Before the end of the administration’s first week, President Donald J. Trump had declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, deployed over a thousand U.S. soldiers there, severely curtailed access to asylum and suspended the U.S. refugee resettlement program. The Department of Homeland Security also reversed the longstanding policy limiting immigration law enforcement in schools, hospitals and churches.
In Newark and Chicago, federal agents engaged in highly publicized immigration raids, and in media appearances border czar Thomas Homan reiterated that once the administration has finished deporting those with criminal records, it will target the broader undocumented population. Administration officials also repeatedly took aim at the Catholic Church and Pope Francis, with Vice President JD Vance insinuating that the U.S. bishops’ work with refugees was driven by financial greed.
Mass deportations and actions to turn away asylum seekers and refugees are irreconcilable with Catholic moral teaching and thus present urgent public policy challenges. On a more fundamental level, they represent major pastoral challenges, because the church’s pastoral care extends to those crossing borders in search of refuge as well as to the many immigrant families in our parishes and communities.
The coming years will present a significant moral test. In the face of dangerous nativism and the possibility of state violence through deportation, family separation and the closure of the border to the vulnerable, the church will be challenged to offer a compelling and credible response. Here are three ways the church can support vulnerable migrants during the second Trump administration.
Pastoral work to protect our communities.Mr. Trump is more prepared and disciplined as he begins his second term. Catholic institutions should organize and coordinate their response. Parishes must provide legal services and other support to those affected by deportation and the separation of families. Bishops, parish priests and pastoral agents in social ministry, including Hispanic ministry, are in need of formation to better equip them to serve those affected.
Clergy can also play a key role in mediating delicate relations between the community and local police, whom the Trump administration will press to cooperate in immigration enforcement. The church can work with local and state elected leaders in order to prioritize community security and mitigate the excesses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation actions. Because local ICE offices around the country may have significant discretion in determining enforcement priorities, dioceses should have open lines of dialogue and communication with local ICE leadership.
The church in the United States can supply bishops, priests and social ministry leaders with the resources to attend to these urgent pastoral needs. Faith leaders and parishes are trusted by the community and can provide critical and truthful information. They can shape a more humane and compassionate narrative on the issue of immigration with congregations and by engaging local media, and also mobilize their communities to live in solidarity with affected families.
Lead with human dignity and work for human fraternity.Mr. Trump won the recent election with restrictionist immigration policies at the center of his campaign. But a vote for Mr. Trump was not necessarily a vote against immigrants. On immigration, polls continue to show that the majority of Americans want a workable system, and the human, social and economic damage resulting from deportations could provoke deeper reflection.
Anxieties about global elites benefiting from mass migration are not misguided. Migration has its benefits and is a complex and multicausal reality, but some undoubtedly unjustly benefit from uprooting people from their land. Natural resources and pliable workforces are exploited. While we must establish mechanisms for migration, we must also vigorously promote human rights abroad to ensure that the right to remain in one’s country is viable.
Immigration is not primarily political or partisan, but fundamentally about human dignity, mutual human obligation and the moral work of building up human fraternity. Our posture toward those who migrate is bound up with our personal salvation and the salvation of the world, for it is Jesus whom we meet in the stranger. During this new administration, the church’s preaching and teaching must convincingly communicate that there are no classes of humanity entitled to less of God’s love or deserving less of our compassion and care.
Rebuild the church’s ministry alongside migrants, synodally. The church in the United States has a robust tradition of public advocacy for the common good, social action and institution-building to meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable, and immigrants in particular. But declining church attendance and giving, the ongoing financial impact of the abuse crisis, the sidelining of Catholic social teaching in formation programs, fewer religious vocations and the politicalization of the U.S. church have all taken a toll and contributed to the atrophy of social ministry.
Younger priests and lay leaders are far less likely to be familiar with the church’s tradition of engagement in public life or to have had practical experience in the church’s work with labor, community organizing or immigrants’ rights. In many places, diocesan programming dedicated to the church’s social mission has been trimmed, bureaucratically outsourced to local Catholic Charities offices at a distance from parish life, or even eliminated. And multicultural and Hispanic ministry in many dioceses continues to suffer from a comparative lack of resourcing and prioritization in diocesan pastoral planning.
These trends have been reflected at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which last year downsized key departments tasked with social ministry and sharply reduced grantmaking to local social action organizations, including many immigrant-led organizations. The conference’s influence with legislators and administration officials has waned; apart from some pro-life issues, there may be few areas of meaningful engagement with the Trump administration. On immigration, the U.S.C.C.B. no longer vigorously engages in forging coalitions with labor, the business community, organizing groups and other faith communities. The church’s larger social service institutions are also understandably fearful of earning the ire of the Trump administration and may moderate their public advocacy.
For all of these reasons, the church in the United States does not have the same ability it once did to shape policy debates or organize a robust response to mass deportations. Even so, Pope Francis’ invitation to rethink ministry in a synodal key may represent a path forward. In concluding the synod last year, the pope argued that “we do not need a sedentary and defeatist church, but a church that hears the cry of the world—I wish to say this even if some might be scandalized—a church that gets its hands dirty in serving.”
Rather than attempting to organize a top-down response on behalf of migrants or prioritizing letters to lawmakers, the church must renew and rebuild its practice of the social Gospel by taking up Pope Francis’ challenge to walk alongside and with those who will be affected.
In practice, this will require visible, concrete action by church leaders at the local level in defense of migrants, which Pope Francis has modeled with his own visits to detention centers, borders and refugee camps.
Our moral witness as a church will be strengthened by our ability to walk together. We must discern new ways to work with others, including organizations in the immigrants’ rights movement and other faith traditions. The church must channel resources to grass-roots efforts and promote the leadership and capacity of affected persons and communities to defend and care for themselves.
In February 1979, Archbishop Óscar Romero wrote to Sister Reza Martha about her work with the undocumented community in the United States. His words remain pertinent:
Continue challenging the members of the church—who are still not aware of the misery and pain of Hispanics in the United States. With them, defend their rights as humans and children of God. God wishes us to live in fraternity and justice, and he has confided to us the work of making it happen.
