Rows of heavily armed federal agents, some on horseback, others dismounting from armored military vehicles, fanned out across Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park on July 7. The show of force included an escort from the California National Guard. Park visitors fled before the advancing agents and others watched in shock as the exercise processed before them.
That militaristic display, conducted near an adjoining community of largely Mexican and Central American immigrants, is part of a national “campaign of intimidation,” J. Kevin Appleby, a senior fellow at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, says. Masked federal agents, “acting like a secret police,” intending “to intimidate us all, to scare people, to get them to self-deport.”
Staying put or self-deportation?
In the coming months, many undocumented U.S. residents may indeed accept the self-deportation urged by the Trump administration as a vast machinery of detention and deportation spearheaded by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency moves into higher gear. For others who have been in the United States for years or even decades, many with U.S.-born children or Dreamers who arrived as children and have known no other life, the decision to self-deport will be much harder to make.
But many immigrants, Mr. Appleby says, have no recourse but to take their chances and remain, even if it means going into a kind of hiding. That is because conditions in their home countries—particularly authoritarian states like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, or Haiti, where criminal gangs maintain a chaotic reign—represent a greater threat to their lives and well-being than a knock at the door from ICE agents.
Under the provisions of President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” an additional $165 billion over the next decade has been set aside for the Department of Homeland Security. ICE is on the verge of a vast expansion that will include the construction of detention facilities across the country and the hiring of thousands of new agents.
The New York Times reports that ICE’s annual budget will spike from its current $8 billion to $28 billion, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. A new offensive is beginning that may mean the arrest and detention of millions of individuals who have been living in the United States without legal status, many of whom reside among the nation’s 4.7 million mixed-status households.
Members of the Trump administration claim that 20 to 30 million undocumented people live in the United States. A more sober analysis sets the figure at between 11 and 14 million. (In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated the undocumented population at 11 million.) Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the president’s primary enforcer of mass deportation, appears determined to proceed whatever the cost and the social and family disruption it will cause.
Mr. Appleby fears that the sharp increase in resources means that ICE is on the verge of an indiscriminate enforcement campaign “They’re already deporting people and arresting people at a record rate [under the existing] budget,” he says. “If they have [an additional] $16 to $20 billion a year to spend, then it’ll be deportation on steroids.”
“You’re going to see more detention centers being constructed like the one in the Everglades”—a facility that has been quickly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”—and “you’re going to have family detention centers being built.”
And a rapid increase in personnel may lead to crises in professionalism and constitutional violations, Mr. Appleby says, pointing out that the Border Patrol has struggled for years to “get quality candidates.” Underqualified and inexperienced personnel “may not have the training or sufficient knowledge of the law to perform their duties lawfully.”
“Inevitably, it’s going to affect not only undocumented immigrants but legal immigrants and U.S. citizens as well—anyone who’s not born here and, frankly, of a certain race are in danger,” he says. U.S. citizens are likely to be caught up in the campaign, especially new citizens. “I think if they had their druthers, they would denaturalize them and deport them as well.”
Parallels from the past
Some may dismiss such concerns as hyperbole or paranoia, but in recent weeks, temporary protected status has been abruptly revoked for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who instantly became vulnerable to deportation, and Mr. Miller has frequently expressed a desire to reassess not only birthright citizenship but the legitimacy of the naturalization of thousands of new citizens. The simple truth is that these worst-case scenarios are not only possible outcomes, they have happened before in the United States.
In 1931, as the Depression first began to bite, President Herbert Hoover initiated a policy of “American jobs for Americans,” urging “Mexican repatriation” in a bid to reserve collapsing job opportunities for the native-born. Raids began across the country but were conducted with the greatest intensity around Los Angeles.
That compelled exodus may have affected as many as two million people of Mexican ancestry, half of them born in the United States. According to one historian, “Authorities ignored the fact that some of the repatriated people were naturalized U.S. citizens and that others were citizens by virtue of birth in the United States.”
Under the Eisenhower administration in 1954, another campaign, the odiously designated “Operation Wetback,” similarly began a haphazard campaign of raids that in the end meant the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants—among them an unknown number of U.S. citizens. Mr. Trump has suggested the Eisenhower program as a model for the militarized nationwide deportation offensive he envisions.
“It could get really ugly,” Mr. Appleby says, “and the church won’t be immune to it.”
On Mr. Trump’s first day back in office, his administration rescinded the D.H.S. policy that prohibited enforcement acts at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals and churches. Under new instructions, ICE agents can use their own discretion about conducting operations at previously off-limits sites.
“They might tread more carefully around places of worship, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to take enforcement actions around churches,” Mr. Appleby says. And that will mean that “people don’t go to church, they don’t go to Mass, they don’t take the sacraments because they’re worried that there’ll be an enforcement raid of some sort or that ICE vehicles will be outside the parish door.”
‘Our people are living in fear’
That phenomenon appears to already be in motion. In May, the Diocese of Nashville experienced a significant drop in church attendance because of large-scale ICE operations in the area. A statement was issued to Nashville parishes acknowledging the aggressive ICE presence and reminding parishioners that “no Catholic is obligated to attend Mass on Sunday if doing so puts their safety at risk.”
On July 8, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino issued a dispensation from weekly Mass attendance altogether to Catholics in his community because of immigration enforcement.
“There is a real fear gripping many in our parish communities that if they venture out into any kind of public setting they will be arrested by immigration officers,” the bishop wrote in a statement on July 9. “Sadly, that includes attending Mass.”
San Bernardino Catholics, he believes, “would be in church if not for this threat to their safety and their family unity…. With all the worry and anxiety that they are feeling I wanted to take away, for a time, the burden they may be feeling from not being able to fulfill this commitment to which our Catholic faithful are called.”
The bishop’s concerns were dismissed as “B.S.” by White House Border Czar Tom Homan in comments to the conservative news outlet Daily Wire. “I do not know of a single incident of a church arrest.”
While it is true that recent ICE apprehensions have not been made inside churches, the incidents that led to the dispensation announcement occurred on church properties and have been documented by local and national media.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment from America, but on July 10, an ICE spokesperson told the National Catholic Register that while the agency “is not subject to previous restrictions on immigration operations at sensitive locations, to include schools, churches and courthouses, ICE does not indiscriminately take enforcement actions at these locations.”
But as accelerated enforcement begins under the next budget, the Trump administration will be under significant pressure to justify the additional spending. “With all this money, [ICE agents] will be able to target every parish in the country, if they so choose,” Mr. Appleby points out.
In Santa Fe, N.M., many immigrant residents are already afraid to leave their homes for Mass or visit frequently targeted Home Depots, according to Archbishop John Wester of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. “Our people are living in fear,” he says.
Noting that many agents refuse to identify themselves, arriving masked and heavily armed, he asks: “How do you know you’re not being kidnapped by some terrorist group or some rogue group that’s imitating ICE?”
Deportations “are being carried out in a very callous way,” Archbishop Wester says. “It’s kind of a feeling of living in a police state.”
That generalized fear, the archbishop says, surely amounts to an infringement of First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom. A number of Catholic leaders sit on the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., and Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco. Archbishop Wester says they should “absolutely” raise the issue with the Trump administration.
“Governments have the right to control their borders,” Archbishop Wester says, “but it’s not a supreme right. It’s not an absolute right. The government also has to take into account other God-given rights and human decency.”
All people have inalienable rights to freedom of religion and freedom of speech that are not limited by citizenship, Archbishop Wester adds. “This is the dignity of the human person,” a dignity “that can’t be ignored or sidestepped by any government.”
Alligator Alcatraz
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami rode his Harley down to Key West for some “R and R” on July 8, but the week’s events quickly got in the way. When he spoke to America, he had just gotten off the phone with a Miami deacon sharing an update about a visit to Alligator Alcatraz.
The new immigrant detention center, recently toured by an approving Mr. Trump, was accepting its first round of detainees. One staff member told the deacon, who had been attempting to assess conditions at the camp, “If you think it’s bad now, wait til the afternoon.”
“Those mosquitoes are relentless,” Archbishop Wenski explains. The archbishop says his next call will be to a Florida member of Congress to enlist his help in securing pastoral access to the new facility.
The facility in the Florida swamps is not exactly an innovation. The archbishop says similar tent compounds went up during the Obama administration, but in the end, “they took them all down.”
“Somebody in the local government asked [the Obama administration] for their hurricane plan, and they had none,” Archbishop Wenski says. “So I don’t know how they’re doing this now, but the governor seems to say that they’re safe enough for hurricanes. We’ll see.”
But the new detention center is just one item Archbishop Wenski will have to contend with. He suspects South Florida, with its many thousands of Guatemalan, Honduran, Haitian and Mexican farmworkers, will likely prove irresistible for ICE agents seeking a bountiful harvest of immigrant apprehensions.
In terms of addressing the president’s long-promised mass deportations, Archbishop Wenski holds on to a hope that Congress can be persuaded to intervene. “The administration is enforcing the laws, but Congress can make the laws and remake the laws,” the archbishop says. “Congress has to do something.”
Archbishop Wenski says there have been some signs of life even among Florida G.O.P. House members. Recent enforcement acts have already proven unpopular with the general public.
A Gallup Poll published on July 11 found that support for extending the border wall and more aggressive enforcement is down substantially. And support for the administration’s overall handling of immigration has fallen sharply—now just 35 percent of Americans say they approve. According to the same poll, support for allowing undocumented immigrants to become U.S. citizens has risen to 78 percent, up from 70 percent last year.
Archbishop Wenski argues that U.S. legislators can reclaim control of immigration policy by negotiating a cut-off date that allows undocumented residents “of good moral character” to apply for a green card. That congressional act would not resolve all the nation’s immigration problems, but it would in one stroke at least protect “all the Dreamers” and more than 80 percent of the other undocumented immigrants who have lived without blemish for years in the United States.
Legislation just introduced by House Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican from Miami, and Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, Texas, includes the creation of a “Dignity Program” that would open a channel to legalization for undocumented migrants who entered the United States before Dec. 31, 2020.
But with hardliners on immigration currently calling the shots in Washington, even such partial reform seems improbable. Mr. Appleby believes the church should be preparing itself for unprecedented conditions in 2026. He urges church leaders to find creative ways to respond.
One laudable example, he suggests, was the decision by one of the church’s newest bishops, the Most Rev. Michael Pham of San Diego, to visit the city’s federal immigration court on June 20, World Refugee Day. According to local press, ICE agents who had been lurking in court hallways to seize undocumented migrants who planned to honor court appointments scattered at the sight of the bishop.
“It was very prophetic and very effective messaging,” Mr. Appleby says, “and it wasn’t confrontational.”
The church must also improve its ground game at the parish level, Mr. Appleby suggests. Catholic parishioners are going to need tools “to legally respond to these enforcement actions to protect their communities.”
Archbishop Wester reports that Santa Fe has been working with its pastors and lay people “on what to do if there is a raid—how to conduct themselves properly, legally and how to help immigrants that are involved.”
He will be joining an online meeting on July 24 with other bishops and immigration advocates about devising a national strategy to address the new reality the church is facing.
Deportation accounting
Archbishop Wenski remains optimistic about civil society’s chances of throwing up obstacles to mass deportation in 2026. He does not believe the public and, perhaps more important, the leaders of America’s hospitality, agricultural and manufacturing sectors will in the end have the stomach for an effort on the scale proposed by the Trump administration. Indeed, the estimated price tag of the deportation envisioned by Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump—one million or more deportations a year—reaches over $315 billion in immediate direct costs and could mean a long-term loss of as much as $5 trillion to the U.S. economy.
“They’re already hearing people screaming—the farmers, the hotel people, the health care [industry],” Archbishop Wenski says. “Who’s going to fix the roofs, who’s going to cut the grass, who’s going to wait tables and bus dishes, and who’s going to clean bed pans, if it’s not immigrants?”
Indeed, not long after the announcement that ICE agents had been ordered by Mr. Miller to pursue a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, the president indicated that he would bow to pressure from the nation’s agriculture and hotel industries to exempt farmworkers and hotel and resort workers from the deportation dragnet. Just days later, apparently succumbing this time to new appeals from Mr. Miller, the president reversed himself.
The flip-flopping “shows the folly of mass deportation,” Mr. Appleby says. “These are essential workers to the economy, and if we deport them all, we’re going to have problems economically.” Undocumented workers in many other domestic sectors—health care, food processing, construction among them—could likewise easily be classified as workers who warrant protection from deportation sweeps.
“That’s the big lie, in my opinion, about this immigration system,” Mr. Appleby says. “We rail against them politically, and we blame them for social ills, but in the end, we depend on them to work in important industries, so that we can live a good life.
“We can’t have it both ways,” he says.
He remains convinced that the deportation bonanza promised by ICE expansion over the next three years will in the end only weaken the U.S. economy even as it creates unprecedented social disruption. Among policymakers most hostile to immigration of any sort, the standard response to that concern has been that U.S. citizens will step up to fill low-wage jobs now most often accepted by undocumented workers.
“I guess we’re going to find out, won’t we?” Mr. Appleby says.
“Fat chance,” Archbishop Wenski says bluntly. “We have a demographic problem: Americans are more older than they are younger. The immigrants are more younger than they are older. That’s the advantage that the immigrants have.”
The nation’s various contradictions regarding its undocumented workforce will no doubt most quickly surface in its agricultural sector. About 1.2 million hired farmworkers help put food on the nation’s table each year, an estimated 42 percent of them are undocumented immigrants, and another 26 percent are workers with H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program visas, according to an analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And with historic lows in unemployment persisting, human resources departments across the country report challenges in finding job candidates. As many as 400,000 jobs in manufacturing remain unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a scarcity of skilled blue-collar workers has been a serious problem for years, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.
That persisting capacity challenge would seem an argument for a more discerning deportation regime and improved legal channels for immigration, two policy shifts that appear completely off the table at the Trump White House. The current system “is so broken…there’s no legal avenue for [immigrants] to come,” Mr. Appleby says.
The U.S. church has for decades pressed for comprehensive immigration reform, Archbishop Wester says. “We know that reform is needed, but this is definitely not the way to do it.”
U.S. Catholics need to “lift up the Gospel” and Catholic social teaching that speaks to “the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of human life, the dignity of work, the common good, subsidiarity,” he says, principles being violated by the administration’s current deportation regime.
Immigrants have been “demonized and dehumanized,” Archbishop Wester adds. Catholics have to reach out to their members of Congress to remind them that “these are real people enduring real suffering.”
“We have to speak up for them,” he says.
