Washington’s Cardinal Robert McElroy issued another sharp denouncement of Trump administration immigration enforcement and deportation policies on Sept. 27, adding to the growing collection of such pronouncements from bishops and U.S. church leaders around the country in recent months.
During the homily for the annual Mass for Migrants at St. Matthew Cathedral, the cardinal recalled how a Scripture professor once instructed him “when you examine a parable of Jesus, look for the character you most dislike and that is you.”
In the Gospel reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan, he noted that it was easy to find the most dislikeable characters, the priest and the Levite who pass in silence by the wounded and abandoned victim by the side of the road.
“For the last year and a half,” Cardinal McElroy said, “the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.”
But now, he suggested, the American public can no longer pass by in silence as the administration’s campaign, one the public was previously assured would only target the worst offenders among undocumented people living in the United States, has expanded month after month, following a capricious and imperiling course. “Poorly trained” agents who once created mayhem across Minneapolis and targeted working people at Home Depot parking lots, now follow a quieter but ambitious program of up to 2,000 arrests a day that has delivered many thousands into detention and deportation.
Citizens and law-abiding immigrants, people with families to support, have been swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, protesters and immigrants have been killed or seriously injured, many deported to dangerous home countries or nations they barely remember. And as at each stage the anti-immigrant crusade grew more indifferent to human suffering and the demands of constitutional order, the American public has remained largely silent. That cannot continue, Cardinal McElroy said.
“We have been told for over a year that the reason the federal government is expelling immigrants is that they broke the law by entering or staying in the United States,” the cardinal said. But in recent weeks the government’s own decisions have “shown us how hollow this claim is.”
“More than one million immigrants who came to the United States for asylum or as refugees under the [Temporary Protected Status] program were legally admitted here because of the danger that a return to their homeland would pose for them,” he said. “Now, our government has decided that these endangered immigrants will be deported from the United States and returned to danger in their homeland.”
“These refugees never broke any law. They are being deported because of a general desire to exclude immigrants from American society,” he said. “They are being deported because the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigrant history is rampant once again in our nation. We know this, but we just cross the road to the other side and pass on by.”
But “Jesus weeps…for the children who have been arrested, detained, transported to far-off centers with terrible living conditions, and cut off from their families,” Cardinal McElroy said. “For us as a nation we can pass on by no more.”
“We must stop, recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name, and fight every dimension of it. We must seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil or replace them. We must shed our identities as priests and Levites and become like the Good Samaritan who recognized no boundaries in rescuing the victim by the side of the road.”
A record 50,925 immigration arrests were made in August, according to ICE officials. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research project, reports that in mid-July almost 66,000 people were held at ICE and Border Patrol detention sites. Almost 71 percent of those detained had never been convicted of a crime, TRAC reports, and many of those who had been convicted of a crime had been found liable for minor offenses, including traffic violations.
According to a recent analysis from TRAC, while the federal government is always represented in immigration court by an attorney, the same cannot be said for immigrants seeking asylum or protection from deportation. TRAC reports that in August less than one in four (24 percent) of immigrants, including unaccompanied children, had an attorney to assist them in Immigration Court cases when a removal order was issued.
And conditions at detention centers around the country have been increasingly deplored as inhumane, overcrowded and potentially deadly. In fact at least 57 people have died in immigration detention since Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency, more than double the number of deaths recorded from the previous four years combined.
Advocates say the true number of deaths in detention is likely higher. They charge that as the death toll rises, ICE officials have taken steps to hide the numbers of the deceased by ignoring or altering reporting mandates.
To continue to ignore the plight of undocumented residents, betrays two great legacies, one religious and one civic, that have been the hallmark of American life, Cardinal McElroy said.
The religious legacy derives from the Book of Deuteronomy. “Moses calls the people of Israel to remember that they had been slaves in Egypt,” Cardinal McElroy said, “strangers in the land, homeless, victimized and outcasts.”
“Moses instructs Israel to always keep this history at the forefront of their minds and let it fashion their most fundamental attitudes and actions toward the stranger and the alien, the widow and the orphan who might seek a home among the people of God.”
The second legacy, he said, is “a reverence for immigration, which has built us up into the great nation that we love so deeply.”
“It was not people of great wealth who came to our shores,” Cardinal McElroy said, “but the poor and the dispossessed, those seeking freedom from oppression and opportunities to build new lives in this new land.”
But over the last 18 months, according to Cardinal McElroy, the nation “has cast aside both the spiritual and moral tradition of the Book of Deuteronomy and the centerpiece of American culture that our love of immigrants constitutes,” replacing it with “suspicion, division, cruelty and violence.”
Now “we must recognize that in abandoning the words of the Book of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty we are losing our soul as a nation,” he said. Before the nation’s eyes must be held up “the families that are being broken apart, the fear that consumes the undocumented communities, the children who are in pain.”
“We must act now and act together,” Cardinal McElroy said. “For Jesus weeps, and he will continue to weep until we go to the side of the road, lift up the victim, embrace him and make his pain our own.”
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