A group of 18 Catholic bishops and archbishops, primarily representing border dioceses across the U.S. Southwest and California, repeated a long-standing endorsement of comprehensive immigration reform on Feb. 24, hours ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. It is broadly anticipated that the president will use the address to defend his administration’s mass deportation efforts and closed-door policy on immigration.
With a Republican-controlled Congress stepping aside as the administration’s controversial deportation effort continues, the U.S. Catholic Church has emerged as perhaps the nation’s foremost institutional source of resistance to the president’s ambition to deport millions of undocumented residents and their families.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has for decades pressed for immigration reform intended to regularize the residency of millions of undocumented immigrants and create a credible path to legal residency and citizenship for would-be immigrants and asylum seekers. That reform package arguably would have forestalled the acrimonious and now mortal conflict over immigration and deportation currently roiling the country. Unfortunately, multiple legislative drives in Washington failed to move C.I.R. to the Oval Office.
The border bishops reiterated a demand that Congress “repair the US immigration system by placing hard-working immigrants and their families on a path to citizenship and by improving access to the legal immigration system.”
They also restated a position from the U.S.C.C.B.’s special message from November 2025, opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” as “detrimental to the human rights of our fellow human beings and not in the best interest of the nation.”
The bishops acknowledged “the right and duty of a sovereign nation to enforce its laws” but added “we also believe that those laws should be upheld in a manner that protects the God-given human dignity and rights of the human person.”
The president will address a nation that has grown increasingly skeptical of his immigration and deportation policies. A PBS/Marist/NPR poll found 65 percent of Americans, up from 54 percent last June, said the administration has gone too far in its enforcement of immigration laws.
A Reuters poll found just 38 percent approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, a new record low for that poll. The AP-NORC similarly found only four in 10 Americans said they approve of Mr. Trump’s performance on immigration.
J. Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. bishops’ conference, told OSV News, “I believe we are seeing a dramatic shift in public opinion against the administration’s mass deportation campaign.”
Mr. Appleby noted the polling shift came after the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two 37-year-old U.S. citizens and Minneapolis residents shot and killed by federal agents on Jan. 7 and 24 respectively as they protested immigration enforcement actions in that city.
In their statement the bishops deplored the “use of masks, random stops without probable cause, roving patrols, and physical abuse of immigrants and others.” They urged an end to tactics of intimidation and campaigns intended to sow fear in immigrant communities. They pressed for the restoration of due process standards “enshrined in our Constitution.”
“We believe that certain policies currently being pursued by immigration enforcement undermine [due process rights]—the use of expedited removal, warrantless arrests, administrative warrants, courtroom arrests, and racial profiling,” they wrote.
The bishops said that “immigrants and their families who are contributing to the common good should not be targeted for removal.”
“We reaffirm the position of the US Catholic bishops that those immigrants and their families who have built equities in our country and are otherwise law-abiding—the vast majority of the undocumented—should be given an opportunity to come out of the shadows and earn their citizenship over time, becoming full legal members of and contributors to their communities and the nation.”
Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the U.S. asylum process, once governed by international and domestic law, has essentially been brought to a standstill. The bishops urged that the process be restored and the “right to apply for asylum at the border should be honored.”
The bishops worried that otherwise “bona fide asylum-seekers [are] being denied the opportunity to apply for asylum at the US-Mexico border.”
“Denying [asylum seekers] this right leaves them in dangerous conditions and situations, subject to abuse by criminal organizations.”
Perceived or actual threats to undocumented immigrants in communities around the country have created a siege mentality among many immigrant families. Many refrain from leaving their homes to work, shop or attend worship services or to receive health care.
The bishops urged the restoration of the previous Department of Homeland Security policy that identified places of worship, schools and health care facilities as “sensitive locations” where immigration enforcement actions were prohibited.
“From our perspective as pastors,” the bishops wrote, “we have found that members of our flock have decided not to attend Mass or access the sacraments of the Church because of the fear of immigration enforcement. We consider this an issue of religious freedom—a right enshrined in both the US Constitution and international covenants.”
The bishops added that “children should be able to attend school without fear and those in need of urgent medical care should be able to seek treatment with confidence.”
The bishops deplored policies that result in deportation to third-party nations or the separation of families and demanded humane conditions for those who have been apprehended for deportation, expressing especially their concern about proposals for the creation of a vast warehouse-style detention system across the country.
“Finally,” the bishops wrote, “we urge the US government to help mitigate the root causes of irregular migration—the lack of economic development, climate degradation, and conflict and insecurity in sending nations—as well as to invest in reintegration programs to ensure that immigrants can safely and humanely reintegrate into their original homes and support themselves and their families in dignity.”
With reporting from OSV News
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