Miami’s Archbishop Thomas Wenski understands in his bones the plight of today’s immigrants. He can draw on his own experience as the child of a Polish immigrant with family roots in the immigrant stronghold of Detroit as well as his unique perspective as a pastoral leader in a part of the country that has been powerfully redefined by the immigrant experience.

In an online forum sponsored by Jesuit Refugee Service USA on Oct. 28, Archbishop Wenski recalled how unwelcome Haitian immigrants had initially been in South Florida and when Cuban immigrants fell from grace following the infamous Mariel Boatlift in 1980.

“What the ’80s taught me…was that immigration was not a threat, but an opportunity because certainly South Florida, especially Miami, has benefited tremendously from immigration,” he said in a conversation with Don Kerwin, JRS vice president.

American dreamers

Like other immigrant groups that came to the United States, the Haitians and Cubans arriving in Miami, he said, were standouts in their homelands, people ready to work hard for their piece of the American dream. In their time, they contributed mightily to the transformation of South Florida—and now their children and grandchildren hold up the region’s health care, real estate and hospitality industries, pursuing advanced degrees and professions their immigrant parents and grandparents could only have dreamed about.

He sees many examples of immigrant success stories in these families. “You could say that immigrants in general—and this has been my experience with Haitians—are almost driven to succeed because they’re risk takers, they’re the decision makers,” Archbishop Wenski said.

“They decided, ‘I can’t take this anymore in Haiti,’ and they took the risk,” he said.

“And this American society of ours rewards people that can make decisions and take risks. So the Haitians, like other immigrant groups, have taken advantage of the opportunities that are provided by America and by freedom to succeed here.”

What a terrible mistake it would be to thwart a process that has been instrumental in the American success story, he suggested. “Originally they were going after the worst of the worst, but the numbers weren’t high enough,” Archbishop Wenski said of the Trump administration’s clampdown, “so they started picking up people that were sitting in the back of a pickup truck as they were leaving lawns that they were cutting in the suburbs.”

“We have to press Congress to change the laws, but we also have to approach the president” and tell him “that he should take a victory lap for having controlled the border” and removing the “worst of the worst” from U.S. communities, he said. Now, the president, he said, has the opportunity to “pivot” from a deportation campaign that has been sowing chaos and anxiety across the country.

There are signs that the Trump administration may be far from the reversal that the archbishop seeks. On Oct. 28, top leaders at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices were abruptly deposed, replaced in many instances by Customs and Border Protection staff in a major shake-up that analysts said would mean even more aggressive deportation tactics. In May, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News the Trump administration’s hope is to make “a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day” with an annual goal of 1 million deportations.

That plan will only frustrate the administration’s other goals, Archbishop Wenski warned.

“The president has always said that he wants to have the biggest economy ever,” he said. “If you’re gonna have the biggest economy ever in the United States, you’re not going to do it without the labor force participation of the migrants.”

Catholics: Remember who you are, where you come from

According to Pew Research, more than 14 million people with irregular status are resident in the United States, the numbers spiking sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pew researchers say a record 7.5 million U.S. households included unauthorized immigrants in 2023.

Almost 70 percent of these households are considered “mixed status,” meaning that they also contain U.S.-born residents or lawful immigrants. Most of the U.S.-born residents are children of unauthorized immigrants, Pew reports.

Over decades of inaction on immigration reform, the issue of residency has become muddled for generations of immigrants. Cut off from legal immigration channels by laws that have not adapted to changing conditions, millions have indeed been arriving irregularly. Many have been in the United States for years and have established deep roots in their communities. Throwing such people out is a disservice to them, but also to the nation, Archbishop Wenski suggested.

“Home is here,” Archbishop Wenski said. “There’s no ‘home’ [for deportees] to go back to, and that’s really where the inhumanity of a mass deportation comes up, because after being here all these years, you start forging connections with this host country: You get married; you have kids; you might have kids that are American citizens; you have a spouse that may be a legal permanent resident or American citizen. And all this is going to be thrown into chaos because of [our] antiquated laws.”

And many flippantly described as “illegal” by media commentators and actors in the Trump administration are nothing of the sort, Archbishop Wenski said. They have been residing and working in the United States under humanitarian parole, Temporary Protected Status or while asylum claims or residency applications have slowly made their way through an overwhelmed system.

“The Biden administration gave humanitarian visas to about half a million people from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba,” Archbishop Wenski said. “You could argue about whether that was a smart move or not, but half a million people came here. They were sponsored by somebody in the United States. They had to pay their own transportation here, and they got work permits for two years.”

“Now, the administration is saying that [when] the two years are up; they’re not going to renew [protected status]. 
They’re going to have to go back. But none of those people were ever a day illegally here in this country.”

And how, he wonders, can any American seriously suggest returning those who have been legitimately offered a refuge in the United States to the chaos and oppression of the failing nations they have fled? “They’ve continued to deport people to Haiti, which is a stateless country right now,” the archbishop said. “They’re deporting people to Cuba, which is in an economic crisis, besides the politics of the whole place, and Nicaragua, which is a country that has deported priests and religious sisters and clamped down on the church there, a very repressive country.”

“They want to deport people there; it doesn’t make sense.”

The U.S. church should continue to keep the issue of comprehensive immigration reform and steps toward rationalizing immigration policy before the U.S. public and its political leadership, Archbishop Wenski said. He urged Congress to reassert its authority over immigration policy and finally address the inadequacies created by decades of inattention.

Simply harmonizing the immigration registry, last updated in 1986 with a cut-off date of Jan. 1, 1972, to current realities could address the status of the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants, he said. He recalled that his own father was able to formalize his residency in the United States through the registry when it was updated in 1929.

It is “Congress that makes the law, and Congress should change the laws,” he said. “We need to focus on Congress to address this issue because every time Congress had an opportunity to do something about immigration over the past 20, 25 years, they always decided to kick the can down the road when the pressure was taken off of them.”

He reminded contemporary Catholics that the history of the American church is intrinsically bound with the continuing phenomenon of immigration. Catholics “should remember where we come from,” he said, “who we are.”

There are few Catholics in this country that are not “maybe a generation removed from the immigration experience,” he said. Noting a surge of neo-nativist ideology and rhetoric, he added, “Catholics have to be careful that they’re not swept up by people who are masking their anti-Catholicism with an anti-immigration stance.”

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For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, read about what the results of a presidential election say about the health of democracy in Ireland and hear from Caribbean bishops, who ask the Trump administration not to turn their region into a war zone.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).