Hours before President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, which is expected to include comments on immigration enforcement, 18 Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops from U.S. border regions issued a strongly worded statement urging Congress and the administration to make specific policy changes on the federal treatment of migrants.
Their list of demands includes honoring migrants’ right to apply for asylum at the border, protecting their access to sensitive locations like schools and houses of worship, keeping mixed-status families together, halting intimidating enforcement tactics like roving patrols and federal agents’ use of masks, and funding reintegration programs in deportees’ home countries.
“While we acknowledge the right and duty of a sovereign nation to enforce its laws, we also believe that those laws should be upheld in a manner that protects the God-given human dignity and rights of the human person,” the bishops wrote.
The signers included bishops from states that border Mexico and Canada — Texas, New Mexico, Washington, Michigan, California, and New York — as well as Rhode Island and Kentucky.
Their statement expressed particular concern over the apparent lack of due process afforded by the government to immigrants, including large numbers of worshipers in their own pews.
“The right to due process is enshrined in our Constitution,” they wrote. “We believe that certain policies currently being pursued by immigration enforcement undermine this right — the use of expedited removal, warrantless arrests, administrative warrants, courtroom arrests, and racial profiling, among other policies — and should be prohibited.”
The issuance of the statement represents the latest escalation in a growing conflict between the White House and the U.S. Catholic clergy, who have followed the example of Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from the United States, in repeatedly rebuking the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign.
Over the past year, Catholic bishops have elevated concern for immigrants as their top social and political priority. They have spoken out forcefully against the administration’s aggressive enforcement tactics in Mr. Trump’s second term. In November, the entire conference of U.S. Catholic bishops issued a rare statement framing the immigration crisis in stark moral terms, condemning growing “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.”
Those growing concerns helped fuel the call for the specific policy changes in Tuesday’s statement, according to Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, who signed the document alongside the archbishops of San Antonio, Seattle, and Detroit.
“There’s some very specific things here that we think are wrong,” he said in an interview.
Archbishop Wester cited raids on homes by federal agents who had not obtained judicial warrants. Pastors of immigrant communities have been telling their congregants that judicial warrants are required for authorities to enter their homes, but “all of a sudden, that’s not being done in all cases,” the archbishop said, “and so it’s confusing to the people, and it’s not fair.”
The statement also said that the administration’s effort to expand federal detention capacity was “of grave concern,” and urged officials not to detain “vulnerable persons and groups,” like people who are disabled and pregnant women.
As Congress and the administration debate immigration enforcement going forward, the bishops said, “We stand ready to work with them to create an immigration system which ensures public safety, protects human rights, encourages economic growth and justice, and upholds our heritage as a nation of immigrants.”
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
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