‘The Living Vein of Compassion’
Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has taken aggressive and extensive actions to restrict migration and to target immigrants already living in our country. These actions include the effective and total suspension of asylum and international protection at our border, the ending of U.S. commitment to refugees around the world, and the suspension of key areas of humanitarian assistance, both at the border and abroad, including aid intended to mitigate forced migration. These actions are accompanied by a disturbing rhetoric of criminality when speaking about immigrants in our country.
Consistent with campaign promises to enact the largest deportation in American history, the administration is laying down key infrastructure to make these promises a reality. The groundwork being laid for this campaign of forced removal is significant and should give us pause. We’ve seen the erection of an offshore detention site at the symbolically charged Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. We’ve also seen the agreement with El Salvador to imprison migrants without regard for essential due-process protections as well as a reckless willingness to test the limits of judicial authority.
Additional sites within the United States are being planned or are already under construction. In El Paso, for example, a contract has been signed with a private vendor for a large immigrant-detention center; the contract is for a sum of money that nearly equals ICE’s entire annual detention budget last year. I also need to mention the deployment of the military to the border and the preparation of orders for the military to take control of the border, which raise significant posse comitatus concerns. In addition, the administration is actively taking away legal immigration status—parole and temporary protected status—from hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, enlarging the pool of those potentially vulnerable to deportation.
There is also the reversal of the Sensitive Locations policy, which formerly represented a modest and humane measure of restraint in avoiding unnecessary enforcement actions in churches, schools, community centers, and hospitals. Because the law always permitted urgent enforcement actions in these places, more than anything else, the reversal of this policy is significant on the level of symbols and narrative, meant to deliver a message that even bedrock principles and norms that ensure the integrity of the polity, including deference to the sacred, the education of children, and the pursuit of health, will be sacrificed to the politics of immigration.
In addition to the federal government, more and more states have enacted anti-immigrant laws over the past year, and many governors and mayors are promising to collaborate with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. Punitive and restrictive laws were passed last year in Iowa, Florida, Oklahoma, West Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Leading the pack, however, is my home state of Texas, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars to deploy the National Guard and state police to the border, has passed legislation to criminalize migration, has constructed border walls, and is readying still another bevy of troubling anti-immigrant bills in the current legislative session.
These
state efforts are also part of the infrastructure of a national
deportation campaign. The administration will depend heavily on local
police and sheriff departments to collaborate in deportations,
particularly through what are known as 287(g) agreements, which
essentially deputize local law enforcement to perform immigration-
enforcement
functions. These agreements vitiate community trust. When one segment
of the population feels they cannot count on law enforcement not to
deport them or a close relative or friend, victims will not call the
police and everyone will be less safe. In Texas, just recently, such an
agreement was troublingly established with the Texas National Guard.
These agreements will be key to supercharging the administration’s
deportation efforts.
And finally, I must mention the current budget negotiations in Congress, which will nearly certainly end in a substantial increase to appropriations for detention and deportation, the last element of the groundwork necessary for a campaign of mass deportations to proceed.
Without a doubt, there were antecedents to many of these actions during the first Trump administration and, to a lesser extent, in previous Democratic administrations. And at the U.S.-Mexico border, there are deep-rooted historical patterns of injustice that exceed any one administration; we have seen many of the same dynamics at play before. Over time, the exception has become the norm, and emergency responses have taken on permanent features.
But in the case of this administration, the speed with which these actions are being carried out, the dystopian rhetoric and sharp attitude, the unapologetic belligerence towards neighboring states in the region, the elevation of self-interest as the criterion of legitimacy, and the disregard for the rule of law and due process are without precedent.
I recognize that different people approach the issue of immigration from different vantage points. For some, it is mainly a political issue, and allegiance to party identity trumps all other considerations. In the past, Republican presidents like George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan promoted meaningful reform and legalization initiatives. Who can forget the words from President Reagan’s last speech in office: “We draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world”? But today, the party’s clear veering towards ethnonationalism and nativism has taken deeper and deeper hold of the country’s political imagination.
On the left, under the Biden and Obama administrations, I saw the pro-immigrant rhetoric on display during campaign seasons evaporate once each was in office. Immigration reform, falling victim to various forms of political calculus, was deprioritized. More than that, though, immigration was viewed by recent Democratic administrations as a fundamentally technocratic issue—if we were just able to achieve the right balance of incentives and disincentives for people who migrate, the right number of immigration judges or Border Patrol agents, the right type of visas, the correct ratio of pain at the border, enough to dissuade people so that the numbers of arrivals don’t become a political liability but not so much as to provoke a political backlash or too visible a violation of human rights…if we got all that right, then we could solve this. Missing here is the crucial human dimension of migration.
The longer this issue goes unsolved, the more the rule of the law is compromised. But it is not the undocumented who represent a threat to the rule of law in our country. The vast majority of migrants would not hesitate to regularize their situation lawfully were it possible. It is the fault of lawmakers unable or unwilling to establish sane and lawful mechanisms to manage migration in our country, at the border, and abroad.
One can also look at the issue of immigration economically, academically, and from the perspectives of the various human sciences and security. All of those perspectives are valid, and also have their limitations.
But I’m not a politician, economist, or social scientist. I have experienced this issue from a pastoral point of view. My diocese is a border community. Most Americans, because of the way we teach history in school and because of the way migration and the border are portrayed in the media, think of the border in binary terms. There is a here and there and a thick impenetrable membrane between the two. But if you were to visit the border, you’d soon realize that isn’t really the case at all. Despite the steel walls and harsh immigration policies, reality is much more fluid.
We are bound to our community on the other side of the border by ties of history, culture, language, and family. People cross every day to be with family, to work, to trade, and to worship. Some of my Catholic schools might have to close if students from Ciudad Juárez, our sister city in Mexico, weren’t able to cross. Students from El Paso also go to Juárez for the technical school there. El Paso is the sixth largest city in Texas and the twenty-second largest in the United States. More than 80 percent of our population is Mexican-American; we are about one quarter foreign born, and migration has always been part of our story, long before the United States even existed as a country.
People are far more valuable than things. Human beings are God’s creation of greatest beauty and worth. Anything of great value also has the potential to do harm if misused, but human beings present far more potential for good. What we have learned over the centuries is that migration need not be a threatening reality, but can be an enriching one, when the movement of people is embraced conscientiously as an opportunity for human encounter. This crossing of paths is deeply fulfilling and charged with meaning. This is the culture of encounter that our previous Holy Father underlined so forcefully from the beginning of his pontificate. What Pope Francis taught us is that there is a deeply religious dimension to this work of encounter and building human fraternity.
Our binational culture, together with the living traditions of faith still practiced in many border communities like El Paso, has lent itself to a deep culture of hospitality. My personal experience of this culture of hospitality as a bishop in El Paso for the past twelve years, which finds expression even today in migrant shelters and myriad different acts of genuine charity on behalf of people who migrate, in so many different efforts by people of many faiths and on both sides of the border, has shaped how I understand and interpret these realities of immigration. There is a deep vein of compassion at the border, and of course it extends southward to Mexico and Latin America in the many different migrant shelters in the Americas, many connected with the Catholic Church, and it extends northward to many of our parish communities here in the interior of the country. Could it be that the poor have fewer resources but bigger hearts?
This living vein of compassion is a reality, a historical reality, a living example of Christian praxis, and it accompanies the aspirations, anxieties, pain, and joys of those who are forced to migrate. The incredible perspective that faith offers is that this reality of migration and this vein of compassion are the very presence of Jesus, the Lord of history, among us and speaking to us today.
I’m a Christian and a priest. Every day I celebrate the Eucharist with the community in my diocese, and during that prayer we ask that our sacrifice of reconciliation might bring about ad totius mundi pacem atque salutem, the peace and salvation of all the world. This living vein of compassion in which we find ourselves as a community is the context for that prayer. I offer the Eucharist that the Lord might bring peace and salvation to this people, my people. In my diocese, that includes those who approach and pass through seeking a better life, and oftentimes just bare life. They, too, are part of us, for we were once them. The many immigrants who are dying in the desert are part of my community and are also worthy of the Lord’s peace and salvation. My community also includes the more than fifty thousand persons in my diocese who do not have the benefit of documents. They, too, are just as much a part of my community. One in three of them live with a U.S.-citizen child. A campaign of mass deportations would represent a moral and deeply social crisis in my diocese, one that would tear at the heart of human fraternity. It would tear at the heart of who we are. And as I have traveled the country in my role as chairman of the USCCB Committee on Migration, beyond just the economic and political damage, I have seen that the reverberations of such a hateful campaign would also threaten our identity as a nation.
These are the perspectives of a Christian and a priest.
I recognize that migration is complex. There must be effective systems of management, more robust asylum protocols, mechanisms for security and order, and legal channels to mitigate irregular migration. The responsibility for shepherding these goals through the political process belongs to the statesman.
But we must also find a solution that goes beyond the technocratic, the political, the economic, one that recognizes the historic debt we have as a country that has generated and generates migration, that has benefited and benefits from the work of migrants, and that is part of a global community.
Of course, we’ve failed to do this for generations now. And there are repercussions for our economy, both our political economy and our moral economy. In recent years, our inability to reach comprehensive immigration reform has opened up a space for a racialized politics of exclusion, a recurring and dangerous dynamic in our nation’s political history.
In the social tinderbox of our country right now, there must be a credible response of faith. Our Christian faith must give us something to say to the world at this moment. Our Christian faith must make a difference, be capable of generating an alternate history to the dystopian one that is presently being enacted.
Allow me to offer a framework for a short-term response to the current moment and then gesture to some deeper work that may be required.
To state it clearly, the actions that I have described to close the border to the vulnerable, to deprive hundreds of thousands of persons of legal status, to broaden the state of exception and deny due process, and to move in the direction of mass deportations, are all morally indefensible from a Catholic perspective. These actions will divide families, divide communities, undermine the rule of law, and increase the numbers of those dying at borders.
Over the short term then, we must pull together in every diocese to protect our people and to protect the vulnerable. We are speaking about a population in our parishes, afraid and anxious right now. I am asking every diocese to put together a plan to ensure that our people understand our rights, and that we muster all the legal services we can to protect our people from deportation. Ensuring that we know the people in our parishes, and that they understand their rights and have access to essential human services, is critical right now.
Every diocese should also be actively engaged in work for the common good, engaging with local law enforcement and local elected leaders to ensure that our communities remain focused on community security and that our local law-enforcement agents are not enlisted in a destructive and xenophobic political project. This is work that can and should be done ecumenically, with other civil-society groups, and especially alongside the directly affected. In this work we need the assistance of the broader network of Catholic organizations, including our religious communities, Catholic education, and Catholic health care.
Let me underscore, too, that this work cannot be the province of our charitable institutions alone. Our charitable institutions do incredible and amazing work every day on behalf of the vulnerable. But our actions now need to include everyone.
There is a role for everyone. And we have to include everyone. This is an opportunity to put synodality into practice. There is work for grassroots education, outreach, and mutual aid right now, and all our parishes and parishioners can be involved in this work. This work is too fundamental to the Church and society to limit it to the ranks of professionals. We need to overcome the barriers we have erected between our professionalized social services, the life of the parish, and the lives of young Catholics, who may not be as connected to our institutions as previous generations. We need to be creative.
In this context, it’s interesting to note that for centuries, until the revision of the code in 1983, the Church’s canon law included the right of sanctuary. The 1917 Code put it this way: “A church enjoys the right of asylum, and those who flee there may not be extracted, other than in the case of necessity, without the permission of the [bishop].”
I’m not commending sanctuary as a strategy to respond to mass deportations. The legal complexities are nuanced, and there is no way our institutions could offer long-term respite to 13 million persons. But I do think it’s instructive to reflect on our history of offering care to the fleeing, and the fact that, until only recently, it was concretized for over a millennium in our practice and internal legislation. In fact, the first codification of this practice in ecclesial law goes back to a bishops’ synod in the year 343.
The core perception is this: the obligation to provide mutual aid and care for the displaced is constitutive of what it means to be a Eucharistic community. And that has to be true at the grassroots level, at the level of individual Christian communities. As Benedict XVI put it: “A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented” (Deus caritas est, 14).
In this Year of Jubilee, the doors of our churches should be places where people, including our immigrant communities, feel concrete expressions of mercy. This should also be true of the doors of our Catholic families and our broader family of Catholic organizations.
I also think that there should be a public and prophetic dimension to this work. This will look different in different places, but the faithful in our parishes passing through this moment of crisis need to hear words of concern from the Church’s pastors. Our solidarity needs to be visible. Messages of hate and marginalization are in the public square and on social media. The public and our people need to see in a clear way that there is a Christian alternative. The way of love cannot be hidden under a bushel basket. It has to be embodied, incarnate, and public. In my own diocese, this has meant public processions and vigils in solidarity with migrants over the past several years, as well as a concerted effort to work with our priests so that there are affirmative messages of solidarity and truth coming from our pulpits.
Regarding longer-term dynamics, let me mention the recent decision of our bishops’ conference to end our work with refugees. In reality, we had no choice; as I mentioned, the Trump administration has ended the work of refugee resettlement and forced our hand.
This decision by the Trump administration is an inflection point. First, because it’s not just about refugees. Together with what will likely be broader cuts to social services in the federal budget and the suspension already of a significant portion of international assistance, this action is a step in the direction of a government washing its hands of its responsibility to steward the common good by supporting the vulnerable. We need to ask the question: Cui bono? Who benefits? Our responsibility toward the economically marginalized is not just a matter of charity but of justice. In this regard, I’ve spoken about the attack on migrants as part of a broader attack on the poor.
The suspension of the refugee program is an inflection point, too, because it is clearly part of a broader attack on civil society and the role of civil-society organizations in our democratic life. Our federal government has long been able to meet social and humanitarian needs by partnering, in a healthy spirit of subsidiarity, with faith-based and community organizations that are closer to affected populations and capable of engaging their members in the broader task of working for the common good. This gives citizens a stake in their communities, respects their agency, and is a check on big government. Subsidiarity, effective partnerships with faith communities, and a vibrant civil society are all quintessential characteristics of American identity. We should all be troubled by an administration taking action to hollow out this important democratic space at the same time that it is governing more and more by cultural diktat, executive orders, and actions that erode constitutional due-process protections. Perhaps we did not expect a rapid slide into a post-religious authoritarianism from the right. All this raises critical questions about the health of our democracy.
What we see is that the dysfunctional approach to immigration is driven by the deeper crisis of public and social life. On a fundamental level, these are signs that we are losing the story of who we are as a country. This is a crisis of narrative. Are we no longer a country of immigrants? Are we no longer a country that values the dignity of the human person, individual liberties, and checks and balances?
It is here, I think, that we need to return to the evangelical mission of the Church. Polarization, of course, is not new in our country or in our Church. It was a significant concern of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” ethic was an effort to make a persuasive public argument grounded in essential human dignity and to shape more just public policy, a message directed ad extra to policymakers. It was a necessary effort, and I think it is still a highly pertinent one.
But we shouldn’t forget that Bernardin’s effort was equally intended to rally Catholics ad intra; the political divides of the day had already begun to colonize our American Catholic social imagination, rendering our witness in public life weaker. As he said:
It is not necessary or possible for every person to engage in each issue, but it is both possible and necessary for the Church as a whole to cultivate a conscious explicit connection among the several issues. And it is very necessary for preserving a systemic vision that individuals and groups who seek to witness to life at one point of the spectrum of life not be seen as insensitive to or even opposed to other moral claims on the overall spectrum of life.
Especially in the United States right now, there is a temptation for us to reproduce the broader cultural and political divisions within the Body of Christ. We are very far from Tertullian’s “see how they love one another.”
Decades later, both of Bernardin’s objectives, to marshal a strong public argument on behalf of human dignity and to bridge divides within the Church, remain just as relevant and important. In the United States, our ability to marshal effective public arguments on behalf of the common good has been made much more challenging by the current political environment. Secularism and disaffiliation have also taken their toll. More still, the loss of credibility of the Church following the public scandal of sexual abuse was a terrible counterwitness. When the ostensible good of the institution was put above the demands of justice and charity, our Christian witness faltered.
Let me spend a moment on the word “witness.” Pope Francis’s social, ecclesial, and missionary imagination, among other things, was deeply formed, as he stated on a number of occasions, by the pontificate of Paul VI, and in particular by the apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi. That document followed the 1974 Synod on Evangelization, in which Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, was highly involved. This is the document in which Paul VI repeats his famous line, “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (41). In a world obsessed with searching for the alternative wisdom of podcasts and YouTube and suspicious of institutions, those words still have purchase.
This is also the document, and I think here we see the influence of Wojtyła, in which the pope insists that the Gospel must generate culture. The Good News has to be translated and made real, it must be incarnate in our times—not in a notional way, but in a real, tangible way that generates hope for ordinary people, and particularly through encounter. He writes:
The split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time… Therefore every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures. They have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel.
It’s easy to see the influence this text had on Jorge Bergoglio. What Pope Francis did was take these insights and model them on the plane of Christian leadership.
Public argument is important. We will continue to need tools like the seamless garment to help translate the Gospel theologically, philosophically, and into the social categories of the day. We are blessed that Pope Francis gifted us the analysis and development in Catholic social teaching contained in Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti.
But what the Holy Father taught us is that perhaps even more fundamental is the need to witness to the Gospel, simply, credibly, and with integrity. Pope Francis did that, and he continued to do it even during the last weeks and days of his life, with vulnerability, with his own body. This is the type of Christian leadership the Holy Father asked of us bishops.
When the Holy Father spoke to the bishops of the United States during his visit here in 2015, he said to us:
It is not about preaching complicated doctrines, but joyfully proclaiming Christ who died and rose for our sake. The “style” of our mission should make our hearers feel that the message we preach is meant “for us.” May the word of God grant meaning and fullness to every aspect of their lives; may the sacraments nourish them with that food which they cannot procure for themselves; may the closeness of the shepherd make them long once again for the Father’s embrace.
I was speaking recently to a group of bishops, reflecting on how we proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the migrant. Our bishops’ conference has done admirable and important work over many years on the issue of migration, not only with refugees, but in offering assistance to the undocumented and advocating for immigration reform. We are of one mind in our support for people who migrate.
But one bishop suggested that there is always the risk that this commitment remains confined to the notional, academic level. And if it remains there—disincarnate—it will become stale. All Christian leaders—not just bishops, but priests, university leadership, our agency leadership, and professionals in public life—all of us need to be personally involved and engaged with the lives of the poor and vulnerable. For our words to be credible, they must be born of genuine solidarity, a solidarity that inspires action.
People need to see Jesus, visible and concrete. They need to feel his compassion. In the wasteland of this frightening political moment, when everything is reduced to manipulable appearance, they need to see concrete, credible reasons for hope. This is why, despite all the challenges and obstacles, the Catholic Church in the United States continues to call our nation to be true to the best of our heritage and to continue pursuing the vision that a nation with liberty and justice for all is indeed possible with the help of God. We continue to believe that immigration reform is possible, and that one day it will happen, and this is why we keep working for it.
It is at the nexus of real life on the margins, close to the pain, as a throbbing vein of compassion, that we discover the presence of God. There, we may not have all the words, all the concepts, all the solutions. But only thus can we become credible witnesses whose words carry any weight. Only thus are we able to generate culture, reweaving society in the way of the Gospel, from below. And my sense is that it is one of the few antidotes to polarization available to us, a polarization that results from putting ideological commitments over real life.
This is precisely the itinerary of leadership that the Holy Father offered us, magisterially, in his actions and in his personal, embodied witness. He taught us that Christian leadership is about service and solidarity that inspires action, it demands an unflinching critical attitude toward societal injustice, it makes love visible, and it leads us to work for justice and human fraternity. I think for the Church in our country, our challenge now is to integrate that evangelical style of leadership into our own notions of episcopal leadership as we navigate the cross-currents ahead.
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