgment, firm and unmistakable. Because this was a Pope who didn’t just talk about the poor. He walked with them. In this case, they had walked—mangled, limbless—from the spine of La Bestia, the death train that slices through Central America like a machete. And they had come to see him.
They were missing fingers, arms, legs. They were also missing invitations. No one at the White House had remembered los mutilados. But that didn’t stop them. At two in the morning before the papal arrival, they showed up outside the Treasury Department.
By dawn, they were at the front of the security line, shoulder to shoulder with my roommate and me. I told them—in Spanish—that the Pope would want them there. We worked the phones. Spanish-language media showed up. Camera lights flipped on. The Secret Service stiffened.
Then, a miracle. Or the Beltway version of one. A deputy from Obama’s press team—Ginette Magaña, a good one—arrived with wristbands. Handicapped seating, right up front. Los mutilados got in. And when Francis stepped out onto that stage, they were there, limbs or no limbs, waving what they had left.
That was the first miracle.
The Second Miracle: Sophie Cruz
“Girl Passes Barricade, Greets Pope Francis” was the AP headline on the raw footage of Sophie Cruz, age 5, evading security around the Popemobile after her father, Raúl, lifted her over the barricade along the parade route.
Francis stopped the Popemobile. Cruz was lifted by a Secret Service agent to Francis, who blessed the girl and received a T-shirt and a letter in the pope’s native Spanish that she had memorized:
In English:
I want to tell you that my heart is very sad, because I’m scared that one day ICE is going to deport my parents. I have a right to live with my parents. I have a right to be happy. My dad works very hard in a factory galvanizing metals. Immigrants like my dad feed this country. They therefore deserve to live with dignity, they deserve to be respected, they deserve immigration reform, because it would be beneficial to my country, and because they have earned it working very hard, picking oranges, onions, watermelons, spinach, lettuce, and many other vegetables. Don’t forget about us the children, or about those who suffer because they’re not with their parents because of war, because of violence, because of hunger.
“Hoy fue algo extraordinario, fue un milagro,” Raúl Cruz told the AP. He later admitted to Univision that Sophie was one of eleven kids positioned along the parade route, each trying to get their letter to Francis.
Back on the South Lawn, another migrant girl had a similar letter she’d memorized for the procession of international press on hand to broadcast the pope’s remarks—bilingual spokeschildren for their parents, agents of a migrant liberation movement that still believed it could win.
And for a moment—a breathless, tender, fleeting moment—immigrants weren’t seen as threats or statistics but as messengers. Prophets. Children speaking for their parents, who picked crops and galvanized metals and scrubbed America’s toilets so clean we forgot who did it.
The Third Miracle
The third miracle was smaller, but still holy.
It was me—a ticketless staffer at the DNC, scheming to get into the pope’s arrival ceremony like it was the hottest club in town (it was). We worked every angle. Julie Rodriguez—then director of the Office of Public Engagement, grand daughter of famed labor leader César Chávez—gave us nothing. But her LGBTQ colleagues? Saints. Two tickets, just like that. That’s Washington: redemption in the margins.
And that’s what Francis brought. Not the kind of miracles that make you a saint, but the kind that make people believe again. In each other. In justice. In the possibility that someone with power might actually show up.
Now, Francis is gone. The cassock has been folded. The fisherman’s ring rests under glass. But what lingers isn’t marble or incense or the grind of Vatican protocol—it’s the memory of a man who made room for the poor, the broken, the undocumented, and the inconvenient. A man who saw the amputees nobody invited. Who stopped the motorcade for the little girl with the letter. Who never confused a podium for a throne.
That’s how we remember Pope Francis. We remember that on one strange, holy morning in Washington, a man in white pulled up in a clown car, looked power in the eye, and sided with the people who never make it past the gate. He didn’t change the system. He didn’t need to. He just cracked it open long enough for the rest of us to slip through.