A Plea for Peace and Dignity in Minnesota
A Response to Bishop Robert Barron
In the opening to his message for this year’s World Day of Peace, Pope Leo XIV reminds us that the successors to the Apostles, the bishops, “give voice every day throughout the world to the most silent of revolutions: ‘Peace be with you!’” This offering of the peace of Christ is not just a pious proclamation; it has the power to transform each of us and the world around us.
The recent popes have had a great deal to say about the nature of this peace, not least in their annual World Day of Peace messages, a tradition which Pope Paul VI began in 1968. Perhaps Pope Paul’s most well-known contribution to the Church’s teaching on peace, however, comes in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, where he insists that peace is inseparable from justice: “[P]eace . . . is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men” (#76).
Pope John Paul II, building on this theme in his 1999 World Day of Peace message, taught that “solid and lasting foundations for building peace are laid” when the inalienable dignity of the human person, and the rights that flow from it, are respected. When the dignity of persons is violated, however, “then the seeds of instability, rebellion and violence are inevitably sown.” Here Pope John Paul is re-articulating one of the key teachings of the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, that the human person and its development is the “subject and goal” of social life (#25).
In his 1980 World Day of Peace, Pope John Paul likewise insists that truth is a “driving force of peace.” Here he certainly means that the acknowledgement of the truth about the human person as revealed in the Incarnation, as the image of God, and as the bearer of dignity is essential to peace. But he also means that commitments to acknowledge facts, to communicate truth, and to dialogue in pursuit of truth are building blocks for peace. On the other hand, he adds:
Selective indignation, sly insinuations, the manipulation of information, the systematic discrediting of opponents - their persons, intentions and actions - blackmail and intimidation: these are forms of non-truth working to develop a climate of uncertainty aimed at forcing individuals, groups, governments, and even international organizations to keep silence in helplessness and complicity, to surrender their principles in part or to react in an irrational way. All these attitudes are equally capable of favoring the murderous game of violence and of attacking the cause of peace.
Both Pope Francis and Pope Leo have expanded on this theme, warning that social media and artificial intelligence can help spread misinformation, propaganda, and hateful content that can sow discord and even violence.
Catholics in the United States cannot help but cry out for peace amidst the ongoing strife in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area involving the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents and protests against those activities. This strife follows similar turmoil in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte. In a recent message published by Fox News, Robert Barron, the bishop of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and well-known Catholic media personality, appeals for peace in Minnesota, attempting to fulfill Leo’s previously mentioned call for bishops to be proclaimers of Christ’s peace. Bishop Barron calls for a deescalation in rhetoric and a scaling back of ICE’s tactics. As I’ve noted before, Barron has insisted that in his role as pastor, his responsibility is not to speak directly to the political issues facing the nation, but rather to offer spiritual and pastoral guidance. Barron’s message on the current crisis, therefore, should be read as his interpretation of the “signs of the times” (Gaudium et Spes #4) and as pastoral guidance given in that light.
Although Bishop Barron is certainly right to use his voice as a pastoral leader to call for peace and dialogue, the content of his message does not reflect the rich understanding of peace found in the papal teachings mentioned earlier and does not rise to the current occasion. For one, Barron’s message does not adequately reflect the centrality of the dignity of the person to the Church’s teaching on migrants and their rights, and it ignores the persistent violations of the dignity of immigrants and protestors by ICE and Border Patrol agents. Second, his message is marred by serious omissions of fact regarding the situation in Minnesota and the country at large, ignoring truths that must be acknowledged if real peace is to be promoted. These deficiencies in Bishop Barron’s message are all the more shocking when it is compared to statements made by other US Catholic bishops over the past several months, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) special message on immigration published two months ago, all of which have provided a more comprehensive account of the current crisis and a deeper reflection on the situation in light of the Church’s teachings.
In Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, the pastoral letter on immigration co-written by the Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico, the bishops lay out five moral principles that should guide immigration policy, principles based in earlier magisterial teaching going back to Popes Pius XII and John XXIII in the middle of the twentieth century:
Persons have the right to find opportunities in their homeland;
Persons have the right to migrate to support themselves and their families;
Sovereign nations have the right to control their borders;
Refugees and asylum seekers should be afforded protection;
The human dignity and human rights of undocumented migrants should be respected. (##33-38)
These principles embody the Church’s social teaching that society and the state exist for the sake of the person and the promotion of each person’s dignity. People should be able to find “the economic, political, and social opportunities to live in dignity and achieve a full life through the use of their God-given gifts” (#34) in their home countries, but when they cannot, they have the right to migrate elsewhere, a right that other states have a moral duty to accommodate (#35). Even when the bishops acknowledge that states have the right to “control their borders,” it adds that this must be done “in furtherance of the common good” rather than for other motives (#39). Furthermore, because the common good “is best safeguarded when personal rights and duties are guaranteed” (John XXIII, Pacem in Terris #60) and extends beyond national borders (Pacem in Terris #134), the common good cannot be pitted over against the rights of migrants, but rather includes them: “[T]he common good is not served when the basic human rights of the individual are violated” (Strangers No Longer #39). Similarly, even when migrants are in violation of a country’s laws, those laws must be designed and implemented in a way that respects migrants’ dignity, and law enforcement officers should treat them with dignity in judicial proceedings and when they are detained (#38).
In the past, I’ve noted that, even in his lengthier remarks on the immigration issue, “Barron’s thinking subtly departs from the Church’s official teaching on immigration in consequential ways.” This is certainly true in his recent message. Most importantly, Barron’s account of the Church’s teaching in that message only mentions the third of the US and Mexican bishops’ five principles: “[A]long with my brother bishops, I strongly defend our nation’s right to maintain the border and to enforce immigration regulations.” Absent is any recognition that this right is paired with a duty to ensure that those immigration regulations accommodate the right of migrants to seek a new home in the US.
The implications of this omission can be seen first of all in Barron’s admittedly brief criticism of what he refers to as “the effectively open border policy that held sway during the Biden administration,” especially when this is compared with what the USCCB had to say about the Biden administration’s immigration policy at the time. The bishops praised the Biden administration for reversing certain policies from the first Trump administration such as ending the so-called “Muslim ban,” creating a task force to reunify immigrant families separated by the Trump administration, and increasing the number of refugees settled in the US each year.
On the other hand, the USCCB criticized the Biden administration for maintaining Trump-era policies that made it difficult for asylum seekers to seek refuge in the US. For example, the bishops lamented that the Biden administration had kept in place the so-called “Title 42” policy implemented by President Donald Trump in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic which allowed for the expulsion of asylum seekers who had illegally crossed the US border without providing them the chance to have their asylum claim heard. They likewise challenged a new policy implemented once the Title 42 policy was repealed in May 2023, after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared over, which similarly made migrants ineligible for asylum if they did not enter the US through a port of entry, regardless of the merits of their asylum claim, and likewise if the asylum seeker had traveled through a third country (i.e., a country other than their home country or the US) to reach the US.
The United States certainly did see a rise in unauthorized border crossings during the Biden administration, and cities like New York City, Boston, and Chicago saw a surge in migrant arrivals, primarily from Venezuela, placing strains on those cities, particularly in regard to housing. These phenomena were not the result of any deliberate policy of the Biden administration, however, but rather were driven by the extremely hot jobs market in the US as it recovered from the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and by external factors like the economic crisis in Venezuela. Additionally, the Title 42 policy paradoxically increased the number of unauthorized border crossings by incentivizing asylum seekers to repeatedly attempt to cross the border after being expelled, whereas previously they were permitted to remain in the US until their asylum claim could be adjudicated. The USCCB responded to the Biden administration’s efforts to address these pressures in a nuanced way that is not reflected in Barron’s message.
The more important implication of Barron’s truncated account of the Church’s teaching on immigration comes at the level of principle, however. To his credit, Barron calls on ICE to limit what the USCCB’s special message had called “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” Barron writes, “I think that ICE operations should be limited to rounding up only undocumented people who have committed serious crimes.” Likewise, he insists that “the status of illegal immigrants who have lived productively and peacefully in our country for many years” should be settled through legislation rather than through “aggressive police action.”
This is an important distinction, but Barron appears uncurious about why so many productive and peaceful people reside in the US without documentation. Bishop Barron calls on politicians and protestors to respect the “federal officers who are endeavoring to enforce the laws of our country,” his analysis does not take into account that, in light of what the Church has taught about immigration, it is difficult not to conclude that the immigration laws of our country are unjust. The USCCB has over the years consistently called for the expansion of visas available to family members of current residents of the US and those seeking work in the country, as well as more welcoming policies for refugees and asylum seekers, because the US immigration system does not provide adequate opportunities for those seeking to exercise their right to migrate. Similarly, the bishops’ call for a path to legal status for many of the undocumented immigrants living in the US is not simply a forbearance permitted out of prudence, as Barron’s position would seem to suggest, but also a recognition that many undocumented immigrants have been the victims of what the bishops frequently refer to as the country’s “broken immigration system.” That is why, for example, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, in his own statement issued last June, insisted that mass deportations “can only result in cruel and arbitrary outcomes” and that a comprehensive reform of the immigration system is what is needed. Barron’s stance on the current crisis, on the other hand, because it does not adequately acknowledge the centrality of the rights of migrants to the Church’s teaching, fails to recognize how the injustice of the laws ICE is attempting to enforce is a key contributor to the current crisis.
Bishop Barron’s statement also fails to acknowledge the many ways that ICE and Border Patrol officers have been violating the dignity of both those they are detaining and those observing and protesting their actions. This is perhaps Barron’s most serious and consequential omission. In Strangers No Longer, the US and Mexican bishops teach that immigrants should be afforded due process in their encounters with law enforcement and immigration courts and, if they are found to have broken the law, should be provided dignified conditions when held in detention (##92-94). The Trump administration has violated these norms in numerous ways that shock the conscience, and yet none of these abuses are mentioned in Barron’s statement, ruining its credibility as a pastoral response to the crisis in Minnesota.
As previously noted, Bishop Barron calls on ICE to limit their operations to arresting immigrants who have committed serious crimes. The remarkable truth, however, is that nearly two-thirds of all ICE arrests between January and October 2025 were of individuals who had not been convicted of any crime, and less than ten percent of arrests were of individuals convicted of violent crimes. The Trump administration’s mass deportation policy is deliberately designed to fail to discriminate between non-criminals and what the Department of Homeland Security has referred to as “the worst of the worst.”
Alarmingly, US citizens and legal residents have also been caught up in ICE sweeps, detained, arrested, and abused in custody. ICE agents have reportedly refused to allow detained US citizens to show their passports in order to prove their citizenship and even rejected a woman’s passport because she didn’t “look like” the name printed in the passport. The root of these civil liberties violations, and arguably the most fundamental cause of the current crisis, is the abuse by ICE and Border Patrol officers of their authority to detain and arrest individuals and the use of racial profiling.
Contrary to a popular misconception, ICE and Border Patrol agents do not need a warrant to detain, question, and arrest an individual. Rather, they have the authority to detain and question someone based on a “reasonable suspicion” that the person has violated US immigration law, and then if, upon questioning, they find further evidence that the person has broken the law, they can arrest them. Federal and state courts, however, have consistently ruled that a law enforcement officer’s reasonable suspicion must be based on something particular to the person in question rather than solely on generalized characteristics like ethnicity or being in a particular location, even if it is statistically more probable that a person with those general characteristics may be committing a crime.
Last July, a federal judge ruled that there was ample evidence that immigration enforcement officers, as part of their “roving patrols” in the Los Angeles area, were improperly detaining people based solely on characteristics like ethnicity, occupation, location, and speaking non-English languages in public, tactics that amount to racial profiling and a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures (the Supreme Court, for unstated reasons, subsequently imposed a temporary stay, or pause, on the federal judge’s restraining order prohibiting ICE from carrying out these unlawful searches, but the facts laid out by the federal judge have gone uncontested by the government).
It’s not difficult to see how these tactics amount to racial profiling: if Hispanic construction workers or restaurant workers, for example, are inherently suspect while white construction workers or restaurant workers are not, then race or ethnicity becomes the determining factor. These tactics have continued elsewhere, such as in Minneapolis, where law enforcement officers have targeted the local Somali and Hmong communities, and one Hispanic man who is a US citizen captured a video of a Border Patrol agent claiming he was being detained because of his accent.
Compounding the issue is that the White House has issued an arrest quota for ICE and other law enforcement agencies, with potential professional consequences for agency leaders who fail to meet their assigned quotas. This unethical practice prioritizes numbers over the rule of law, increasing the potential for civil liberties violations and false arrests.
The Trump administration has also abused the law by seeking to arrest and deport immigrants and refugees seeking to avail themselves of their legal rights. For example, the Trump administration has dismissed pending removal cases against immigrants, particularly those who sought asylum during the Biden administration or who took advantage of the CHNV humanitarian parole program (a temporary program implemented by the Biden administration to regulate the influx of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela), only to reopen their cases and seek expedited removal, a process allowing for deportation without judicial proceedings (see here for an explainer on this complicated issue). This policy has led to the well-publicized cases of ICE agents arresting immigrants as they leave the courtroom where their case was being heard.
In Minnesota, over a hundred refugees from several countries who had already been vetted and approved for resettlement in the United States and with no criminal record were arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas, only to eventually be released and forced to make their own way back home. The arrests and detentions appear to be linked to an effort by the Trump administration to re-examine the vetting of refugees, although it’s not clear why this required their arrest and detention. The Trump administration has also recently claimed that it can deport individuals with active asylum claims to third countries, circumventing the asylum process.
The Trump administration has abused so-called “third-country deportations” in other ways, as well. The US government is permitted to deport a person to a country other than their home country if their home country does not accept deportations for diplomatic reasons or because the individual has a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country. In the past, however, this policy has only been used if the individual has ties of some sort to the third country. The Trump administration, however, has sought to expand the use of this policy, violating the rights of deportees in the process. For example, the administration has agreed to send deportees to countries where they do not speak the language and have no cultural affinity, such as sending deportees from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan. Most famously, the administration sent over a hundred Venezuelans to El Salvador to be detained indefinitely, without any due process, in that country’s Terrorism Confinement Center where they were tortured before eventually being released. In September, the administration deported fourteen migrants to the African nation of Ghana, which subsequently announced that it was making arrangements to send those migrants to their home countries, despite the credible risk of torture, violating the third-country agreement.
Immigrants do not have to be sent abroad to have their rights violated in detention, however. At the Krome detention center in Miami, detainees have experienced overcrowding, a lack of bedding, overflowing toilets that are never cleaned, and insufficient meals. In June, the conditions had become so bad that a group of detainees spelled out “SOS” with their bodies on an outdoor patio to get the attention of observers. A federal judge determined that the conditions in the Broadview detention center in Chicago, where detainees were forced to sleep on concrete floors, sometimes next to overflowing toilets, and were denied showers and toiletries, were “disgusting” and unconstitutional. ICE has also repeatedly prohibited Catholic ministers from providing the Eucharist to detainees in Broadview, most recently on Christmas Eve. Some detainees at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” facility were shackled in outdoor cages exposed to sweltering heat and mosquitos. ICE detention centers likewise use a variety of strategies to limit detainees’ access to legal counsel. ICE also moves detainees from one detention center to another in a different state to thwart efforts by the detainees’ attorneys to challenge their detention in court. The Department of Homeland Security, in violation of the law, has also repeatedly refused to allow members of the US Congress to inspect detention facilities.
ICE and Border Patrol agents have also used unlawful or dangerous tactics in their dealings with those observing their activity and protesting the abuses just outlined. Agents have rammed their vehicles into the vehicles of both suspects and observers (protestors have also crashed into ICE vehicles). Law enforcement officers have repeatedly misused pepper spray and tear gas in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, deploying pepper spray or tear gas on crowds that are nonviolent and not obstructing law enforcement activity, deploying pepper spray into the windows of moving vehicles, and spraying pepper spray directly into the face of a man pinned down by agents. ICE officers have threatened to kill observers in retaliation for their legal activity, pointing to Renee Good’s death as an example. On Thursday, three ICE agents swerved their vehicle in front of a car being driven by a woman who had been observing them from her car, jumped out of their vehicle with guns drawn and pointed at her, and arrested her; they later released her without charge after an intervention by the local police.
Gallingly, law enforcement officers and administration officials have repeatedly lied about these abuses. Most notoriously, the Trump administration claimed that 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador were affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, when in fact only a small handful had any connection to the gang. Department of Justice attorneys are alleged to have lied to a federal judge to hide the fact that a plane carrying some of those detainees to Venezuela had taken off in violation of a court order. In the middle of the night on September 30, 300 law enforcement officials carried out a military-style raid on an apartment building in Chicago: Border Patrol and FBI agents descended down ropes from a Blackhawk helicopter while armored vehicles surrounded the building. Law enforcement officers broke down the doors to several apartments and ransacked them (without warrants), and dozens of residents, including US citizens, were marched out of the building in zip ties. The acting ICE director, Todd Lyons, claimed that the raid was justified because the apartment building had been taken over by members of the Tren de Aragua gang who were terrorizing the residents. In the end, however, the Trump administration claimed that only two members of the gang had been arrested in the raid, although it has never identified the two or presented any evidence that they were gang members.
A federal judge in Chicago determined that Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino admitted in a deposition to lying about the events leading up to the deployment of tear gas against a crowd of protestors. After the death of Renee Good, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem accused her of “domestic terrorism” and President Donald Trump claimed she had run over the ICE agent who had shot her, despite video evidence proving that she had not run over the officer and suggesting that her intent was to drive away from him and the other ICE officers on the scene rather than to hit them with her vehicle. Similarly, Noem and others falsely claimed that Alex Pretti had drawn his weapon prior to being shot and killed by Border Patrol agents, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff claimed he had intended to “massacre” the agents despite video evidence demonstrating otherwise.
I hope readers will forgive me for testing their patience with this long list of abuses against immigrants and protestors alike. My purpose in citing all these examples is to demonstrate that these violations of human dignity are not isolated, but systematic. Under the guise of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, these abuses seem to be designed not to promote the rule of law but to instill fear, victimize the vulnerable, and intimidate critics. Given these numerous abuses of human dignity, however, it is remarkable that in his call for peace in Minnesota, Bishop Barron does not mention a single one.
In fact, Barron reserves his criticism for the politicians and protestors challenging these documented abuses, accusing them of “stirring up resentment” against law enforcement. He goes on to add, “The comparison of these oft-beleaguered individuals to Nazis and fascists and Gestapo agents is morally heinous and directly productive of violence.” On top of his own silence, Barron seems to leave no room here for legitimate criticism of the authoritarian tactics being employed by the Trump administration. Indeed, his association of criticism of administration policies with violence—which echoes the Trump administration’s own rhetoric—is itself an attempt to demonize Trump’s political opponents while completely ignoring the incendiary rhetoric coming from Trump himself and administration officials.
Barron opens his statement by lamenting the “massive institutional corruption” that has been uncovered in Minnesota’s social services agencies. He rightly points out that this fraud is a scandal that deserves more attention and that “Catholic social teaching is adamant that public corruption constitutes a grave threat to society and especially to the poor.” At the same time, however, he gets basic facts of the case wrong. He writes:
One of the most disturbing features of this episode is that a journalist, Christopher F. Rufo, and Nick Shirley, an independent investigative reporter, broke the case by doing what ordinary inspectors and public officials in the state should have been doing for years: simply verifying where the money was going.
In reality, however, the Minnesota Department of Education began flagging potential fraud carried out by the nonprofit organization Feeding Our Future in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization received federal and state money while fraudulently claiming to have served meals to children. The FBI began investigating the scheme in 2021, under the Biden administration, and arrested and indicted several of the perpetrators the following year. It’s true that state officials should have done more to uncover the scheme earlier, but a state auditor’s report points out that state officials were overly cautious in response to a lawsuit by Feeding Our Future claiming early actions against the organization were motivated by anti-Somali racism (most of the eventual defendants were Somali). In 2023 and 2024, the Minnesota Attorney General’s office also brought charges against several companies accused of committing Medicaid billing fraud, and again many of the defendants were of Somali origin.
In December of last year, Nick Shirley, the independent journalist mentioned by Barron, produced a video claiming to show fraud committed by Somali-run daycares in Minnesota, but the allegations made in the video have been found to be unsubstantiated. Shirley himself has a history of producing anti-immigrant videos—for example, he had previously produced videos promoting the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets and providing laudatory footage from El Salvador’s CECOT prison—and this most recent video seems to be in the same vein. In his description of the fraud scandal in Minnesota, Barron again misrepresents the facts in a way that disparages President Trump’s political opponents, in this case Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, while taking at face value claims made as part of a campaign to vilify immigrants.
More importantly, however, Bishop Barron also remains silent about the racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric President Trump has unleashed toward the Somali community in the aftermath of the publication of Shirley’s video. In an outburst of bigotry unprecedented for a president, Trump called Somalis “garbage,” claiming their home country “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He later added that Somalis have “destroyed Minnesota” and “destroyed our country.” Bishop Barron, however, expresses no concern about this rhetoric or the possibility that it might be “directly productive of violence.”
Nevertheless, the president’s rhetoric has been translated into policy. The Department of Homeland Security recently terminated Temporary Protected Status—a program intended to allow foreign nationals to temporarily stay in the US when their country is unsafe due to violence or natural disaster—for Somalis, making them subject to deportation, despite Trump’s claim that “With Somalia, which is barely a country, you know, they have no, they have no anything. They just run around killing each other. There's no structure.” Immigration enforcement surges in Minnesota and Maine also seem aimed specifically at the Somali community, despite the fact that the majority of Somali Americans are US citizens.
Barron views his essay as a pastoral exhortation for peace: “Everyone on all sides of this issue must stop shouting at one another and demonizing their opponents.” I would ask, however, whether Barron’s message in fact fosters the sort of peace identified by recent popes as the peace of Christ—a peace founded on truth and respect for the dignity of every person. Barron accentuates the state’s right to impose its authority on immigrants while ignoring the state’s duty to protect the dignity and rights of immigrants. He remains silent about the systematic abuses of human dignity being carried out by the Trump administration while focusing his criticisms on the administration’s opponents. He makes law enforcement officers out to be the victims while erasing the victims languishing in detention centers. He identifies criticisms of the administration’s authoritarian tactics with violence while ignoring the president’s own incendiary and racist rhetoric, rhetoric which has the power of the state behind it.
What’s also striking is the contrast between Barron’s statement and those made by several of his fellow bishops and by the USCCB as a whole, which do clearly challenge some of the abuses outlined here and that seem to recognize the threat they pose to the rule of law. Is it too much to hope that Bishop Barron could learn from the wisdom and pastoral experience of his fellow bishops, or even from the many residents of his own state terrified or outraged by what is happening in their community?
One hesitates to find in Barron’s statement the real reason why he selectively omitted the abuses of ICE or this administration’s draconian terror tactics and multiple violations of human rights and dignity. From my perspective, it is utterly unseemly that a Bishop of such influence should fail to speak truth to power. Shameful.
Thank you Matt. I was pointed to your piece by Prof. Anne Carpenter (@CatholicKungFu on BlueSky) and I'm grateful that she did. Well researched, clearly articulated, compelling arguments--and you were respectful, but pointed, in your response to Bishop Barron. This is a keeper for me.