July Grab Bag
Bishops' Pastoral Reflection on Immigration, Dissension in the ICE Ranks, and an Upcoming Gathering on Amoris Laetitia
I am re-sending this post from this morning because I originally accidentally set it to be sent only to paid subscribers. Apologies for the inconvenience.
This week, I have a bit of a grab bag of different items. In response to the recent deaths of three recent deaths tied to immigration enforcement stops, two committee chairs from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a joint pastoral reflection. A report from the Washington Examiner describes dissension among Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, not so much over moral questions regarding what they’ve been tasked with doing, but over the effect of Trump administration policy on agency morale. And earlier this month, the Vatican published a preparatory document for an unusual gathering of the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences in the Vatican to discuss the implementation of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.
Two USCCB Chairs Write Pastoral Reflection on Immigration and Racial Profiling
Three foreign nationals were killed during encounters with ICE in the span of a week earlier this month. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had lived in the United States for 35 years, was shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop in Houston. The ICE officers claim Salgado Araujo attempted to ram them with his vehicle, while witnesses claim it was the ICE officers who rammed Salgado Araujo’s van, and that he had put the vehicle into park when the officer began shooting. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant legally authorized to work in the US, was shot in his car on his way to work in Biddeford, Maine as he drove past ICE officers searching for another individual. The ICE officers involved claim that Durán Guerrero attempted to flee the scene but have offered no explanation of why he was a threat to them or the public. And Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a tourist from Mexico, was killed by a passing truck when he fled ICE officers who had stopped a vehicle with Coronilla Durán and three other individuals inside.
In response to these three deaths in such close proximity, Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of Victoria, Texas, the chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, and Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Austin, Texas, the Chair of the Subcommittee on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, issued a pastoral reflection lamenting the deaths and decrying the policies that contributed to them. They write: “As Catholics, we believe that all persons are created in the image and likeness of God and, therefore, grieve all situations where human life is brought to an unnatural end.”
Significantly, Bishops Cahill and Garcia do not focus on the circumstances of the three men’s deaths or on the controversial question of whether ICE officers should conduct traffic stops, a policy that was briefly suspended then reinstated after Durán Guerrero’s shooting. Instead, the two bishops zero in on the broader policies that make incidents such as these possible. In particular, they condemn the practice of racial profiling:
As the bishops of the United States affirmed last November [in their Special Message on immigration], “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement.” Racial profiling in particular not only violates God-given dignity but also inflicts profound harm on individuals, families, and communities by fostering fear, eroding trust, and increasing the risk of unjust and even tragic outcomes.
When condemning racial profiling, Cahill and Garcia cite the USCCB’s 2018 pastoral letter on racism, Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love. The inclusion of Bishop Garcia as a co-author of the statement and the involvement of the bishops’ Subcommittee on Racial Justice and Reconciliation also signals that the USCCB views their response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies as not simply a question of justice for immigrants but also of racial justice.
