Hundreds had joined a procession from the Shrine of the Sacred Heart to the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle, where Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, offered a powerful homily condemning the national deportation campaign initiated by President Trump since his return to office in January. Cardinal McElroy urged U.S. Catholics, in emulation of the Good Samaritan, to ask: Which of these detained and arrested men and women facing deportation today are your neighbors?

He charged that the nation has been experiencing “a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women” and to make life unbearable for undocumented immigrants.

The president’s deportation dragnet is “willing to tear families apart, separating grieving mothers from their children, and fathers from the sons and daughters who are the center of their lives,” Cardinal McElroy said. “It embraces as collateral damage the horrific emotional suffering that is being thrust on children who were born here, but now face the terrible choice of losing their parents or leaving the only country that they have ever known.”

“As citizens, we must not be silent as this profound injustice is carried out in our name,” Cardinal McElroy said, celebrating Mass for the 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees and the Jubilee of Migrants on Sept. 28.

The cardinal told those gathered for the celebration, “We are confronting—both as a nation and as a church—an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst.” He urged members of the U.S. church “to embrace in a sustained, unwavering, prophetic and compassionate way the immigrants who are suffering so deeply because of the oppression they are facing.”

“The priest and the Levite in today’s Gospel are a stark reminder that in the face of suffering, we so often choose to pass on by—sometimes out of indifference, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of a general reluctance to become involved. But Jesus rejected this indifference, this fear, this reluctance. His telling, last words in the Gospel allow only one option. Which of these in your opinion was neighbor to the robber’s victim?

“In understanding and facing the oppression of undocumented men and women in our midst, we can only have one response: ‘I was, Lord, because I saw in them your face.’”

In recent weeks, some Catholic commentators had been wondering when Cardinal Robert McElroy might speak out on the militarization of Washington and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions and arrests in his archdiocese. The annual celebration of migrating people created an opportunity to do so.

“Our Catholic community here in Washington has witnessed many people of deep faith, integrity and compassion who have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed in our nation,” he said. “A profound ministry of consolation, justice and support must be the hallmark of our spiritual and pastoral care at this moment.”

The cardinal acknowledged that Catholic social teaching allows each nation the right to control its own borders, adding that efforts to secure U.S. borders and deport undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes “constitute legitimate national goals.”

But what the archdiocesan community and communities across the country have been experiencing is far removed from those defensible enforcement goals. The cardinal charged that the Trump administration, “by its own admission and by the tumultuous enforcement actions it has launched,” is engaged in a comprehensive campaign, relying on terror, “to uproot millions of families and hard-working men and women who have come to our country seeking a better life.”

The administration’s goal “is simple and unitary: to rob undocumented immigrants of any real peace in their lives so that in misery they will ‘self-deport.’”

That campaign of fear cannot be justified by the fact that migrants have established residency without the proper documentation, Cardinal McElroy said. “Today’s Gospel proposes a far different measure for determining whether 10 million men and women and children and families who have lived alongside us for decades should face terror and expulsion: Are they our neighbors?”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan, he said, “is the greatest parable that Jesus gave to the formation of our moral lives and our understanding of bonds of community and sacrifice and embrace in this world.”

Its most striking element, Cardinal McElroy said, “is that the Samaritan was willing to reject the norms of society which said that because of his birth and status he had no obligation to the victim, who was a Jew.”

The Samaritan “rejected the narrowness and myopia of the law to understand that the victim he was passing by was truly his neighbor and that both God and the moral law obligated him to treat him as neighbor.”

Our times demand the same, the cardinal said. “Is the mother who sacrifices in every dimension of her life to nurture children who will live rightly, productively and caringly our neighbor? Is the man being deported despite the fact that he has three sons who serve in the Marines because of the values he taught them our neighbor? Is the woman who works to provide home care for our sick and elderly parents our neighbor?”

He described the “undocumented community” as a people who offer the archdiocese a “daily witness of faith and family, hard work and sacrifice, compassion and love” in a “profound reflection of the deepest virtues of our faith and the most noble aspirations of our nation.

“As a church, we must console and peacefully stand in solidarity with the undocumented men and women whose lives are being upended by the government’s campaign of fear and terror,” Cardinal McElroy said. “Courage and sacrifice must be the hallmark of our actions at this moment of historic and deliberate suffering being visited upon people living truly good lives that are a credit to our nation.”