"Category 4 Storm" — Top US Bishop Says Catholics May Not Be Able to Work for ICE Anymore
As ICE ramps up inhumane actions, a leading bishop says some Catholics may soon have to say, “In conscience, I can’t do this.”
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Catholic leaders used unusually stark language at Georgetown University on Thursday, Sept. 11, warning that the Trump administration’s expanded detentions and deportations are tearing through parishes and families like a “category 4 storm.”
Speaking at a public roundtable of leading Catholic voices on migration, Washington Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala said the dominant emotion he encounters is “fear,” as immigrants ask, “Where do we go from here?”
Menjivar-Ayala, who crossed the border without authorization before becoming a U.S. citizen, said today’s enforcement climate has revived a grim phrase from El Salvador’s civil war — “Se lo llevaron” (“They took him or her”) — to describe sudden removals.
He and University of Virginia theologian Nichole Flores said many brown-skinned Latinos, including Flores herself, now carry passports at all times amid reports of racial profiling.
“Our immigrant community is experiencing a hurricane of its own these days,” Menjivar-Ayala said. “This is a category 4 storm tearing through the lives of people, destroying their dreams.”
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski traced the political drift to a post-9/11 reflex to treat immigration primarily as a national-security question. The vast majority of migrants without legal status, he argued, “are not law-breakers. They’re being broken by the law.”
Pastoral fallout is immediate. Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez told the audience that priests estimate “at least 30%” of regular Mass-goers are no longer attending.
Catholic schools are feeling the strain, and the archdiocese has launched a Family Assistance Program to deliver groceries and essentials to families too afraid to leave their homes.
In the Rio Grande Valley, Sister Norma Pimentel said fear is pushing families toward homelessness as some parents avoid work.
El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration committee, said he is actively weighing the moral question of whether Catholics can, in good conscience, join Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency ramps up hiring.
Some agents hope to “soften the approach” from within, he noted, but the “messages I’m getting from ICE” suggest less discretion and stricter execution of policy.
“The time may well come,” Seitz said, “when they have to make that difficult moral choice to say in conscience, ‘I can no longer do this.’”
As a career state government and federal government executive , I personally am deeply troubled by the apparent “culture “ being promulgated within ICE wherein field staff , masked to hide their identity and often unwilling to identify their agency authority , are acting like the East German Stasi in scooping up immigrants of color without documentation , most of whom are hard working and looking after families, and who have not been convicted of crimes. It is so sad , unAmerican , unjust , unChristian , and deeply harmful to our country , our economy , our world wide reputation . All this to further the vengeance and moral emptiness of a multiply convicted felon ,and too often enabled by Roman Catholic Federal Supreme Court Justices and numerous elected US Congress members , some Governors, and the right wing . Immoral. Wrong. shameful.
My recent Note to the USCCB: The silence of US Bishops in response to the US military using weapons of war against a boat in international waters, not near the US borders and not a military threat, is disheartening. I have talked to several parishioners who say that they are okay with the killing of whoever was in that boat because the government said they were smuggling drugs, even though there is no evidence of drug smuggling. AND EVEN IF they WERE drug smuggling, people do not deserve death by the government with the largest military on earth. A PERCEIVED threat does not give the US military the RIGHT to determine who should live or die. The flock is being led astray by the leadership of an amoral US regime. I beseech those with the moral duty as Good Shepard, to face the wolf that would consume the souls of your flock, with the truth on how our loving Savior, Jesus Christ would be most likely to respond. I believe that He would be flipping over some tables!
Blessings of fortitude in these challenging times!