Close to one in five American Catholics is vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” regime or is part of a household with at least one member at risk. That figure—a finding of “One Part of the Body: The Potential Impact of Deportations on American Christian Families,” a study that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals released on March 31—deserves more attention than it’s gotten so far.
“Mass deportation” is no longer a campaign slogan but the top priority of the United States government. Trump has put the country’s full resources behind the effort, as if for war: “Protecting the American People against Invasion” is the title of his January 20 executive order. Some 61 percent of these supposed “alien” invaders are Catholic, according to the study. Trump’s claim, straight from the order: “Many of these aliens unlawfully within the United States present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans. Others are engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.”
“One Part of the Body” sees it differently. The document begins with St. Paul’s definition of the Church as one body with many parts, and the belief that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” The report’s aim isn’t to feed into the fear the Trump administration is trying to instill in immigrants (in part through a $200 million “hyper-targeted” ad campaign to frighten people into leaving the country). “Rather,” it says:
our purpose with this report is to invite American Christians—within our congregations and within the halls of governmental power—to recognize that, if even a fraction of those vulnerable to deportation are actually deported, the ramifications are profound—for those individuals, of course, but also for their U.S.-citizen family members and, because when one part of the body suffers, every part suffers with it, for all Christians.
Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. bishops issued a well-thought-out statement on the duty of American Catholics to welcome immigrants into their congregations. Since then, immigrants have done much to revitalize parishes across the country, not only with their numbers, but with their enthusiasm, spiritual intensity, relative youth, and faith traditions. The bishops predicted this future in their 2000 pastoral letter, “Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity.” “Today’s immigrants bring a vast richness of gifts, from new spiritual movements to a renewal of devotion to Mary in the great variety of national devotions, such as that to Our Lady of Guadalupe,” the bishops wrote. “In many dioceses, a renewal of vocations to the priesthood and religious life is one evident fruit of the new immigration, while lay participation in ministry has blossomed in many ethnic ministries.” Since that time, more than a quarter of the priests ordained in the United States have been foreign-born, with a particular impact on religious orders, according to a report from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
“Mass deportation” will inflict serious wounds on the U.S. Catholic Church, and it should not be treated as one more piece of Trump hyperbole. His adviser Stephen Miller has proved to be ingenious about mobilizing the entire federal government toward deporting people who are most often Catholics. We haven’t seen the full impact yet of Trump’s immigration regime, including such measures as short-circuiting courts by dramatically expanding “expedited removal”; hiring twenty thousand more enforcement officers; using the military; offering stipends to people who self-deport; and ending Temporary Protected Status for some one million immigrants, many from heavily Catholic countries such as Haiti and Venezuela.
Fear of deportation is already affecting parish life. “There’s been in many places throughout the Midwest a major decrease in attendance due to fear,” said one priest who is active in Hispanic ministry, and who asked not to be identified so as not to expose his congregation to risk. “For so many who regularly assist at the Mass, they’re afraid that they could be arrested or deported.” This follows on the new administration’s decision to revoke a policy that prevented immigration enforcement at or near houses of worship (although it still directs agents to use “a healthy dose of common sense,” whatever that means in Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security).
“The difference is that there’s increased anxiety,” one pastor of five parishes in the Pacific Northwest told me. The Spanish-language Masses in these parishes are “inspiring,” he said, and of the thirteen Masses offered each weekend, the five in Spanish are the most attended. I happened to attend a Sunday Mass at one of those parishes while traveling and was deeply impressed by the size of the congregation—standing room only in a church that seats six hundred—and by the deep reverence of the celebration. The priest said he hadn’t seen anything more than a slight dip in attendance, in part because people are turning to their faith to sustain them at such a difficult time. But there was the family who showed up for a child’s First Communion with the sad explanation, “We’re minus one.” The father of three had been deported.
The pastor of an inner-city parish in Ohio said he’d held “know your rights” workshops and encouraged parishioners to name citizens as guardians for their children in case the parents were deported. “We have a couple of families that have stopped coming to church and stopped bringing their children to religious education,” he wrote via email. “We’ve discussed how to respond if the authorities come on church property and we’ve evaluated with our leaders the wisdom of continuing outside processions—most recently, Good Friday. When I ask if they think we should stay inside, the response is ‘Father, we have faith.’”
The priest told me:
The humiliating, dehumanizing, hurtful, and damaging rhetoric about immigrants that Mr. Trump continues to proclaim since he came down that escalator sets the wider stage and is more piercing than the fear, insecurity, etc. concerning deportation. I have apologized to my congregation for this and get emotional seeing some of those strong, hard-working men cry.
The pastor of a large, 90-percent-Latino parish in the Northeast said the biggest impact there had been on religious-education classes. Many of the teachers avoided attending, and eventually lessons were offered by email. Out of respect for their fear, he has stopped encouraging parishioners to come to church. Little by little, families are returning after an initial drop in attendance. Some parishioners who had been in the country long-term have been deported, including one who’d worked for nineteen years, he said. And the church has started trying to serve parishioners in new ways: bringing groceries to those afraid to go out, for example. “We don’t mind doing it,” the pastor said. “But it’s just too much.”
The future of the Catholic Church in the United States leans heavily on Hispanics, who make up 36 percent of the flock, according to Pew Research Center. Pew reports that Hispanic Catholic adults are much younger than whites: 59 percent are under age fifty, compared to just 29 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics. Hispanics far outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the South and West, Pew found—resulting, based on what I’ve seen, in a younger, livelier, and sometimes more participatory Church in those regions. They are a big part of the Catholic present, and even more, the Catholic future.
It’s commonly thought that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targets criminals, but records of the immigration courts show that very few deportation charges are based on any accusation of a crime (other than being in the country without legal status). Trump’s January 20 executive order makes it clear that every undocumented immigrant is at risk: “It is the policy of the United States to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all [italics added] inadmissible and removable aliens.” That’s why it’s called “mass deportation,” and there is heavy pressure on ICE to produce large numbers of arrests and removals.
Should it get due attention and follow-up, “One Part of the Body” has the potential to be a starting point for persuading all parts of the body that mass deportation is a threat to the U.S. Catholic Church as we know it. But it comes late, for Trump has already demonized millions of immigrants—often our fellow Catholics—for the offenses of a few, with mostly timid pushback from U.S. Church authorities and quite a bit of buy-in from Catholics. It should be obvious by now that Trump is serious about deporting every person who is in the country without legal status (and then some), and, as the study says, “the impacts would be profound on congregations throughout the United States.”
