US Church leaders back call to halt Ice funding after ‘unacceptable’ violence
A group of 300 Catholic leaders including 15 bishops signed a letter to the Senate asking lawmakers not to fund the Ice agency unless an appropriations bill included protections for migrants.
Catholic leaders in the United States voiced growing opposition to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, after weeks of violent clashes between federal immigration agents and protesters that left two US citizens dead in Minneapolis.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, described US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as “lawless” during an online interfaith prayer service on 26 January and urged Catholics to tell their representatives not to approve funding the agency.
“How will you say ‘no’ to violence?” Cardinal Tobin said. “How will you say ‘no’ this week when an appropriations bill is going to be considered in Congress? Will you contact your congressional representatives, the senators and representatives from your district? Will you ask them, for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can’t be separated, to vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organisation?”
Tobin spoke two days after federal immigration agents shot dead 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who participated in an anti-Ice protest in Minneapolis. Pretti’s death came 17 days after an Ice officer in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, 37, a poet and mother.
Responding to questions about the shootings on 28 January, the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the Holy See “cannot accept episodes such as these”.
“Issues, problems, contradictions should be resolved in other ways,” Parolin told reporters in Rome.
A group of 300 Catholic leaders in the US, including 15 bishops, signed a letter to the Senate asking lawmakers not to fund the Ice agency unless an appropriations bill included protections for migrants.
“A [US Department of Homeland Security] budget that prioritises detention and removal – while lacking strong safeguards for family unity, due process, and accountability – risks entrenching harm rather than promoting justice or public safety,” said the letter, dated 28 January. Its signatories included Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle.
Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington joined several interfaith leaders in the nation’s capital on 29 January to sign a public statement that called the deaths of Good and Pretti a “profound moral failure” that “demand[s] our collective attention and response”.
“The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti – two US citizens devoted to civic engagement and to caring for their immigrant neighbours – have left communities in Minneapolis and across the nation grieving, shaken and rightly outraged,” the statement said.
Police arrested more than 50 protesters outside the Senate building on 30 January during a peaceful demonstration demanding a halt to Ice funding organised by religious groups.
Pax Christi International reported that those arrested included Marie Dennis, director of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, Dan Moriarty, Peace and Nonviolence Senior Programme Officer at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and Jean Stokan, a member of Pax Christi USA. All the protesters were released within a few hours.
Last week Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the killings of Good and Pretti, as well as the death of a detained man in Texas, were just a “few of the tragic examples of the violence that represent failures in our society to respect the dignity of every human life”.
Coakley invited bishops and priests across the country to offer a special Holy Hour for Peace as a step towards healing.
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