The first thing many people do at the center is kneel and pray before a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue guards a thicket of aloe vera plants that have grown in the garden for as long as anyone associated with the shelter can remember.

Things got even worse for Gonzalez recently, after a sister he’d been staying with kicked him out of the house after a disagreement. With nowhere else to turn, Gonzalez arrived at the gates of the Bishop Enrique San Pedro Ozanam Center.

Just like that, in a matter of a few years, Gonzalez joined the many millions of Americans knocked into poverty because of poor health. An estimated 10.6 million have been pushed below the poverty line because they can’t pay their medical expenses.

He subsists on $808 a month in disability payments, barely enough to feed himself, pay for various miscellaneous expenses like clothing and toiletries or the cell phone he bought for his now 12-year-old daughter to keep in touch with her. Without federal subsidies there’s also no way that he could afford his medication — he takes 14 daily pills and one shot each day for a laundry list of conditions including hypertension, depression, anxiety and diabetes.

“I’m still learning how to live with my illness,” he said. “I’m still learning to live without any real income.”

Because of his condition he’s unable to work. His gait is slow, he’s constantly fatigued and his medications make him nauseous. His mind copes with dueling bouts of depression and anxiety.

He didn’t have any money coming in. He was estranged from his family and the independence he’d enjoyed most of his adult life was swapped with an uncomfortable dependence on help from relatives. Medical bills mounted quickly.

The visitors slice into the plants to release the gel trapped beneath their tough outer skin, a natural healing aide used for centuries to tend to wounds. Many of those in the shelter come battered from sometimes arduous journeys from as far away as Honduras and El Salvador.

“The more they’re cut, the more they grow,” Maldonado said of the plants. “There’s something deeply symbolic about that.”

Many Ozanam visitors work the fields by day and sleep at the shelter at night.

Even as grants for services have been cut year by year and the will and sentiment of locals to help the poor or undocumented has ebbed, Maldonado says they are learning to do more with less.

“There isn’t any light for me. To be honest I don’t see any difference in the days. My illness isn’t getting any better. I don’t have money. I’m depressed. No light at all.”

To save money they’ll leverage the skills of their visitors to keep up the property or do maintenance or repairs. They’ll turn off the air conditioning during the day and switch it back on at night so folks can sleep comfortably.

And for those working hard to land on their feet, the shelter offers housing assistance, including a down payment and three months’ rent.

“We try to be good stewards of the money and we try to assist individuals who really want better for themselves,” Maldondado said. “We see this every day and you can sympathize and relate to what they need because when I was growing up I had gone through situations like that. I have to put myself in their shoes.”

When the shelter runs out of meat for meals, cooks will go the garden and snatch up cactus to make Nopales Con Huevos, a dish made of scrambled eggs and cactus stems.

On most nights every bed in the place is filled.

Maldonado grew up in a poor family of nine, with parents who immigrated to the United States from Mexico. His dad worked as many as four jobs while his mother tended to the brood.

Each of the Maldonado siblings went on to earn a college degree, he said -- a testament to the power of determination.

Maldonado and two of his brothers make up something of an odd triangle in the immigration continuum. While he runs the shelter, one of his brothers is an immigration attorney and the other works in the office of Homeland Security.

On a recent evening as the sun fell over the Rio Grande Valley, Maldonado stood in the courtyard of Ozanam overlooking the Mother Mary and her aloe vera plants, and the young and old men and women who’d traveled hard roads to get there.

“There are some folks that leave the valley and you won’t see them for another 10 years,” he said. “We have some people that do appreciate our help and they come in before they leave and say thank you for being there at a time that I needed you. That makes my day. That’s why we do this.”

For Gonzalez, even with a temporary roof over his head, his tunnel is as dark as ever.

“There isn’t any light for me. To be honest I don’t see any difference in the days. My illness isn’t getting any better. I don’t have money. I’m depressed. No light at all,” Gonzalez said.

His daughter, Gonzalez said, is the only thing keeping him alive.

She’s 4’11 with a pretty smile, he said, “chunky like her mother” with the voice of an angel.

“I joke with her. I say, one day you’ll become a famous singer and support me,” Gonzalez said, a smile pressing across his swollen face.

As Gonzalez spoke from that office at Ozanam, he had 9 days left on his 30-day stay.

Photos by Matt Black/Magnum for MSNBC