Conversion was the theme of a roundtable at Georgetown University on Sept. 11, the conversion of U.S. government leaders and of U.S. Catholics who seem to have forgotten the church’s immigrant history and their own immigrant family roots.
“It is true that we need to protect our borders,” Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez said, “but at the same time [immigration has] been part of the history of the United States from the very beginning. That’s the reality that we need to be aware of to find the solution at this time.
“The most important thing is to help people to understand the dignity of the human person,” he said. “Deportation is not an immigration policy…. We really need to find a way to have an immigration reform that responds to the reality of our country.”
“We need a kind of a conversion about immigration,” he said.
The Most Rev. Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami, called immigration “part of our Catholic story.”
“It’s to our shame as Catholics that we forget that our grandparents or great-grandparents were discriminated against precisely because they were Catholic,” he said.
Noting critics, including Vice President JD Vance, who suggested the church was motivated by profit in its efforts to serve immigrants and refugees, the Most Rev. Mark Seitz, bishop of El Paso, said: “When we speak to this issue, many people today say, ‘Oh, you’re getting into politics.’ I need to point out that this was a Gospel issue before it was a political issue.”
“The church’s teaching on immigration isn’t new, and it hasn’t changed,” he said. “We’ve celebrated World Day of Migrants and Refugees for 111 years, since around the time of World War I. And even then, it wasn’t just invented at that moment. We’ve had the Gospels for a longer time, and that’s the basis.”
Catholics also serve contemporary immigrants in order to fulfill their obligations as good citizens, he added, “faithful to the founding principles of this country that recognize the inalienable dignity and rights given by our Creator to every person.”
“Without that, without a care for those who are most vulnerable among us, we cannot be a great nation. We cannot be a just nation,” he said.
The church leaders who gathered for the roundtable, hosted by Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, discussed various efforts to respond to a broadening national clampdown on people with irregular immigration status. They described families who have not so much broken the law but are becoming “broken by the law,” as Archbishop Wenski put it, during the Trump administration’s enforcement-focused immigration policy.
They described traumatized children and communities across the country where people live in fear, hesitant to leave their homes to practice their faith, afraid to venture out even to buy groceries for their families. The deportation campaign across the nation is not only creating anxiety for these families but suppressing local economies, they said.
“Se lo llevaron,” “He or she has been taken,” was an expression that haunted his childhood during El Salvador’s civil war, Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., said. Now he is troubled to hear it spoken over and over again by people who have experienced the disappearance of a family member or household breadwinner after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrest or detention.
“When people were kidnapped, when people were taken by death squads, when they would disappear by the guerilla, people used to say, ‘Se lo llevaron,’” he remembered.
“This is what people are experiencing these days. This is the level of terror that people are feeling.”
“Fear has been what has been paralyzing us in trying to find a solution to the number of irregular immigrants in this country,” Archbishop Wenski said. Noting the Sept. 11 date of the roundtable, he recalled where he had been the day before the attack—in Washington to meet with immigration officials who were confident on Sept. 10, 2001, that comprehensive reform would be in reach that fall legislative session.
“I took a cab to Reagan National, got on the plane, went back to Miami and went to bed,” Archbishop Wenski said. “In the morning, I got up and as I’m driving to my office, I have the radio on. The airline flies into the World Trade Center, and that was the end of any talk of immigration reform.”
Despite continuing paralysis on systemic reforms, immigrants have continued to come to America, however they can, he said, seeking work and escaping hardship. “And we don’t have the systems in place to regulate that or to accommodate that.”
An “enforcement only” approach to immigration continues to play into national fears and anxiety that emerged after the Sept. 11 attacks, but leaders of major economic sectors, agriculture, hospitality and construction can testify to the important contribution of immigrant workers, the archbishop said. “Enforcement is always going to be part of any immigration policy, but we have to rationalize it and humanize it,” he said.
“The president talks about having the biggest economy ever, but you’re not going to have the biggest economy ever without taking into account the labor force participation of the immigrants.”
Ashley Feasley, a legal scholar at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law and former director for Migration Policy and Public Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, noted the vast increase in funding for the Department of Homeland Security over the next four years—$170 billion. The nation, she warned, is likely to see “massive increases of individual detention facilities in rural and suburban areas, massive increases of hiring for ICE and [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and a lot of impacts when we think about families who could be caught up in some of our collateral enforcement actions that occur.”
Preparing to respond to the victims of that collateral enforcement was on the mind of Archbishop Gomez, who described how his L.A. archdiocese was establishing programs to support the families left behind after the deportation of a breadwinner. Other efforts assist deportees in readjusting to the societies they land in. The archbishop believes these initiatives are likely to become prominent ministries in the near term for the U.S. Catholic Church.
That pastoral response will be accompanied by determined advocacy efforts, the church leaders said.
“We have been bombarded with so many decisions and so many actions that are very concerning to us; it’s almost hard to know where to start,” Bishop Seitz said. “But we’ve got some basic principles that guide our actions.
“In our own quiet, committed way, we know that we need to speak out……in the halls of Congress, yes, but we also need to speak to our communities, to our congregations, and we’ve been working very hard on a plan to better educate and inform people in our communities.
“We know that what we can certainly do is pray, and don’t underestimate its power, but we don’t stop at praying,” he added. “Prayer moves us to action.”
These church leaders called on U.S. policymakers to recognize the reality of immigrant families and the contributions they have made during a period of systemic breakdown of immigration policy, urging once again a serious effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform that would provide a meaningful path to citizenship for the many thousands who today live in fear.
“I think we’ll have immigration reform very soon,” said Archbishop Gomez. “Let’s keep working for that. That’s my prayer and my dream, that we can get something done finally.”
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