(OSV News) — Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of the Archdiocese of Miami spoke with OSV News concerning a new report from Human Rights Watch alleging dehumanizing conditions at three Florida detention sites holding immigrants that lack legal authorization to live and work in the U.S. for eventual deportation. These alleged conditions included denial of medical care potentially resulting in deaths; freezing and overcrowded cells with no bedding or hygiene access; and degrading treatment including beatings, shackling, isolation, and detainees being forced to eat with hands cuffed behind their backs.

In this interview conducted July 23, Archbishop Wenski argued that the border is now secure, and for the sake of the common good, Congress and President Donald Trump should pursue immigration reform and turn aside from a course of mass detention and deportation that violates human dignity.

The interview has been edited for length.

OSV News: Your Excellency, what is your reaction to the report?

Archbishop Wenski: This is not the first time that these concerns have been aired.

I was at Krome on Easter Sunday, and they had constructed some temporary tent shelters with air conditioning; tent shelters to handle the overcrowding. But at Krome about a month ago, an older Cuban man died in custody, and that has happened before. At “Alligator Alcatraz” … the people are basically in cages.

And because the Everglades is a very humid place — it’s a swamp — it’s very hot, and the facility itself is built on top of a tarmac … these are harsh conditions.

The facility is also over 30 miles away from Miami, so it’s very far from medical facilities. If somebody had an emergency there — a heart attack or something like that — it would seem very difficult for them to be evacuated to a medical center in a timely fashion. That distance discourages, or makes difficult, visits for attorneys.

OSV News: You’ve said that current immigration policies don’t uphold due process, and it’s time for Congress to do something. What could that look like — if Congress did do something?

Archbishop Wenski: There are a couple things that Congress could do. Right now, the administration is focused on enforcement only. Immigration has been an ongoing crisis the last 20, 25 years. And both sides of the aisle have kicked the can down the road, because they use it as a wedge issue to appeal to their bases, whether on the left or the right. And so Congress has been pretty much missing in action over the past years.

Sometimes a congressman — mostly Republican, but even some Democrats — would say they would support a broader immigration reform; first, they needed to get control of the border.

That was their usual excuse for the past 20 years: Get control of the border first, then we could talk about immigration reform. Well, President Trump has effectively controlled the border. So now it’s time to talk about immigration reform.

There is a proposal in the House by Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, who is a Republican from Miami. And I will say that’s a good first step at a proposal that would provide a path for legalization for a number of people.

We have a lot of people that are basically in limbo. … If the president wants — as he says he does — to have the most robust economy ever, then you can’t have a robust economy without taking into account the contributions of immigrants to our workforce.

OSV News: You’ve said it’s a matter of human dignity.

Archbishop Wenski: Yes — this is what was so maddening, if you will, about Alligator Alcatraz.

First of all, the name. Second, the jokes that were made by the public officials that visited the place: talking about pythons and alligators as being the security guards of this facility. That kind of joking about another person’s misery is really unbecoming. It forgets that these people that are detained are brothers or sons or fathers of people that are very much in anguish because of what’s happened to their loved ones. At least respect it.

It almost seems like the name of the place — the isolation of the place, the rhetoric around it, the type of cages being used and everything — seems to be wanting to dehumanize the detainees. And certainly that’s not worthy of our country.

And this is another reason why celebrating Mass there is important to us as Catholics, because the Mass is one way of humanizing the detainees. It is also a way of elevating their dignity as children of God. And at the same time, it reminds them that they’re not alone; that God is with them.