Invoking Pope Leo, Iowa Bishops Slam Trump's ICE Raids

Four heartland bishops say migrants are neighbors, not suspects — part of a red-state Catholic pushback.

Iowa’s four Catholic bishops just put ICE-style enforcement on notice.

In a pastoral letter released Friday, they defend migrants as neighbors and condemn “enforcement tactics that treat all immigrants… in the same manner as violent criminals.”

The bishops — Thomas Zinkula (Dubuque), William Joensen (Des Moines), Dennis Walsh (Davenport), and John Keehner (Sioux City) — are saying what too many politicians won’t: human dignity doesn’t vanish at the border or at a traffic stop.

Read their document and you’ll see why it matters.

They reject policies that “restrict humanitarian protections, deny asylum claims, and expand detention,” and they echo national concerns about deploying the military for civil immigration enforcement or playing games with birthright citizenship.

This is Church teaching applied to today’s reality — clear, sober, and rooted in the gospel’s command to welcome the stranger.

It also tracks with Pope Leo XIV’s own language about safeguarding the dignity of the vulnerable.

And here’s the bigger story: Iowa isn’t an outlier.

Across the country — especially in MAGA country — bishops are stepping into the vacuum with moral clarity.

Just last week, Kansas bishops warned that “unnecessary raids, mass detentions, and family separations” betray both the Gospel and American values, urging Catholics to build welcoming parishes where politics never poisons compassion.

That’s Kansas — not Cambridge.

In Texas, bishops condemned Trump Administration executive actions that gut due process and heighten risk for families and children, singling out the open-ended use of military assets in immigration enforcement.

Again: red-state prelates calling out hardline tactics that treat longtime parishioners like threats to be managed rather than people to be served.

Nationally, the U.S. bishops — led by El Paso’s Mark Seitz — have been blunt: human dignity is not contingent on papers, and sweeping crackdowns that collapse everyone into “criminals” are an affront to God.

That’s the Church’s witness in a sentence.

The takeaway is simple and uncomfortable: if our immigration policy relies on fear, spectacle, and indiscriminate detention, it’s failing both faith and country.

Iowa’s bishops just said so — plainly.

The question now isn’t whether the Church will show up.

It’s whether the rest of us will match that courage with practical solidarity for the families living in our pews and on our blocks.

Letters from Leo exists for moments like this — when Iowa’s bishops step into the breach and say plainly that migrants are neighbors, not suspects.

When bishops in so-called MAGA country and nuns and priests from El Paso to eastern Iowa choose families over fear, their witness can’t be drowned out by the noise of our politics.

This newsletter is here to amplify that moral clarity and spread it in a world desperate for signs of hope.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.