The Trump administration announced its goal of arresting 2,000 immigrants daily, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, which is in charge of ICE) has never been able to reach that number. But its agents have been using new tactics recently, “from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest,” in order to boost their numbers. And, in fact, they arrested 51,000 immigrants in July, their highest number of arrests so far.
On the other end, over 2,000 detainees have been freed every month, mostly because “many federal judges, some of them Trump appointees, have ruled against the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention for many immigrants.” And even though DHS says its goal is “to arrest and deport pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and other criminals,” 40 percent of those arrested have no criminal record apart from “non-criminal immigration violations.”
Pope Leo’s strong advocacy for migrants
As El Paso Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz declared, “Our immigrant brothers and sisters, from those who are undocumented, to those who are naturalized citizens, are living in a deep state of fear.” Thomas Reese, Jesuit priest, a seasoned journalist and editor with a PhD in political science from UC Berkeley, and now Senior Analyst at Religion News Service (RNS), describes the Chicago-born Robert Prevost’s choice of a papal name: he “took the name Leo in honor of his predecessor, Leo XIII, who was the founder of Catholic social teaching and defended workers who were being exploited during the Industrial Revolution.”
Pope Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903) was the first Catholic leader to reflect on modern society and, in so doing, became the founder of “Catholic social teaching”: a central focus on reducing inequality and social justice, solidarity with workers and the poor; finally, the idea of subsidiarity—urging that sociopolitical decisions should be decentralized and made as locally as is possible. Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation in October 2025, Dilexi Te (“I have loved you”), a little book which argues mostly from Scripture that God cares first and foremost for the poor and enjoins his people to do the same. Here is Thomas Reese again:
“Leo inherited what would become his first apostolic exhortation from Pope Francis, whose views he embraced while revising it to reflect his thoughts. But both pontiffs felt that those who did not see care for the poor as ‘the burning heart of the Church’s mission … need to go back and re-read the Gospel.’ . . .
The document’s fundamentally scriptural argument is that ‘contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.’ The Gospels make clear that through the incarnation, Leo argues, God chose ‘to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us.’
Later in [Chapter 2] he says, ‘Wanting to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest.’”
It is not surprising, then, that Pope Leo received Bishop Mark Seitz and a delegation from El Paso at the Vatican in early October 2025. After listening to them, Leo urged them “to be more vocal against the deportations.” Months later, on the United State’s 250th birthday, Leo chose to spend part of the day on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, “a symbol of the immigrant influx polarizing the political debate in Europe.” As the picture above illustrates, he chose to honor in particular a child named Joussef, one of thousands buried there. Within the last decade, over 30,000 migrants are thought to have died at sea.
That day too he issued a letter to the United States, “reminding the country of its duty to uphold religious freedom and respect for human life, including the unborn and immigrants.” At one point he writes, “Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning.”
Back in June, the pope made a detour while visiting Spain and gave a speech at the port town of Arguineguín, part of the Canary Islands. He was addressing organizations that work with migrants (see this picture of him blessing a migrant recently rescued from a boat that had left the West African coast). In his speech, he assured the migrants present of “their worth and dignity even as they suffer at the hands of traffickers and mafias.” He then stated, “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.”
People of faith defending and caring for immigrants in the U.S.
I mentioned Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. Another Catholic leader heavily involved in calling attention to the plight of immigrants is San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller who himself crossed into the U.S. from Mexico at age 23. As a priest in California, “he would walk alongside farmworkers who worked bent over in fields and who slept in farmhouse garages to avoid being deported.” He later learned community organizing in Chicago as auxiliary bishop “and boarded deportation buses to hand out prayer cards.”
I am reading from an August 7th article in RNS (“How grief made Archbishop García-Siller a prophetic voice on immigration”) by a member of the Vatican committee on “Integral Human Development” and the executive director of Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Dylan Corbett. He writes about García-Siller’s new pastoral letter (“We Will Come to You”) just released. In it, he opens up on the grief he experienced while trying to console mostly Latina mothers who had lost their children in the Uvalde school shooting. This was ”another massacre in a strip of land with a long history of violence against those of Mexican descent.” Then a month later, he witnessed the tractor-trailer in which 53 migrants bodies were found. As Corbett puts it,
“In pursuit of the American dream, the migrants had suffocated in metal darkness. In five weeks, he had moved between two forms of American erasure: the sudden obliteration of childhood via school shootings and the slow suffocation of people who migrate. Both communities had been abandoned. Both experiences would stay with him”
Now in his letter, he mourns the more than fifty deaths of immigrants in ICE custody and the more than a thousand documented instances of abuses in these detention centers. What is more, 73 percent of these people have never been convicted of anything (according to the right-leaning Cato Institute). He accuses the current “campaign of mass detention and deportation” of being built on hatred and intentional cruelty. In García-Siller’s words, “This system’s brokenness is not merely policy failure . . . A system in which racial disparity is so deeply embedded cannot deliver justice without honest reform.”
A spirituality of the cross runs through his letter, notes Corbett. “Human tragedy met with love becomes where God lives.” The crucified Savior comes bringing life and comfort to those agonizing under the weight of oppression, injustice and pain. As in the parable of Jesus in Matthew 25, as we care for “the least of these,” we care for Jesus himself. The map García-Siller is offering in his letter is one that grew out of his own experience: “encounter with the reality of human suffering, then accompaniment, then organized advocacy, then lived solidarity. It is a model for what religious leadership looks like when silence becomes impossible.”
A glimpse into other faith actors on this scene
There is so much material on this that I will only give you a glimpse into it.
· * Read about the letter sent to President Trump less than a week after his second inauguration signed by “prominent national and local Jewish organizations . . . voicing their stern opposition to his immigration policies and urging him to abandon plans for what they describe as ‘widespread persecution of immigrants.” In particular, the letter reads, “The history of our Jewish values make immigration policy—including ensuring a functioning and welcoming refugee program and protection of the right to seek asylum—deeply personal to the Jewish community.”
· * The Rev. Noel Andersen, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, is also national field director of Church World Service, and international humanitarian nonprofit bringing together “37 Christian denominations and communions.” He spoke in August 2025 to journalist Aleja Hertzler-McCain for an RNS article: “Faith leaders bear witness and speak out against the ways masked ICE agents are abducting our community members.” They are accompanying immigrants “in every major city and in some rural areas, just about everywhere there is an immigration court,” he added.
· * In the same article, we follow the Rev. Cloe Breyer, episcopal priest and director of the Interfaith Center of New York. She tells RNS that watching immigration court proceedings is “harrowing,” like “witnessing a kind of public display of lawlessness.” There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some are arrested and others not. Hertzler-McCain writes, “Breyer said she has gone to immigration court about half a dozen times in the last six months, along with rabbis and other Christian leaders. She has worked with the New Sanctuary Coalition, through which she shows up to accompany immigrants who happen to be there that day, and also with specific clients at the request of their lawyers.”
· * Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran immigrant living legally with his wife and kids in Maryland (no criminal background) was arrested and deported with other compatriots in March, 2025. In this famous case, the Supreme Court ordered the government to return him, which they did in June. Read the August 25 article in RNS about the crowd that came to support him as he was about to go up the steps for his immigration court mandated appearance in Baltimore that day. See in particular the picture of clergy praying for him on that occasion.
· * Read about seven clergy arrested at a protest at the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility. An American Baptist pastor, Rev. Michael Woolf, was dragged to the ground by four ICE officers and kept in custody for seven hours. “I have bruises all over,” Woolf said in his first interview. The violence and the insulting language are “part of the dehumanizing nature of it, and it gives me a lot of clarity around what’s happening here. It’s really a spiritual emergency.”
As I conclude, let me say that a lot of secular organizations have also stepped in to defend, counsel, guide and support immigrants in these difficult days (just one example). As Americans, we have often been guilty of mistreating immigrants in the past (the internment of the Japanese community in the 1940s might be the worst case), and we have had to work hard at dealing with our various prejudices along the way. But most of us—people of faith and no faith—realize that our outsized welcome for the immigrant by and large is part of what made the United States the great nation it has become. More on this in the last installment on this topic.