The Catholic Church Must Challenge Trump on Deportations

Among Donald Trump’s most alarming, repeated and ambitious commitments as a candidate was to arrest and deport up to 12 million undocumented immigrants. Many are Mexican and have been in the United States for more than 10 years.

Now he is laying the groundwork to remove those immigrants from their homes, jobs and communities. It would be a “bloody story,” he said. One voice that has been largely absent in loudly criticizing this extreme and un-Christian plan, I am sorry to say as a Catholic, is the American Catholic Church’s.

In November the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops migration committee, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, said that the bishops were prepared to “raise our voice loudly” but that “we are waiting to see just what exactly takes shape.”

Mr. Trump said in November after his victory that he would declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to accomplish his deportation plan. A top aide has said that “vast holding facilities” would serve as “staging centers” for immigrants as they wait to be flown to other countries.

What more do we need to know? Church leaders should speak out now, and forcefully. So should priests across the country in their Sunday sermons. Twenty percent of American adults describe themselves as Catholics; one-third of them are Hispanic.

So far, what little church leaders have said has been, at best, muted on the national stage. Pope Francis’ secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said shortly after Mr. Trump’s election that the church was “for a wise policy toward immigrants and therefore one that does not go to these extremes.”