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What can I tell you? That I witnessed Pope Francis’ first miracle just hours after his death? That at the time I was far from Rome and, truthfully, scared? That the insights of the vulnerable poor into God’s ways are invaluable? Let me back up.
I live in California, and at the time Pope Francis died we were still experiencing Easter Sunday. This has a meaning many of us cannot shake. I met him on Sept. 30, 2024, as part of a delegation visiting Rome during the Synod on Synodality, and his principal questions to me were about migrants and refugees. What was happening in the United States troubled him, and he recognized that a new administration could be disastrous for vulnerable displaced people.
At that meeting, I experienced Pope Francis’ preternatural ability to take a global issue and flip it on its head, to begin with the details and struggles of daily life and then discern the big picture. Migrants were not numbers to him but individuals with lives and dreams. They were our siblings and God’s beloved.
On that sunny morning, I was in his library office at the Vatican with a small group of women from around the globe involved in pastoral leadership. He wanted to know what was happening on the ground. When we said goodbye, the Holy Father asked me to pray for him, a constant refrain of his, a reminder of his fragility and of the fact that he was always simply just one of us.
This Easter, my phone was off in the evening, so I did not know of Papa Francisco’s death until the next day, but I slept badly because I was worried. My ministry with immigrants had taken an urgent turn beyond my classroom and, as Francis might say, “into the streets.” I had planned the car routes and calculated time, but I had never been to immigration court before. The first thing on my mind as I awoke was the potential outcomes of our day in court, but then my family heard my anguished gasp at the deluge of messages. El Papa Francisco había muerto.
I got myself together in a daze. Media requests were coming in, but I put off news interviews until the evening and headed to the university where I teach. The campus was waking up as I walked into one of the stores on campus to grab a juice. The cashier was visibly sad, and we shared our grief at the loss of nuestro amado Papa Francisco. The woman’s eyes moistened as she recounted the fear of her neighbors and friends, fellow immigrants.
“Our community is suffering so much right now,” she told me. I nodded agreement. And then unexpectedly her eyes lit up at the insight that had just occurred to her: “Now el Papa is in heaven; he can do so much more for us from heaven!” The clarity of her grasp of prayer and of the promise of advocacy from our ancestors in faith has stayed with me.
To Be a Displaced Person
I was a child when my family arrived in the United States as refugees from Cuba. Although the painful memories of our days of departure are seared into my mind, I am less sure about what happened next; we were three little girls alone with our mother. But we had family in the United States (a requirement in those days for being granted refugee status), and they provided the vital bridge we were about to cross between worlds.
I hope you understand why the rest of this story has no names or places. An immigration expert put it to me this way: “Some of this [what the Trump administration is doing around immigration and deportations] is so outside of what is normal that there are no policies to follow.” The fear is not conjecture; it is reality.
As I prepare to drive to immigration court, three generations walk toward me: an older woman, a young woman and a little girl. The elder, her stoic face marked by a lifetime of struggle, begs me to keep her informed; the child looks on wide-eyed and unknowing; and the young mother hugs her daughter tight before she gets into my car. As we drive away, she confides to me that she is so terrified she considered not showing up for court. We speak about Pope Francis and his preferential love for immigrants, mirroring God’s care. We both imagine the Holy Father holding our hands. She has come, she tells me, because she has faith. I recall Pope Francis’ words to immigrant children in 2016:“Migrants are not a danger, they are in danger.”
That day in court, things could have gone very wrong. Yet at every turn human dignity and compassion were winning. As she was dismissed, the young mother’s face beamed with peace. Did she really understand everything? Had things gone as well as she thought? We looked at each other and felt the power of intercessory prayer. Yes, from heaven, Pope Francis could do so much.
A devotion to Francisco, protector of immigrants, is being born.
Pope Francis Led the Way
So where do we go from here in our care for migrants? There’s been much said since Pope Francis’ passing about his legacy: What had he accomplished? What had he left undone? But perhaps these are not the right questions to ask of a disciple of Jesus. I prefer to frame the approach needed now as he does in his book Let Us Dream: See, choose, act. What did Papa Francisco see that we need to see? What tools do we have so we can choose correctly? And how do we act following our discernment?
My ministry with vulnerable immigrants began years ago when a student came in for advising. He was a charismatic leader committed to our university’s priority of being dedicated to “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.” That afternoon he told me about being elected to lead the social justice initiatives for the student government. Then, his eyes filled with tears. He would have to decline because this was a “job,” and he couldn’t legally work. The top student in my upper division theology course lacked immigration status.
When the newly elected Pope Francis chose to visit the island of Lampedusa as his first trip, it was not the island he wanted the world to see, it was the ocean. He wanted to remember the hundreds of migrants who had died in shipwrecks off the shore. As he dropped a wreath into the lapping waves, he focused our attention on that mass grave most of us ignored.
“Immigrants dying at sea, in boats which were vehicles of hope and became vehicles of death. That is how the headlines put it,” he told the world, “It has constantly come back to me like a painful thorn in my heart. So, I felt that I had to come here today, to pray and to offer a sign of my closeness, but also to challenge our consciences lest this tragedy be repeated.”
Like Pope Francis’ broken heart, the encounter with my student precipitated the work I have done for immigrant justice since.
At this point, you might expect statistics and a clear sense of the current moment, but I cannot give you that. The situation surrounding immigration is so volatile that anything I say will be outdated in an hour. The number of legal cases challenging the current administration’s lawless abuse of immigration laws and the dignity of immigrants is staggering. Although most courts have upheld the rights of “noncitizens” to due process, that we are having to debate this at all tells us how far we have descended from the guarantees of the 14th Amendment that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Any person. Two words that can truly make the difference between life or death.
Taking an Honest Look at Ourselves
To pay attention means to look at what is happening now, and also to learn from what has happened before. The description of the United States as a “nation of immigrants” is generally traced to John F. Kennedy’s book A Nation of Immigrants, published when he was a senator. In a similarly titled speech in 1963, President Kennedy described this nation as constituted of the descendants of people “who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to the United States to build a new life, to make a new opportunity for themselves and their children.”
Kennedy stressed that it was “not a burden but a privilege” to embody a spirit of welcome and opportunity. He saw this as central to preserving the “inheritance” he defined as the “great experiment of democracy.” He foresaw that without a commitment to the truth that the majority of this nation were descendants of displaced peoples, the very foundation of this nation would be in danger. Was he right?
The problem (or maybe the purpose?) of selective amnesia is that it strips away history’s capacity to offer a corrective to the present. We might often hear in opposition to immigrant rights that they are lawbreakers and that “my family came here the right way.” As we discern our response we can ask: What time period are we talking about?
A Complicated Past
President Kennedy surely remembered that in the 1840s, half a million desperate Irish immigrants came to the eastern United States fleeing the potato famine. At that point there was no right or wrong way to come; people came. Roughly at the same time, the United States went to war with Mexico, a large sovereign nation sharing the North American continent. Fueled by a desire for the shipping ports that could be built on the West Coast, the United States fought all the way to Mexico City. To save itself as a country, Mexico, which just two decades before had been New Spain, agreed to the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It lost half its territory, its history, its people.
The diverse peoples of New Spain—Indigenous, Black, Spanish and their mixed-race descendants—had lived on those lands for at least 375 years. Believing that might makes right, people from the east, the United States, came: taking their lands, displacing and, when possible, erasing them. These are the lands of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and portions of Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. In other conflicts, other territories with deep histories as New Spain were also lost, including all of Texas and Florida. As many members of these historical communities often say, they never crossed the border, the border crossed them.
In the 19th century, the discovery of gold in the newly seized lands of California ignited a new migration from China. While there was a boom economy, workers were welcomed, but soon sentiment turned and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed. It banned Chinese workers from entering the United States, even to reunite with their families. Astonishingly, this act was not formally repealed until 1943. This was the very first law restricting migration.
Back on the East Coast, in the span of about 50 years, close to 25 million people sought to immigrate from Europe. There were no laws applying to groups; only individuals might be turned away if they were suspected of being “prostitutes or convicts.” Out of those many millions, only 1 percent were not admitted.
However, as the 20th century moved forward, nativist public sentiment turned once again against immigrants. Laws were passed requiring European immigrants to pass literacy tests, and an Asiatic Barred Zone was created affecting most of Asia. But none of these immigration policies affected the American continent from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. There were no laws controlling the free flow of peoples within the Americas.
It was in the 1920s, following the surge of refugees fleeing Europe after World War I, that quotas were established. It bears noting that the American continent was still not part of this quota system. The racist underpinnings of immigration laws become clear when we look at how the quotas intentionally boosted Northern European numbers while curtailing Southern European, African and Asian migration. It was also not until the 1920s that the first deportations, visas and border patrol system were created.
War displaces the vulnerable and divides people, and so World War II’s horrors resulted in new immigration measures, such as the Alien Registration Program. Questions of migration, which had been tied to economic issues through the Department of Labor, were now revised as security issues and moved to the Department of Justice. World War II prompted an exceptionally shameful chapter in U.S. history: Executive Order 9066, which forcibly incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps. Families who were American citizens lost homes and businesses solely because of their Japanese ancestry. Many returned home after the war only to find their properties confiscated, people living in their homes, their trucks, farms and orchards rezoned or sold.
With labor shortages brought on by the war, the Bracero Program was instituted in 1942 to recruit agricultural workers to the United States—after many Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) had been forcibly deported during the Great Depression. The bracero (the word means “hard work with your arms”) workers had no path to permanent residence and were often exploited and exposed to dangerous chemicals. In 1954, with xenophobic sentiment again on the rise, the Eisenhower administration carried out Operation Wetback (using a racial slur against Hispanic persons). As The Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “border patrolmen and immigration officers, acting on intelligence gathered over a period of months, will sweep through…and ferret out illegal Mexican aliens.”
In 2015 a very different Los Angeles Times took stock, reporting that “the Eisenhower-era operation…was accompanied by scores of deaths and shattered families. In some cases, U.S. citizens were apprehended and deported alongside unauthorized immigrants.... In the pre-civil rights era, few spoke up on behalf of the immigrants....”
The question of migration continued to vex a nation that had never approached it comprehensively or even intentionally, only haphazardly. Some clamored for humanitarian laws, and a few were passed, including the 1948 Displaced Persons Act—the first asylum legislation admitting displaced persons from Europe and allowing some already in the country to regularize their status. The 1953 Refugee Relief Act also provided some visas for refugees, primarily from Europe, and was followed by targeted programs for refugees from communist countries.
It is not until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that migration caps were applied to the American continent. This created a system of preferences in place until recently: 1) family reunification, 2) employment and 3) refugees, in that order. During the Reagan administration, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act allowed almost three million immigrants to normalize their status while also increasing border enforcement and employer requirements. Although helpful to individuals, the legislation did not address the underlying issues with the immigration system.
In 1990, Congress created a category called Temporary Protected Status for asylum seekers from designated nations with extremely dangerous conditions because of war or political instability. The current Trump administration has revoked T.P.S. designation from several of these nations—and all are set to expire eventually. The laws tightening employer sanctions have also created a cascading effect of constant immigration upheaval, and repeated attempts at comprehensive immigration reform, including the bipartisan Dream Act, have failed in Congress. In response, President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, in 2012 through an executive order. It has been repeatedly challenged.
Acting for Others
That morning in immigration court, I saw a courtroom full of young immigrants trying to do the right thing: go through the process, follow the law. If their stories are anything like that of the young mother I accompanied, they are fleeing persecution, torture and death in parts of the world where the powerful operate with impunity and lawlessness prevails. Earlier that week we had been to Catholic Charities and saw how the cuts to federal funds for refugee resettlement have decimated their programs. As the downcast social worker explained, the lawyers working on asylum cases had been let go. I could see the painful results: In that courtroom no one had a lawyer. What can any of us do?
In 2017, Pope Francis established a special section in the Roman Curia for migrants and refugees. It has articulated three simple overarching principles that may help guide our actions and advocacy in the United States.
First, people should be able to stay in their own lands. Most migration comes from being forced from one’s land. Pope Francis is explicit about what is necessary for people to be able to stay and thrive in their own countries: the three Ts of tierra, techo, trabajo (“land, lodging, labor”). When these necessities are lacking, people are forced to migrate.
Second, people should be free to move to sustain life and the lives of their families. Simply put, immigrant rights are human rights. When conditions cannot sustain a dignified life, people have a right to migrate in search of better conditions. This is the history of humanity, and especially of the United States. Curtailing this right to movement causes suffering and death. People today move because of armed conflicts, because poverty and the widening economic gap have created conditions where 10 percent of the world’s population does not have access to safe and nutritious food. And as we read in “Laudato Si’,” wars and hunger are related to the growing instability of our climate and the loss of ecosystems and habitats.
Finally, the third principle is: People should be free to return to their lands. The focus is on freedom as a necessary condition for human dignity.
What is happening in our world right now is overwhelming, but Catholics need to stay informed about the legal challenges. Understanding the problems and the laws will help provide hope for relief for the most vulnerable. We are all protagonists in this story, and each of us is called to active love of immigrants.
So what can you personally do?
Stay informed. Show up. Speak up. Cultivate community and a sense of radical interconnectedness. Volunteer with immigrants’ rights organizations. Teach others. Get training to provide pastoral care. Raise money. Highlight the beauty of others. Engage your heart. And of course, look to heaven:
Francisco, protector of immigrants, pray for us.
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How to Help
The Vatican’s migrants and refugees section developed four action points to follow with regard to migrants and refugees in local communities.
1. Welcome. What can you do to create a welcoming climate for migrants? “Migration should be safe, legal and orderly, and the decision to migrate voluntary.”
2. Protect. What can you do to fulfill the duty to safeguard migrants grounded in the centrality of the human person?
3. Promote. It isn’t enough to arrive at a new place; the dignity of persons requires that we work to help those staying long-term to develop as human beings and contribute to society.
4. Integrate. This does not mean erasing anyone’s roots but creating the conditions for them to be full members of the community while undoing systems that perpetuate marginality.
