From defending birthright citizenship in the courts to condemning ICE’s warehouse scheme, U.S. Catholic bishops have made clear they’re siding with immigrant communities
U.S. Catholic bishops continue to speak out forcefully in defense of the dignity and rights of immigrants and their families in recent weeks, including reaffirming support for a pathway to legalization and decrying federal immigration enforcement tactics that have resulted in a paralyzing state of chaos and fear for communities from coast to coast.
“We speak out as pastors in border states and beyond concerned about the impact of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recent and ongoing immigration enforcement activities against individuals and families who are without legal status in our country,” 20 U.S. bishops wrote last month. “While we acknowledge the right and duty of a sovereign nation to enforce its laws, 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.”
They in particular note attacks on due process rights, the separation of long-settled families, the rearrests of law-abiding refugees who’ve received permission to enter the U.S., and the unchecked federal immigration enforcement that has resulted in a drop in church attendance by as much as 50 percent in some parts of the country.
“Deporting ‘mixed-status’ families as a group— families with at least one family member who is a citizen—can significantly harm family members who have been born and raised in our country, especially US-citizen children,” bishops wrote, noting the “detrimental effects on family units.” When as many as 4.4 million American children have at least one undocumented parent, current immigration policies harm some of the most vulnerable among us.
“A child’s risk of experiencing mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and severe psychological distress increases following the detention and/or deportation of a parent,” the American Immigration Council said in 2021, noting that family separation leaves children at greater risk of “physical conditions such as cancer, stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.”
The path forward is not more cruelty and bluster, but instead humanity and solutions, they say. “As the US Catholic bishops and many across the country have advocated for decades, Congress should 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.”
ICE’s plan to spend nearly $40 billion on industrial warehouses as working families struggle to pay their bills was similarly condemned last month by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The statement notes that ICE’s plan to purchase industrial facilities to mass detain up to 10,000 people rivals some of the most shameful periods in our history. “Aside from the internment camps used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in the 1940s, such facilities have no precedent in American history.”
“These plans are deeply troubling,” said Bishop Brendan J. Cahill, USCCB chairman. “The federal government does not have a positive track record when it comes to detaining large numbers of people, especially families, and the proposed scale of these facilities is difficult to comprehend. The private prison industry is who stands to gain the most from this supercharging of immigration detention.”
Because most immigrants detained by ICE are jailed in privately-operated facilities, the administration’s goal to balloon detention capacity to 100,000 beds will result in financial windfalls for private prison companies. During a quarterly earnings call last year, GEO Group CEO J. David Donahue told investors that he was “excited” about the federal government’s agenda, The Appeal reported.
Just this week, the Arizona Daily Star reported that Haitian asylum-seeker Emmanuel Damas died as the result of a festering tooth infection while in ICE custody at an Arizona facility operated by CoreCivic, another private prison company contracted by the federal government. Chandler City Councilwoman Christine Ellis said that Damas struggled to get care while detained at the facility. “Ellis, a registered nurse who is Haitian-American, said she is outraged and called for an investigation into Damas’ death, which she said came weeks after the man first complained of tooth pain to Florence staff.
“Nobody should die from a toothache,” Councilwoman Ellis told the Arizona Daily Star. “Something has to be done.”
“The thought of holding thousands of families in massive warehouses should challenge the conscience of every American,” Bishop Cahill continued. “Whatever their immigration status, these are human beings created in the image and likeness of God, and this is a moral inflection point for our country.”
The USCCB, along with Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), also filed a legal brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the administration’s “immoral” birthright citizenship executive order, which seeks to throw out 160-year-old constitutional principle and terminate a protection explicitly guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. Bishops write that the order is “antithetical to the import of the Church’s teachings” and will deprive American-born children of full agency in their own country.
“Children do nothing wrong by being born in the United States,” the legal brief states. “Yet, this executive order renders them stateless. Depriving an innocent child of his citizenship based upon his parents’ immigration status would be an especially outrageous punishment — one that this court has rejected as punishment even for people who have been proven guilty.”
Far from addressing vastly outdated immigration rules, the executive order, if allowed to be fully implemented, would only worsen an already broken system. “Specifically, the Executive Order would, by 2045, increase by as many as 2.7 million the number of unauthorized residents in the United States and at the same time increase the risk that some people will be stateless.” The legal brief states that these American children “will be faced with an impossible decision: forever being an underclass citizen, with limited access to the necessities of life, such as healthcare, education, housing, and the right to vote, or being forced to migrate to a country that they have never known and in which they may not be welcome.”
“Ending birthright citizenship lacks historical, legal, and moral support,” the legal brief concludes. “The principle of citizenship by birth is firmly rooted in Western legal tradition, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, and reaffirmed by this Court’s precedent. It is equally grounded in Church teachings, which affirms the inherent dignity of every human person, especially the innocent child. As Catholics, our faith compels us to protest laws that deny the dignity of the human person and harm innocent children, particularly when such laws resurrect the very injustices the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to repudiate.”
Oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara are expected to begin April 1, National Catholic Reporter said. “Since Trump issued the order several federal courts around the country have blocked the government from enforcing it, leading the administration to ask the nation’s high court to weigh in.”
