Catholic immigration advocates may have been caught “flat-footed,” as one put it, by Donald J. Trump’s ferocious return to Washington, but many of them began regrouping and hashing out next steps this week at a gathering in New York. The event, hosted by the Center for Migration Studies, offered immigration advocates, attorneys and direct service providers from across the country a chance to meet and make sense of what has been happening to their programs and the people they serve as immigration enforcement actions gathered steam around the country.
“We have to have a better and bolder response” to meet this critical moment, Dylan Corbett, the executive director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Tex., told delegates during the concluding moments of the conference on Sept. 16.
“If there is any institution in this country that can stop what is happening, it is the Catholic Church,” Michele Pistone, a professor of law at Villanova University and faculty director for the Strategic Initiative for Migrants + Refugees, said. “And we can’t wait for the leadership to lead us; we need to lead them.”
During a keynote address on Sept. 15, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso said that the Trump administration’s commitment to a national campaign of mass deportations “is real; it’s happening; and because of the recent appropriations bill, it’s only going to escalate.”
“What we’re seeing is that migrants are scapegoats in a crisis with much deeper roots—ethical, social, economic and political,” he said. “Migrants are the unfortunate canaries in the coal mine.”
“We can’t ignore the seams that are falling apart in the American project,” Bishop Seitz told the conference. Noting “another frightening example of political violence” in the murder on Sept. 10 of conservative activist Charles Kirk, Bishop Seitz said, “It’s up to leadership to set the tone, and our political leadership today is both setting a deeply troubling tone and also using the instruments of state for politicized and frightful means, including how we approach immigration enforcement.”
He warned that the nation’s “slide into authoritarianism” had to be acknowledged. “Scholars tell us that things like this don’t happen overnight; they happen slowly at first and then very quickly, and the vulnerable and people who are different are among the first casualties.”
Despite this grave assessment of the times, Bishop Seitz urged the immigration advocates and service providers to continue their work in hope, so that “we’re working towards rebuilding, as Pope Leo said … ‘a world where power is tamed by conscience, and law is at the service of human dignity.’”
“We need what Leo has called both a new ‘economics of hope’ and a new ‘politics of hope.’”
After two days reviewing a somber litany of challenges and difficulties created by the administration’s deportation-first policy, many at the conference, held at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, said it was time for the U.S. church to step up and push back. They spoke of a three-step campaign beginning with a harm-reduction effort to assist families affected by deportation or living in fear because of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence in their communities. Education and outreach to the broader Catholic community was the next step, many suggested, followed by the creation of more opportunities to show solidarity for the nation’s immigrant communities through service, advocacy and protest.
Several delegates pointed out that while Mr. Trump galvanized support from white Catholics, even enjoying more support in 2024 from Latino Catholics than he had in previous campaigns, many Catholic voters now find themselves troubled by the practical implications of the administration’s enforcement-focused immigration policy. Gallup has tracked a historic surge of support for immigrants in recent polling.
Todd Scribner, the assistant director of education and outreach for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Migration and Refugee Services, said U.S. bishops were strategizing with other national Catholic entities to begin a program of “post deportation support” to families directly affected by deportation or detention and to establish another national outreach effort focused on “formation.”
“We’ve got to make sure that Catholics are aware and understand Catholic teaching on the immigration issue,” he said.
The Rev. Bryan Massingale, in a presentation on Sept. 16, suggested some reasons that effort will likely prove challenging for U.S. bishops. Father Massingale is a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University. A campaign to defend immigrants and change public policy on immigration, he said, must acknowledge the racism inherent in the current clampdown on people with irregular immigration status, many of whom have been living and working and raising families in the United States without incident for decades.
The administration’s accelerating deportation regime is more than an expression of a wrong-headed and immoral policy but of patriarchy and white supremacy, he said. That is a disquieting truth that, despite past statements in support of immigrants, the U.S. bishops’ conference will struggle to express, according to Father Massingale.
The bishops, he said, have previously released well-intentioned statements and position papers meant to confront immigration policy that were too isolated from issues of race and white supremacy. Those efforts, Father Massingale said, have been fatally hamstrung by the conference’s unwillingness to discomfort white Catholics even as a kind of national terror descends on immigrants and people of color.
Donald Kerwin, vice president at Jesuit Refugee Service, reminded the conference that dislocation and fear are not limited to the nation’s immigrant communities. The refugee resettlement and asylum process, he said, has essentially ground to a halt under the Trump administration. That sudden shutdown left thousands of refugees, many of whom were in transit to the United States, in a bureaucratic limbo around the world.
He described JRS’s exasperating and mostly futile struggle to rescue its overseas programs during the chaotic first months of the Trump administration as the Department of Government Efficiency targeted spending on refugees because of alleged wastefulness and fraud. It was that evaluation process that he charged was wasteful and fraudulent, not the life-saving programs that, in the end, were almost all canceled.
“This has been an administration that’s very skilled at destroying things,” Mr. Kerwin said. “It’s very bad at building things. It’s good at walls; it’s bad at bridges.”
Despite the devastating cuts to international aid and abandonment of asylum seekers and refugees, the people themselves, he said, are still out there, still looking to the United States as a destination of hope. And, Mr. Kerwin said, the church is still doing what it can to serve them at the refugee camps where they have been marooned or in reintegrating into the societies they have been returned to.
It is Catholic social teaching, he suggested, that can offer a framework to respond to the enforcement onslaught being directed at residents with irregular immigration status in the United States. “The right to stay, migrate and return is a framework that I’m thinking about and coming back to over and over again,” Mr. Kerwin said. “It maintains that in every case, decisions on staying or migrating for people—which are really impossible, difficult, consequential decisions—ought to be safe and voluntary decisions. They ought to be the fruit of a free choice…. That should be our goal. We should be creating those kinds of conditions around the world.”
“If you can’t adequately feed your children or you live in a war-torn country or you’re a young person without any prospects in your home community, you have a right to seek better conditions—in your own country or elsewhere. That’s Catholic teaching.”
If American Catholics “don’t know that,” Mr. Kerwin said, “they need to know that.”
During his address, Bishop Seitz said he was deeply concerned about the deployment of the U.S. military and details from federal law enforcement agencies in support of immigration enforcement. “I’m also very disturbed by the recent Supreme Court decision,” he said, “that gives the government…carte blanche to target people for enforcement because they look Latino, because they speak Spanish or because they work hard.”
He thinks the inevitable impact on families ought to provide a rallying point for U.S. Catholics. “The majority of immigrant families are of mixed status,” he said. “What the administration is doing right now means that we’re forcing Solomon’s choice on families: whether to take their children to a country they do not know or leave them behind.”
“How cruel for our country to impose this on a family and put this burden on children,” Bishop Seitz said. “And nothing good can come from this,” he added. “What we’re ultimately going to do is generate a class of wounded, alienated young Americans, and we’re going to break up healthy families. There’s nothing Christian or Catholic about that.”
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