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Archbishop Edward Weisenburger of Detroit spent Friday on a sidewalk in Clark Park, holding a hand-lettered sign that read “Todos Somos Familia,” Spanish for “We Are All Family.”
He had come to stand with about 50 people at the weekly vigil of Strangers No Longer, a lay Catholic immigrant-rights group, after days of reports that ICE agents were targeting southwest Detroit, home to a large Mexican immigrant community.
Drivers honked as they passed. When the 40-minute protest ended, the archbishop walked back to his car and drove himself home.
“I don’t really believe in a polite religion that maintains the status quo for people in power,” Weisenburger told the Detroit Free Press.
He had harsh words for the agents themselves. “I never thought I’d see something like that in my day: hiding behind masks, snatching people off streets,” he told The Detroit News.
The vigil came four days before Tuesday’s midterm elections, in a campaign where immigration sits beside affordability and Trump’s own unpopularity as one of the three issues defining the race, according to Reuters. It also came eight days after twelve American bishops prayed over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, a moment White House staff filmed and posted online twelve days before the vote.
The backlash has not let up. Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob issued a public apology, Des Moines Bishop William Joensen said the White House “exploited” the meeting, and several others have since put distance between themselves and the video. Thousands of Catholics have signed our letter asking the rest to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
Weisenburger, for his part, called Friday’s vigil “less a political statement, and far far far more a moral, ethical and religious statement.” He told Detroit Catholic that “Catholicism does not fit in perfectly in any political party,” and that when it comes to immigration and voting, Catholics must always remember one thing: “Everyone is created in the image of God.”
A record that started on day one
Pope Francis named Weisenburger archbishop of Detroit on Feb. 11, 2025, three days before Francis entered Rome’s Gemelli hospital for the five-week stay that preceded his death, which makes Weisenburger one of Francis’s last American appointments. He came north from Tucson, where years of listening to migrants along the border marked him for good. In a February column for the Free Press, he wrote that hearing their stories, “I knew I was on holy ground.”
Four months into his tenure, on July 14, 2025, he walked with hundreds of clergy and lay Catholics from Most Holy Trinity Church in Corktown to the ICE field office on Michigan Avenue. Before they set out, he prayed that God would “make firm our resolve to reveal and uphold their dignity as your beloved sons and daughters.” ICE refused to accept the letter they carried.
Nine days later, he fired theologians Ralph Martin and Eduardo Echeverria from Sacred Heart Major Seminary, and canon lawyer Edward Peters was let go within days. All three had spent years publicly criticizing Pope Francis. The Catholic right was furious; Crisis editor Eric Sammons called the firings “an act of a thin-skinned, petty tyrant.”
Pope Leo XIV knows this archdiocese well. He was ordained a deacon at St. Clare of Montefalco Parish in Grosse Pointe Park, and when he placed the pallium on Weisenburger’s shoulders in St. Peter’s Basilica on June 29, 2025, the archbishop reminded him of it. “Yes! Yes, St. Clare’s Parish,” the pope answered, according to Detroit Catholic. “Yes, I have fond memories.”
Where Jesus would be
Leo has given American Catholics the vocabulary for what happened in Clark Park. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” the pope told reporters at Castel Gandolfo in September 2025.
On Wednesday, he met the Chicago Catholics who sued the Trump administration for the right to minister to immigrants detained at Broadview, and he accepted letters and photos from the people held there.
Weisenburger described the habit behind Friday’s decision in plain terms. “Part of my spiritual practice is to get up in the morning and say, ‘Where would Jesus be today?’” he told the Free Press. The same question guided him on his first day in Detroit, when one of his priests told him that parishioners were leaving for countries they had not seen in more than 25 years, deporting themselves out of fear.
Several of the twelve bishops in the Oval Office say they were promised privacy, and the White House turned their prayer into a campaign video anyway. In Clark Park, the people in the frame with the archbishop were frightened families and the neighbors who show up for them every Friday.
Jesus told his disciples exactly where he would be (“I was a stranger and you welcomed me”), and he left no doubt about which side of that line a Christian is meant to stand on. On Tuesday, Catholics carry the archbishop’s morning question into the voting booth. Detroit’s shepherd has already shown us how to answer it.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Weisenburger and the Strangers No Longer volunteers who keep watch in Clark Park week after week, and with every family in southwest Detroit that woke up this week afraid of a knock at the door — along with countless others of goodwill who believe the Church belongs beside the stranger.
In a season when the powerful want bishops as props for campaign videos, we remain rooted in a faith that kneels with the poor and refuses to bless cruelty.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who smell like their sheep, and for a Church willing to tell the truth about human dignity when it costs something.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every immigrant family, I am asking you to join us.
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I'm so glad to hear about this.
I AM SO PROUD OF BISHOP WEISENBURGER!!!! He was recently the bishop in Tucson! I got to witness his amazing homilies through the Covid lockdown and he always spoke with such conviction! He inspired me so much and continues to!!!!