Pope Leo XIV’s theme for the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, celebrated this year on Sunday, Sept. 27, is “Even just one of these children.” The theme draws attention to the minors directly involved in the experience of migration and to God’s promise that “whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Mk 9:37). Naming new challenges to the Gospel priorities of hospitality and justice, the pope has chosen to focus specifically on threats to the dignity and rights of our youngest sisters and brothers. 

I write from Boston, where immigration is part of the city’s DNA—including its Catholic community’s origins—just as immigrant origins are foundational to broader U.S. history and identity. And yet new threats facing migrant youth suggest the need is great to heed this papal invitation to protection and care. Throughout Boston’s parishes, schools and service agencies, immigrants remain fearful and in hiding due to new enforcement tactics, including deportation quotas, detention practices and the exposure of sensitive locations. 

A law-and-order posture has fueled these and other protocols, such as the outsourcing of detention to notorious prisons within and outside of the United States, the deliberate defiance of due process rights and the introduction of violent tactics. 

Community members are unsure whether they should send their children to school, attend Mass or risk availing themselves of food pantries. International students have had visas revoked. Students from mixed-status families are missing classes. I am reminded of a young man, Dario, whose harrowing detention testimony I witnessed at a migration and law conference earlier this year through his Catholic Charities attorney. 

The mass deportation campaign has increasingly affected immigrant families and their children—many of whom are U.S. citizens. Children and youth are silent victims of detention and removal practices that detrimentally influence their physical, psychological, social and spiritual well-being at a formative time in their lives.

Violence against children

Despite promises to target “the worst of the worst,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is detaining more immigrants who do not have a criminal record than at any other point since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to newly released federal data. More than half of the 49,000 people ICE arrested in July did not have a criminal record. Instead, they included individuals accused of civil violations, including individuals married to U.S. citizens, with revoked temporary legal status or who had entered legally and were pursuing asylum claims.  

These new tactics are taking an unprecedented toll on migrant children and their families. Between January 2025 and March 2026, ICE detained more than 6,200 immigrant children. Only about 1,500 children were released to relatives in the United States; approximately 3,600 were deported. Studies show that separation from parents and guardians, especially of younger children, can lead to irreparable brain development damage, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation and developmental regressions that affect the child’s physical health. They also suffer material hardship from the loss of a breadwinning parent, as well as social and spiritual harms at formative times of their lives. These effects persist even after children are reunified with parents.

The administration has also led efforts to end funding for attorneys to represent unaccompanied children in deportation proceedings, resulting in their increased deportations. Many of these children entered the United States seeking protection and reunification with their families. Children who self-represent in court have almost no chance of obtaining relief from deportation. Immigration judges issued deportation orders for more than 18,000 children in June of this year alone, a 78 percent increase from January. 

In addition, ICE has detained pregnant and postpartum women and nursing mothers, ignoring a long-standing policy directing them not to do so. Harrowing reports of miscarriages by women who have been detained and of nursing mothers being separated from their children illuminate the urgency of these threats to women and children’s dignity, agency and health.

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Tex., has housed hundreds of children, and families detained there have filed more than 700 complaints over poor medical care, spoiled food and the lack of support for children in acute mental and emotional distress. Children have been held there five times longer than a court order permits. Children detained in Dilley have described its effects through letters and drawings: A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Tex., detained for 70 days, writes “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” A 9-year-old detained for 113 days pleads “[I] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.” And a 14-year-old from Honduras who was living in Hicksville, N.Y., who had been detained for 45 days confesses, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”

As elsewhere, students in Massachusetts have been targeted and detained and had visas revoked. Zeneyda Barrera, an 18-year-old high schooler and asylum seeker in Lynn, Mass., was arrested after allegedly pushing her 12-year-old brother; Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, a Milford High School student, was arrested on his way to volleyball practice for allegedly overstaying his student visa. ICE had been looking for his father and he was driving his dad’s car, so he was a “collateral arrest.” In Chelsea, ICE broke the rear window of Daniel Flores-Martinez’s car and dragged him out of the vehicle while he was on his way to church. His wife and three children were in the car, including one child who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy. 

Video footage of the street arrest of Massachusetts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk at the hands of masked ICE agents in plainclothes went viral, drawing comparisons to kidnapping. Seemingly arbitrary and retaliatory student visa revocations have raised serious concerns across the country. After over 100 lawsuits resulted in more than 50 restraining orders against these actions, the administration reversed course. One judge blocked the student visa revocations as arbitrary and capricious, saying they had “uniformly wreaked havoc.” Bunker Hill Community College cancelled all of its study abroad programs over fears about international students being detained during re-entry. 

The student visa revocation cases point to a strategy new to this administration of targeting documented people and then “de-documenting” them so as to render them deportable and run up the deportation numbers for the news cycle, as the legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom has noted. Hence, from young children to undergraduate and graduate students, new protocols combined with eroded protections regularly threaten the dignity of our young people.

Prior administrations maintained an ICE policy that avoided enforcement operations at sensitive locations, such as houses of worship, schools, hospitals, funerals, courts, food banks and protests. (The bipartisan rationale had been for ICE to avoid the bad optics of making arrests at First Amendment-sensitive places like churches and protests, and to encourage immigration and criminal court compliance by taking immigration arrests at courthouses off the table.) On Jan. 20, 2025, the administration rescinded those safeguards, effectively greenlighting ICE arrests at sensitive locations. As a result, families and children report increasing fear, growing absenteeism, stress and poorer academic performance as well as declines in Mass attendance. 

The church speaks out

Against this backdrop, Pope Leo, in his World Day of Migrants and Refugees Message, lifts up the millions of children and adolescents annually forced to leave their nations of origin as the most vulnerable group of migrants. He attends to their “concrete faces, who have unique stories, and call on our conscience.” War, poverty, violence and environmental disasters compel migration, yet relocation often brings with it the “anguish of separation,” loss of close family members and consignment to the dangers of life in shadow societies. Pope Leo reminds us, too, of victimization by “trafficking and exploitation, the recruitment of minors for use in armed conflicts, sexual violence, forced marriages, and the atrocities they have suffered or witnessed during their travels. Their dignity is trampled upon in countless ways.”

The pope’s message calls for the protection and dignity of every single child and adolescent in the context of our civil and religious institutions alike, in our personal lives and in our wider webs of community. He calls Christian communities not to delegate the task of offering welcome to certain associations with a particular charism, but to foster the integration of migrants in ways that surpass “the mentality of mere assistance.” In this way mutual respect, friendship and solidarity can replace the “solitude, isolation and rejection” that often affect the children of migrants. 

When the Trump administration announced plans to double its federal immigration detention capacity earlier this year, Bishop Brendan Cahill, chair of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Migration, called the move a “moral inflection point” that “should challenge the conscience of every American.” “[T]he federal government does not have a positive track record when it comes to detaining large numbers of people, especially families.” Bishop Cahill added that it is the “private prison industry who stands to gain the most from this supercharging of immigration detention.” The profiteering and politicking often driving harmful migration tactics are squarely at odds with the inherent dignity of those reduced to pawns on a chessboard, to use the phrase of Pope Francis.

Catholic teaching holds that any immigration enforcement efforts should be targeted, proportional and humane. Enforcement mechanisms, including deportations, should focus on genuine dangers to public safety and attend to responsibilities to uphold the God-given dignity of all human persons. For the transcendent dignity of every human person, loved into being by God, stands at the heart of the Christian tradition—this dignity is neither conferred by citizenship status nor subject to removal. 

Mass deportations underway today, however, raise significant concerns about protecting the rights of the most precarious among us. Harmful rhetoric about violent criminals disconnected from migrant realities on the ground have paved the way for an indiscriminate deportation force that dehumanizes migrants. Such fear-based claims often wield a stronger influence on attitudes than do facts about immigrants’ presence, contributions or relative rates of crime. Immigrant youth are most vulnerable to these measures and the security-first attitudes that foster them. 

Dignity and solidarity

Even as the church upholds the right of a sovereign nation to serve the common good of its population, this right is tempered by its duties to defend human dignity, to pursue social justice and to protect the global common good. 

In their Special Message on migration issues last November, the U.S. bishops affirmed as a body that they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” They forthrightly lamented the climate of fear and the profiling and vilification of immigrants, and raised concerns about detention conditions, the lack of available pastoral care and threats to formerly protected areas like houses of worship, hospitals and schools. Drawing on insights from Scripture as well as their experiences consoling family members who have been separated from their loved ones, the bishops took a stand with migrants, prayed for an end to violence and advocated for meaningful reform. 

Their actions are a reminder that solidarity with our young migrant brothers and sisters and firm defense of their dignity in the face of fearmongering and direct threats is a moral duty according to longstanding church teaching, the concerns of recent popes and instruction from the body of U.S. bishops. Pursuing the common good demands giving meaningful attention to root causes of asylum seeking and protecting universal human rights—not indiscriminate mass deportation. Violent tactics make it all the more urgent that our migrant brothers and sisters know their church stands with them through accompaniment and advocacy alike.

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are replete not only with injunctions regarding hospitality to strangers but also with examples of families uprooted and migrating. Abraham is called forth from his homeland to establish a great nation in the Promised Land; Jacob’s family migrates from Israel to Egypt because of a great famine; Moses leads the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt in search of religious and political freedom; and Mary and Joseph flee their home in Palestine into Egypt. 

The sanctity and social mission of the family developed in the Catholic tradition reorient the conversation on immigration away from deportation quotas or political point-scoring. Families comprise our most intimate relationships such that protracted separation threatens our very human subjectivity. Policies that undermine family unity frustrate this core relationally and fracture their integrity in profound ways.

In his recent encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo frames migration in terms of dignity and justice. He puts the principle of the universal destination of goods in the forefront to remind readers that the goods of the earth are intended for everyone, not for the hoarding of those select few with the luck to be born on certain sides of borders. Consistent with Catholic social thought, he affirms the right to private property but reminds us of its social function—that it is not absolute, but rather subordinate, to this principle of the universal destination of created goods. Even as he acknowledges nations’ rights to defend borders, which must be adjudicated in light of the right to migrate, he calls society’s treatment of migrants and refugees a “litmus test” for social justice, revealing whether a community’s “sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity.”

The impact of increasingly traumatic enforcement and detention practices on children and families exposes ways in which unjust structures and harmful attitudes—understood as structural sins—undermine the sanctity of the family, endanger inviolable dignity and threaten the common good. Drawing on St. John Paul II, who introduced the language of structures of sin into the Catholic social tradition, Pope Leo underscores how injustices do not arise solely from individual wrong choices, but also from structures, mechanisms and cultural claims that produce inequality “almost automatically.”

Hence Leo’s broader framework of migration ethics calls us to exceeding hospitality, charity and largesse to ensure just relationships between migrants and receiving communities, whether employers, officers of the court or neighbors. It also means doing more to protect the right to remain, that is, the right not to have to migrate. In the U.S. context in particular, Pope Leo’s livestream message upon receipt of the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal in July underscored how our nation’s flourishing is tied to the way we treat people who are or may be dependent—including migrants: “In every generation, those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character.” 

Good neighbors

Forming our consciences around migration entails distinguishing rhetoric, campaign promises and misinformation from reality. The echo chambers of our curated newsfeeds and algorithms too often abet sinful tendencies, hardening our reception. Pope Francis warned in “Fratelli Tutti” about how habits of consumerist comfort ingrained by social media distractions incubate false ideologies that can manipulate consciences and insulate them from different perspectives. As followers of Jesus in the present age, we must guard against narratives that dehumanize, misinform and sow division.

While the United States celebrated the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence with rallies and fireworks this past July, the U.S.-born pope traveled to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to pray at a migrant cemetery and celebrate Mass for the island’s residents and new arrivals—just as Francis did during his first trip outside of Rome as pope in July 2013. The timing of Leo’s trip evoked the founding of the United States by immigrants and the ongoing Christian obligation to uphold their dignity. 

In Leo’s homily on the parable of the good Samaritan at Lampedusa, he invited listeners to likewise become neighbors: to draw near, weep before another’s pain and enter into the dynamic of love. In light of the forces of violence and indifference facilitating harm to migrant children today, may we find consolation in his message: “Like the Good Samaritan, we can always change our plans and direction.” For “In God we all have a safe haven, and every Christian community is called to be a reflection of it on earth.”

Kristin E. Heyer is the Joseph Chair in Theology at Boston College.