"And they smirked at me and rolled their eyes and said, 'Well we only have 10 minutes, we can only give you 10 minutes, because we have another press opportunity that we need to get to."
"So you just see how these people (migrants) are being used by our government, by these Congress people," Johnson said.
The politics behind the border crisis are frustrating to Johnson, she said, because they often dehumanize migrants and distract people from doing something concrete to help the situation.
She said people have asked her if her efforts to bring supplies to migrants means that she supports an open-border policy. She doesn't.
"No I don't support lawlessness, I don't support an open border, I support legal immigration, doing it the right way, but the bottom line is I don't have the answer, I don't know the answer," she said, "but I can deliver these wipes so that babies' butts are clean and they're not getting infections. And I know how to make sure that a baby can get fed, and that's really what this is about. And that's what it is to be the Church, to meet the needs that are right in front of us."
Johnson converted to Catholicism several years after leaving the abortion industry in 2009.
Another frustrating aspect of the weekend was that on the same day that Johnson, Herndon-De La Rosa and their team were unloading their supplies, TruthOut.org published an opinion piece entitled: "The 'Pro-Life' Movement Is Silent About Children Dying at the Border."
"It came out the same day that we were in McAllen, and I was like really? Pro-life people don't care about people at the border? Tell me more about that, you know, as I'm sweating and disgusting and hot and gross," Johnson said.
The author has since reached out to Johnson and Herndon-De La Rosa for follow-up interviews, and admitted on Twitter that she had not heard of the #Bottles2TheBorder campaign when she wrote the piece.
But Johnson said that the pro-life movement, at least in some circles, still has a problem with the way they speak about the issue of immigration. She said that sometimes on social media, she will get comments from people in ultra-conservative groups who use "dehumanizing language" when discussing migrants.
"I don't know if they identify strongly as pro-life, but they are conservative, and they're coming on my page saying, 'Well we need to help Americans first, and Americans need to take priority,'" she recalled.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
"And I'm thinking, well why can't we just work to help everybody? Why do we have to pick and choose? Because when God creates all of us, he doesn't create Americans with more dignity and worth than he does Mexicans," she said. "We're all created in the likeness of Christ, we're all created with that same inherent dignity and worth at the moment of conception."
Johnson said the border crisis presents an opportunity to the pro-life movement to step up and prove that they are supportive of life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.
"This is an opportunity to make that known and to show it, and to actually be that pro-life. There are respite centers all along the border that are providing respite to immigrants who have come through a port of entry legally, and they need support, they need rest, they need a shower, they need clean diapers, they need food, and this is an opportunity for us to provide that," she said.
While the current #Bottles2TheBorder campaign has ended, the campaign's website includes a link to a list of respite centers along the border to which people can donate directly.
Mary Farrow worked as a staff writer for Catholic News Agency until 2020. She has a degree in journalism and English education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.