Faith Communities and the Problem of Disunity

Faith communities view their unity as a source of strength and consolation. However, although Christianity seeks communion between the faithful through the person and teaching of Jesus Christ, it suffers from sharp divisions on social issues, including refugee protection and immigration. Indeed, interfaith and interreligious solidarity in responding to displacement and crisesFootnote ¹¹ and in advocating for migrantsFootnote ¹² can be stronger than intra-faith unity on what many believers perceive to be a political option, not a moral imperative.Footnote ¹³ For example, between December 2012 and December 2013, 1,700 religious leaders, members of faith communities, and faith-based organizations endorsed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR’s) statement “Welcoming the Stranger: Affirmations for Faith Leaders,”Footnote ¹⁴ which captures the source of this unity. It avers: “The call to ‘welcome the stranger,’ through protection and hospitality, and to honor the stranger or those of other faiths with respect and equality, is deeply rooted in all major religions.”Footnote ¹⁵

However, Christians form their views and opinions from diverse sources and imperfect knowledge. Religious conviction can help to shape policy positions but can also be lost in partisan, political identities.Footnote ¹⁶ It offends faith-based organizations when their most ardent ideological and policy foes are co-religionists, many of whom publicly identify and justify their positions by reference to their faith. In the circumstances, faith-based organizations need to decide how to address persons who, they believe, at best misunderstand and at worse use religion to pursue agendas at odds with their shared faith traditions.

Since 2013, the Center for Migration Studies of New York has coordinated the Catholic Immigrant Integration Initiative, a program that seeks to strengthen the individual and collective work of diverse Catholic institutions, programs and ministries with immigrants and their families. A recurrent theme in the initiative’s gatherings has been the bewilderment of faith-based organizations and immigrants at co-religionists who champion anti-migrant policies or fail to defend them in the face of sustained public attacks. This is nothing new in the nation’s history. Christian communities have a long, tawdry history of failing to protect their brothers and sisters in faith. Legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly in September 1667, for example, is aptly titled “An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.” The words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. capture the frustration of faith-based organizations and immigrant communities at many of their co-religionists. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”Footnote ¹⁷

Using Migrants as a Means to the End

Politicians who foreground their faith regularly exploit migrants by using them as political tools. In 2022, for example, three Catholic governors—Ron DeSantis of Florida, Greg Abbott of Texas, and Doug Ducey of Arizona began to transport to New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Denver, and elsewhere a population that had swelled to hundreds of thousands of migrants by mid-2024. Governor Jared Polis of Colorado initiated a similar busing policy in late December of 2022.Footnote ¹⁸ The City of El Paso transported 14,000 migrants to New York City and Chicago between August 23 and late October 2022.Footnote ¹⁹ Between late September 2023 and early December 2023, the state of Texas and the City of El Paso bused 1,300 migrants to New York, Chicago, and Denver.Footnote ²⁰

Faith communities mobilized in support of the bused migrants and strongly criticized the transport programs. It did not escape the notice of the interfaith coalition assisting the migrants that the first group bused to Washington, DC, arrived on Holy Thursday, the day before Passover, and during Ramadan.Footnote ²¹ Texas and Arizona insisted that the migrants were voluntarily in these programs, but some did not know where else they could go or even where they were headed. Many sought to join loved ones and find work, but elsewhere in the United States.

The buses deposited many of the migrants at Washington, DC’s Union Station in the dead of night, including families with young children. Three buses left migrants on a freezing Christmas Eve night near the vice president’s residence.Footnote ²² To faith communities, these unhoused migrants evoked the Holy Family, not an invasion or existential threat to their nation.

The chartered flights by the State of Florida to Martha’s Vineyard in mid-September of 2022 and its two flights to Sacramento, California, in early June 2023 particularly troubled faith-based organizations. Florida’s first chartered plane traveled to San Antonio in order to locate migrants to send to Martha’s Vineyard. The migrants boarded in response to promises of nonexistent jobs, housing, and benefits in Boston.Footnote ²³ Many had immigration court dates the same week in other jurisdictions.

Faith-based organizations recognized that in pressuring desperate people to travel under false pretenses and using them for its own purposes, Florida had adopted the tactics of human traffickers. Others saw this strategy as analogous to the “reverse freedom rides” of the 1960s, when white supremacists offered Black residents in the southern United States one-way tickets to northern and western cities, with false promises of housing, jobs, and a warm reception.Footnote ²⁴ In weaponizing migrants to sow discord in more welcoming US states and localities, the governors also borrowed the strategy—employed often (but not exclusively) by autocratic regimes against democratic states—to achieve their geopolitical aims.Footnote ²⁵

Doubling down on its widely criticized tactics, Florida subsequently used a private contractor to recruit approximately thirty-six out-of-state migrants (mostly Venezuelans and Colombians) near a shelter in El Paso, Texas, with empty promises of employment in California. The contractor flew the migrants to Sacramento and left them without jobs, prospects, or concern for their removal hearings (scheduled elsewhere), depositing some at the steps of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento.Footnote ²⁶ Florida also sent recruiters to locate migrants at Sacred Heart Church in El Paso. Bishop Mark Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso characterized this initiative as an “effort to make a political point” and “reprehensible.”Footnote ²⁷

Faith communities commit their time and treasure to remedying conditions that will have forcibly displaced or rendered stateless a projected 131 million persons by 2024Footnote ²⁸ and by trying to secure more viable, permanent homes for the displaced. Forced migrants serve as a kind of canary in a coal mine for the world’s myriad crises. In 2023, for example,72 percent of the migrants “encountered” nationwide by US border officials came from Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Haiti.Footnote ²⁹ These states and their migrant-sending communities are beset in varying degrees by organized crime, repression, environmental crisis, poverty, economic free-fall, political dysfunction, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, migrants typically move for a mix of reasons, and violence can be a pervasive threat even for “economic migrants.”Footnote ³⁰

Republican politicians once championed the cause of refugees and asylum-seekers from politically repressive countries, such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Yet governors Abbott and DeSantis tried instead to dramatize what they mischaracterized as the federal government’s open border policy, a much-repeated talking point that worked at cross-purposes with federal border control efforts.

The governors also sought to expose the hypocrisy of Northern jurisdictions, which they believed would reject the transported migrants.Footnote ³¹ Yet the targeted communities instead made significant efforts to assist them. As of December 2023, New York City had 67,200 migrants in its care of the total 150,000 who had passed through the city’s emergency shelter system since the onset of the busing programs, and its per diem cost per migrant household neared $400.Footnote ³² As the 2023–2024 school year began, it enrolled 21,000 new students (mostly migrants), who were living in temporary housing.Footnote ³³ By March 2024, it had opened seventeen humanitarian emergency response and relief centers and housed asylum-seekers in 218 emergency shelters.Footnote ³⁴

Migrant expenses strained other receiving jurisdictions as well.Footnote ³⁵ By January 2024, Chicago had received nearly 35,000 bused and flown migrants from Texas and other states, and Illinois governor J. B. Pritzer implored Abbott not to send more, stating that their health and survival would be at risk in the frigid weather.Footnote ³⁶ Yet unscheduled buses continued to deposit migrants at night in irregular suburban locations in sub-zero temperatures.

These receiving communities are not hypocritical. Migrants have found homes in them for generations. In effect, the border reached them long ago. Recent migrants have continued to make their way to these and other communities, typically to join family and to work at a time of well-documented US labor needs.Footnote ³⁷ Federal programs eased the reception of some migrants. Highlighting the importance of legal status, work, and community ties to immigrant integration, the state of Massachusetts reported virtually no use of its shelters by persons admitted under a Biden-era program that offers humanitarian parole to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, who have immediate relatives in the United States and financial sponsorship by US residents.Footnote ³⁸

What particularly offended faith-based organizations about the busing programs was the deliberately poor and often nonexistent coordination with receiving communities,Footnote ³⁹ and the absence of any concern for the welfare of the migrants or their new communities. Whatever the migrants’ trajectories, the governors used human beings—survivors of journeys that have killed record numbers—as political props and as a tool to try to divide and create disarray in other US communities. The welfare of the migrants and the receiving communities has never been the point.

On May 10, 2023, Governor DeSantis signed into law legislation that allocated $12 million to the state’s migrant “transport program,” invalidated drivers’ licenses from other states of persons lacking immigration status, required hospitals to determine the immigration status of patients, and made it a felony to transport undocumented immigrants, including family members, into the state.Footnote ⁴⁰

Employers feared the law would lead to the loss of immigrant construction, agricultural, and tourism industry workers in a state already experiencing labor shortages.Footnote ⁴¹ In a meeting with faith leaders and community groups, legislative champions of the bill minimized its likely impact, characterizing it as “political” and intended mostly to “scare” people.Footnote ⁴²Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami argued that the legislation criminalized “empathy” and gratuitously made the lives of select immigrants more difficult.Footnote ⁴³ Governor DeSantis also made the US-Mexico border a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, likening asylum-seekers and other migrants to an invading army, home burglars, a threat to US sovereignty, and “criminal aliens.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Both DeSantis and Abbott raised the specter of killing border crossers, with DeSantis threatening to leave suspected drug smugglers at the border “stone-cold dead,”Footnote ⁴⁵ and Abbott complaining that the “only thing we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Opposition to the Work of Faith Communities with Migrants and Its Tepid Defense by Co-religionists

Public officials also regularly criticize faith-based organizations for their work with migrants and immigrants. On April 21, 2022, Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene, a self-described “cradle” Catholic and Christian nationalist, claimed that Catholic Charities’ work with immigrant families proved “Satan’s controlling the church.”Footnote ⁴⁷ She accused the church of “destroying our laws,” “perverting” the US Constitution, and “forcing America to become something that we are not supposed to be.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Publicity-seeking politicians present an occupational hazard, but the tepid defense of this ministry by putative allies and co-religionists reveals a deeper problem. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an institution devoted to responding to “slanderous assaults” against the Catholic Church and the defense of its teaching, demanded that Greene immediately apologize to Catholics. However, it also spoke of the abundance of “opportunities” to criticize the Catholic Church’s work with “illegal aliens.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Why do defenders of the faith view criticism of this ministry as an opportunity? What opportunities does it present? In the Christian tradition, human beings cannot be “illegal” any more than brothers and sisters or the children of a loving God can be. Moreover, to characterize human beings as “illegal” is to portray their Creator as a lawbreaker. Yet prominent Christians and Catholic media persist in slandering migrants as “illegal aliens,” “illegal alien children,” “invaders,” and worse.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such terms are message-tested to inflame public sentiment against migrants, typically in service to political ends. Biblical scholar Gregory Cuellar argues by associating migrants with “criminal aliens,” “gang member[s],” and “Mexican rapist[s],” former president Trump sought to “desacralize” migrants—the children of God—and “sacralize “border security,” while sanctifying his vision of the nation, its true members (the “people”) and himself (their leader).Footnote ⁵¹

Christianity seeks to “gather into one the dispersed children of God” (John 11:52, NABRE). It does not restrict love of “neighbor” to those in a “closely knit community of a single country or people,” but extends it to “[a]nyone who needs me, and whom I can help.”Footnote ⁵² It sees the faithful as part of the body of Christ, which reflects its hope “to bring wholeness and unity to a fragmented and divided human family,” to bind “all people together through love,” and to call all to “re-member especially those who have been dis-membered from the body.”Footnote ⁵³

While politicians consistently use divisive rhetoric to “other” migrants and refugees, Christianity seeks to move “from a narrative of otherness to a vision of one-ness.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Under its core teaching, unity does not turn on legal distinctions, but models the triune God and Christ’s identification with the dispossessed and disinherited. Migrants are not “alien” to this tradition. They are angels in disguise (Hebrews 13:2), the self-sacrificing daughter-in-law in the messianic line (Ruth 1–4), and the Good Samaritan, a foreigner who models compassion and mercy (Luke 10: 25–37). They evoke the Holy Family in its dangerous journey to Bethlehem to secure documentation (Luke 2: 1–7), and its flight to Egypt from King Herod (Matthew 2: 13–15).Footnote ⁵⁵ Jesus charged his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28: 19–20, NABRE), and to spread God’s word “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8, NABR).

Christians see in the “least” a means of salvation and the way “to encounter the face of Jesus Christ.”Footnote ⁵⁶ At a 2022 event, Fessahaye Mebrahtu, director of Black Catholic and ethnic ministries for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, described himself as an African “immigrant, in a lifelong process of integration.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He spoke movingly of Eritrean migrants he knew who had died at sea trying to reach a better life, and of their family members. “On the last judgment,” he said, “Jesus will tell us, ‘I am the brother or sister you neglected.’ Therefore, we cannot abdicate our responsibilities as our brothers/sisters’ keepers, especially those on the margins.” Christians believe they will be judged by the God of the least, the God crucified as a criminal,Footnote ⁵⁸ the God of persons who died in transit, the God of the “nobodies” of the world.Footnote ⁵⁹

In a telling irony, Christian lawmakers who applaud Texas, Florida, and Arizona for transporting asylum-seekers to other jurisdictions, seek to deny Catholic Charities agencies federal funding and accuse them of “aiding and abetting” illegal migration by meeting the humanitarian needs of migrants.Footnote ⁶⁰ To that end, the Secure Border Act of 2023 would have prohibited the processing of migrants arriving between ports-of-entry (ensuring that these border crossers could not legally enter), stripped funding from nongovernmental organizations that “facilitate or encourage unlawful activity,” and barred funding to organizations that offer lodging and legal services to “inadmissible” persons.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Catholic Charities agencies do not violate the law. In fact, border officers transport migrants to these agencies because they offer humanitarian services.

Faith communities would far prefer that potential migrants could flourish in their home communities, furthering what Saint John Paul II called “the right not to emigrate” and Pope Francis terms the freedom “to choose whether to migrate or to stay.”Footnote ⁶² Many of the world’s poorest citizens lack these twin rights. Climate change, for example, “is equally likely to increase migration as it is to prevent it” and “poorer households are likely to be ‘trapped’ in circumstances where they are at once more vulnerable … and less able to move.”Footnote ⁶³

Faith-based organizations try to make the right to stay a reality. However, they also serve human beings—many of them forcibly displaced—in their time of need. In secular terms, they exercise their “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” through their work in “charitable and humanitarian institutions.”Footnote ⁶⁴ They believe that temporary residents in the United States, asylum seekers, and undocumented persons need more services, not fewer, and they oppose policies that impede their work with immigrants. They practice discipleship in the ways Christ taught (Matthew 25:31–46).

In a survey by the Center for Migration Studies of New York spanning the Trump presidency, high rates of Catholic immigrant-serving institutions—such as charities, hospitals, schools, universities, refugee resettlement programs, legal offices, food banks, and youth ministries—reported that the administration’s interior enforcement strategies very negatively or somewhat negatively affected their work with immigrants.Footnote ⁶⁵ Respondents identified fear of deportation as a primary impediment to immigrants accessing their programs and ministries. One put it bluntly: “Fear deters clients from seeking any services.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Another explained that enforcement “[c]reates fear, [an] environment of misinformation, trauma for families who endured/endure extensive separation.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In 2018, Archbishop Wenski decried policies that sought to make America great by making it “mean.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Criticism of Faith-Based Organizations’ Public Policy Engagement and Positions

Christian intellectuals and media figures reliably attack the policy work of mainstream Catholic institutions. They dissent from Catholic teaching with lockstep messaging, arguing that migration has nothing to do with the faith, dismissing it as a peripheral issue on which they can disagree in good faith, and characterizing faith leaders as self-interested.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 2017, Stephen Bannon, chief White House strategist in the Trump administration, criticized the US bishops’ opposition to terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which offered temporary status and work authorization to undocumented persons brought to the United States as children. Bannon attributed the bishop’s “terrible” positions on “illegal aliens” to their economic interests in “unlimited illegal immigration,” dismissing them as “just another guy with an opinion.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Pope Francis has consistently rejected the claim that the “situation of migrants” is a lesser” concern and has affirmed that for Christians: “the only proper attitude is to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children. Can we not realize that this is exactly what Jesus demands of us, when he tells us that in welcoming the stranger we welcome him?”Footnote ⁷¹ He has also decried the hypocrisy of Christians who “defend Christianity in the West on the one hand but on the other are averse to refugees and other religions.”Footnote ⁷² He said: “The sickness, one may also say the sin that Jesus condemns the most is hypocrisy. A Christian cannot be a Christian unless they live like a Christian. A Christian cannot be a Christian without practicing The Beatitudes. A Christian cannot be a Christian if they do not do as Jesus asks of them in Matthew chapter 25.”Footnote ⁷³

The political scientist Mark Amstutz offers a sweeping critique of select teaching documents and the policy work of Christian churches on immigration. While conceding that Christian denominations “are certainly entitled to advance” their policy concerns, he argues they have neglected “moral education” on immigration in favor of “policy advocacy,” an area in which they possess “comparatively limited competence” and provide little “value.”Footnote ⁷⁴

These claims are difficult to sustain. Over the past 130 years, for example, the Catholic Church has produced a steady stream of teaching documents on migrants and refugees, and many would argue that its moral education on migration encompasses its entire history. However, it struggles to promote meaningful engagement with its teaching by the faithful, particularly those in public life. Moreover, faith-based organizations enjoy immense public policy expertise on migration, rooted in their institutional histories, work with affected communities, and religious touchstones. To take Catholic teaching to heart, Catholic institutions must be committed to integral development; that is, the good of “each” person and the “whole” person, in all their dimensions and at every stage of their life journeys.Footnote ⁷⁵ This commitment requires a level of engagement and expertise that goes well beyond their policy work but informs it.

Catholic institutions serve persons in migrant sending communities throughout the world and run large networks of shelters and welcoming centers for migrants in transit. In the United States, they live, work, accompany, and offer spiritual and material support to immigrants and their children through 16,429 parishes, 522 hospitals, 4,750 elementary schools, 220 colleges and universities, the nation’s largest US refugee resettlement and charitable legal immigration networks, and many other ministries and programs.Footnote ⁷⁶

Amstutz criticizes the Catholic Church for viewing the world “through the lens of utopian idealism.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet its work with forced migrants, the undocumented, and the imprisoned expose it to the dystopian conditions that uproot human beings and that migrants endure in their long, often unsuccessful struggles to reach safety and find a permanent home.

Amstutz also charges the Catholic Church with insufficient appreciation of the role of states in “advancing human rights and fostering economic prosperity.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, the Catholic Church takes states seriously by holding them to high standards: Catholic teaching vests in states responsibility for safeguarding rights, promoting the common good, and creating the conditions that allow persons to flourish in their home communities. This teaching undergirds its policy work with states. Moreover, many policy makers and public agencies value the Catholic Church’s normative positions, technical expertise, and intimate knowledge of the lived experience of migrants and host communities. On an international level, the Holy See frequently convenes states to dialogue on issues, such as migration, that they cannot successfully address on their own.

Amstutz criticizes “denominational statements and studies” that offer “insufficient analysis of existing immigration conditions and policies.”Footnote ⁷⁹ When it comes to “the subject of unauthorized aliens,” however, his own focus is insufficiently narrow, not “whether such persons are entitled to equal and fair treatment,” but how to respond to their “unlawful presence in a foreign state.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Christian ethicists such as Kristin Heyer caution against restricting migration analysis to the individual acts of migrants, and making them “the primary site for enforcement and responsibility.”Footnote ⁸¹ Heyer argues for “more receptive responses” that “prioritize hospitality over structural justice,” lift up the “social dimensions of justice,” recognize “sinful complicity,” and seek broader accountability.Footnote ⁸² Her work suggests that an analysis of just (only) immigration cannot be just because it fails to contextualize migration and ignores its causes, the contributions of migrants, and the wellbeing of migrants, their families, and their circles of association.

Christian faith-based organizations advocated for language in the Global Compact on Migration on the need to mitigate the structural factors driving migration, to expand legal migration pathways, and to facilitate safe return and reintegration.Footnote ⁸³ Their programs and advocacy engage the causes and triggers of forced migration and the “deeper roots of displacement, such as food security, global inequality, and governance,” not just their “symptoms” (uprooted persons).Footnote ⁸⁴

Faith-based organizations recognize, as Saskia Sassen writes, that while globalization (the cross-border flow of goods, services, capital, and information) “denationalizes national economies,” it has renationalized migration control in its many forms.Footnote ⁸⁵ It pains them to see politicians misdirect furor over the effects of globalization, to those displaced by this phenomenon, or to characterize the victims of violence as criminals or possible terrorists.

Faith-based organizations recognize the “unintended bridges” to migration, created by the interventions, policies, and conspicuous consumption of developed states.Footnote ⁸⁶ They insist on state accountability for conflict, “economic instability,” climate change,Footnote ⁸⁷ and gun violence.Footnote ⁸⁸ They criticize the hypocrisy, for example, of developed nations that have been poor stewards of the environment, and now build walls—physical, paper, and policy—to deny access to protection to the persons displaced by climate change and other conditions.Footnote ⁸⁹

They believe that policies to address the undocumented cannot exist in a vacuum but need to acknowledge the dependence on undocumented workers of US industries,Footnote ⁹⁰ the US economy, and the broader society. They recognize the heroic work of undocumented, frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemicFootnote ⁹¹ and their effective membership in US society. They support stronger and better-enforced labor laws so that unscrupulous employers cannot exploit the undocumented and drive down wages and working conditions for all workers. They support reform of the badly outdated legal immigration system, so that it meets the nation’s labor, family, and humanitarian needs. They understand that US visa backlogs exceed the life expectancy of many of the undocumented immigrants mired in them. They know that US law provides only 10,000 immigrant visas per year for so-called unskilled workers, but there are more than seven million undocumented workers in the US labor force. Faith-based organizations understand and deal with the disastrous aftereffects of deportation on “mixed-status” families, their mostly US citizen children, faith communities, and the broader society.Footnote ⁹² Most faith-based organizations do not believe removal would be a proportionate punishment for persons brought to the United States as children, or those who have developed strong family and community ties to the country over many years. In addition, most view legal counsel in removal proceedings as a rule of law imperative.Footnote ⁹³

Amstutz refers to several “deportation-by-attrition” state laws as reasonable and “moderate.”Footnote ⁹⁴ However, these laws sought to make life so unlivable for undocumented immigrants and their families that they would self-deport. What would it have meant for US families and society, and the rule of law if federal courts had not permanently blocked seven provisions of Alabama’s HB 56?Footnote ⁹⁵ What about its prohibition, for example, on enforcement of contracts with undocumented immigrants, or on business transactions between the undocumented and the state or its political subdivisions, such as for payment of water, gas, and electricity?

The US Department of Justice wrote that these provisions “were designed to affect virtually every aspect of an unauthorized immigrant’s daily life, from employment to housing to transportation to entering into and enforcing contracts” and that they “threatened to impose significant burdens on federal and state agencies, diverting their resources away from dangerous criminal aliens and other high-priority criminal activity.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Faith-based organizations do not have all the answers on complex policy issues, but they try to offer fully informed policy ideas that reflect their knowledge of immigrants, the well-being of local communities, and their religious convictions.

Exclusionary, Anti-person Ideologies

Although sometimes cast in religious terms, the interrelated ideologies used to justify exclusion and deny protection and membership to migrants stand in stark opposition to core Christian teaching.

Political Symbolism: The Problem of Walls

Pope Francis has consistently spoken of the need to build bridges between peoples, not walls.Footnote ¹⁶² Faith communities devote significant time and energy to fighting harmful, mostly symbolic proposals, such as the supposedly impregnable 2,000-mile border wall championed by Trump and other 2024 presidential candidates. Walls can divert migrants to perilous crossing routes, force them into territory controlled by cartels and paramilitary groups, and cause severe injuries for migrants who fall while attempting to scale them. However, they cannot stop the flight of desperate persons.

Governor Abbott initiated Operation Lone Star in March 2021 and deployed the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety to the border. In June of 2023, Abbott announced that the state’s multi-billion immigration enforcement budget would fund the deployment of a chain of buoys, with underwater webbing, to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande River.Footnote ¹⁶³ The state also laid miles of concertina wire along the river. State officials implausibly claimed that this system would save lives by preventing crossing attempts. Instead, it entangled and cut exhausted migrants, including children and a pregnant woman who suffered a miscarriage.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In January 2024, the Texas National Guard blocked Border Patrol agents from assisting Mexican officials in rescuing migrants from a stretch of the Rio Grande where a woman and two children had drowned an hour before.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ To legal scholars, Texas’ standoff with federal authorities and its denial of access to land where the federal government had jurisdiction to operate harkened back to segregationist tactics of an earlier era.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

For many years, nearly twice as many newly undocumented persons entered the United States legally and overstayed temporary visas as crossed its land borders.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Whether or not this trend continues, walls, concertina wire, and buoys do nothing to stop these legal entries. Nor have walls succeeded in stopping illegal entries. Migrants consistently breach fencing on the Mexico-US border.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Nonetheless, walls have become a political rallying cry and have spread like wildfire throughout the world. Seventy-four walls, most of recent provenance, exist worldwide, with another fifteen at different stages of planning.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Catholic and other faith-based organizations support enforcement of immigration laws and screening of those seeking to enter the country. However, they believe that enforcement can only be effective if coupled with meaningful strategies to address the conditions that have uprooted so many human beings and sufficient legal pathways to migrate. Developed states rely overwhelmingly on migrant control and enforcement policies.

The Trump administration also sought to reduce and impede legal migration, to eviscerate humanitarian programs, and to strip certain groups of temporary residents of legal status.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Beyond its rhetoric on the need for a 2,000-mile wall, it embraced the symbolic standard for “operational control” of US land and maritime borders set forth in the Secure Fence Act of 2006;Footnote ¹⁷¹ that is, “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”Footnote ¹⁷² This zero-tolerance standard is far stricter than the arrest and prosecution rate in cases of murder and rape.

Impossible to meet in practice, “operational control” served two political ends. First, it associated displaced persons with terrorists and violent criminals. Second, it impeded the passage of meaningful immigration reform legislation—legislation with the potential to reduce illegal migration and increase human security—by conditioning congressional support for reform on meeting this standard. The Border Patrol has adopted more practical metrics.Footnote ¹⁷³

Bad Laws and Bad Faith Compliance with Good Laws

Faith communities try to help migrants realize their fundamental human needs, such as family unity, work, education, health, security, and belonging. Yet their work and preoccupations are invariably local. Laws, policies, and systems that prevent them from assisting migrants, whether explicitly or in practice, represent one of their greatest sources of frustration.

The core legal documents in the field of refugee protection are the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. The essential protection rooted in Article 33(a) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, is non-refoulement, which prohibits contracting states from expelling or returning a “refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ This language does not cover a large percentage of those who would be at grave risk if returned. However, the 1951 Refugee Convention commits states to protect and integrate those who do qualify.

The European Union, Australia, the United States, and other developed states have flaunted the spirt and letter of non-refoulement by denying access to their territories through interdiction by sea, interception by land, and border control strategies. To do so, they have enlisted other states, supranational entities, and private actors.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The legal scholar David Martin has argued that in the post-World War II era, states adopted large numbers of human rights “resolutions, recommendations, declarations, conclusions, or accords” precisely because they had no intention of honoring them.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ While often rationalized as humanitarian, life-saving, and anti-trafficking measures, developed states implemented policies to deny desperate persons access to protection, including Jewish refugees in 1930s and 1940s, and exposed them to all manner of human rights violations.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The history of the US Refugee Act of 1980 represents a case in point. It sought to bring the United States into conformity with the 1951 Refugee Convention and established the current US refugee resettlement program. It also provided for a system to permit foreign-born persons “physically present in the United States or at a land border or port of entry, irrespective of such alien’s status, to apply for asylum” (emphasis added).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Yet shortly after its passage, Western European nations and the United States began to ramp up policies “designed to discourage asylum seeking and to contain asylum seekers in territories proximate to their home countries.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

In 1993, the US Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc,Footnote ¹⁸⁰ which held that non-refoulement did not apply unless a person had reached the frontiers of a signatory state. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees sharply criticized this decision based on its reading of the 1951 Refugee Convention’s prohibition of expulsion or return.

The Sale decision paved the way for interception and interdiction policies throughout the world that have denied countless persons the very possibility of protection, or even screening to assess whether they potentially face “persecution or torture.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ These developments have also tragically relieved pressure on developed states to engage fully in stemming the conditions spurring flight. Sale has been a dark cloud for countless migrants and a generation of migrant rights and service agencies, including faith-based organizations.

After Hurricane Mitch in 1998,Footnote ¹⁸² the United States pressured and assisted Mexico and Guatemala to turn back displaced persons seeking haven in the United States.Footnote ¹⁸³ It resorted to these policies again—often referred to as “pushing the border out” or “border externalization”—after the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Tactics in the early years of the Trump administration, which faith-based organizations overwhelmingly opposed, included

• • preventing asylum-seekers from entering US territory at ports of entry and subsequently requiring them to enter at ports of entry, even in areas controlled by cartels;

• • limiting the admission of asylum-seekers to only a small number every day, and not at every port of entry, under the metering program;

• • terminating the Central American Minors program, which allowed at risk youth from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras with legally present US parents to enter the United States as refugees or humanitarian parolees;

• • adopting so-called zero-tolerance policies, which nationalized the practice of separating parents from their children as a deterrent to the migration of others and which permanently severed parent-child bonds in hundreds of cases;

• • pursuing asylum cooperative agreements, allowing the United States to return select US asylum-seekers to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—three refugee-producing countries—for determination of their claims;

• • enacting the egregiously misnamed Migrant Protection Protocols that forced US asylum-seekers to await their hearings in dangerous Mexican border cities where they lived in squalid conditions, and suffered hundreds of documented cases and many more undocumented cases of murder, rape, kidnapping, assault, and extortion;Footnote ¹⁸⁵ and

• • using the Title 42 public health law that had resulted in 2.8 million expulsions (without hearings) by May 11, 2023, when the program ended.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Between 1980 and 2023, the US refugee admissions program resettled more than 3.2 million refugees for an annual average of nearly 73,000.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Faith-based organizations resettled the overwhelming majority. However, from 2018 through 2021, the United States admitted fewer than 76,000 refugees in total. In addition, the Trump administration eviscerated the program’s public-private infrastructure, including networks of faith-based resettlement agencies built over decades.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

The Biden administration has extended humanitarian parole to hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Central American minors, and othersFootnote ¹⁸⁹ and Temporary Protected Status to more than 610,000 US residents from sixteen countries as of December 2023.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ However, neither of these statutes provide a designated path to permanent residence, and temporary protected does not confer integration services. Faith communities have urged Congress to pass legislation that allows parolees to adjust to permanent residence. In addition, they advocate for the admission of refugees referred to the US resettlement program who have had been waiting for years in dangerous, untenable conditions.

Faith communities harshly criticized many of the Biden administration’s border enforcement, refugee, and legal immigration policies, particularly asylum restrictions and deterrence policies. Faith-based organizations have urged the Biden administration to create a program to stabilize and offer basic services and work authorization to the hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers and parolees who entered the country in the early 2020s. They argue that states and localities—both on the border and in the interior of the country—cannot assume this responsibility without greater federal leadership and support.

In March 2024, the DeSantis administration announced that Florida would deploy “250 additional officers and soldiers and over a dozen air and sea craft” to its southern coast in order to “protect” the state and US “sovereign territory” from “illegal aliens coming to Florida.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ In April 2024, Archbishop Wenski criticized Governor DeSantis for speaking of Haitians as if they were an “invasive species,” and the Biden administration for its “unconscionable” decision to resume deportations to Haiti, a nation in “freefall.”Footnote ¹⁹²

Religious Identity and the Challenge of Partnerships and Funding

Too little funding and too much need represent a core struggle for immigrant-serving faith-based organizations. Faith-based organizations serve persons based on their needs, not their religion or legal status. Yet they struggle with the issue of how to sustain their religious identity in a field that has become increasingly “secularized.”Footnote ¹⁹³

Some faith-based organizations receive mostly government funding for their work with refugees and immigrants, and others depend heavily on the support of private foundations. Moreover, (secular) international and supranational entities, such as UNHCR, International Organization for Migration, the European Union, and large international nongovernmental organizations play an oversized role in this field. In 2013, UNHCR and a coalition of faith-based organizations agreed on three core principles to guide UNHCR’s partnerships with “faith actors”:

1. 1. Hospitality in the form of humanitarian assistance and an acknowledgment of the importance of faith communities as first responders in humanitarian crises “by virtue of their presence, local knowledge, networks and assets in some of the most isolated and remote areas.”

2. 2. Respect for “the diversity of identities, values and traditions … of forcibly displaced individuals and communities,” and a recognition that faith can be a “‘basic’ need’” and “spiritual sustenance” an imperative.

3. 3. Equality based on shared objectives and mutual respect, and a commitment to “equal treatment and the right to equal protection according to humanitarian standards.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴

These guidelines prioritize humanitarian assistance, lift up the extensive contributions of faith-based organizations, and recognize the spiritual needs of migrants. They seek to allow faith-based organizations to connect with migrants where and how they find them.

The work of faith-based organizations largely aligns with the objectives of their public and private funders. While faith-based organizations can influence funder priorities, funding dynamics present a quandary for them. Many spend extraordinary amounts of time cultivating funders, educating them on the needs of migrants, applying for support, and reporting on their activities. Some seek funding for projects that they would not otherwise undertake in order to keep their organizations afloat, support other work, or cement relations with funders. Faith-based organizations and other nonprofits have become adept at shoehorning their own work into the social analyses, evolving strategic assessments, and preferred language of funders. In addition, some secular funders are loathe to support faith-based organizations for fear they will proselytize or neglect to provide services that may be in tension with their religious convictions.

Conversely, faith-based organizations need to guard against compromising their values and becoming less than, in Pope Francis’s words, “completely mission-oriented.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The challenge goes beyond mission drift, to the very identity of faith-based organizations and the needs of the communities they serve. Many refugees view their journeys and suffering in religious terms, and find inspiration, sustenance, and support in their faith.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Yet according to one report, many faith-based organizations “have become nearly indistinguishable from their secular counterparts … and have muted religious insights from their programming choices and omitted religious language from reports.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ One study of US resettlement agencies found paradoxically that faith-based organizations relied on their religion as “motivation and rationale” for their “almost completely secular” services, while secular mutual assistance agencies sought to build community by engaging in more religious activities and encouraging religious practice.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

The international community, states, international nongovernmental organizations, private foundations, and countless migrants cannot achieve their aims without the active engagement of faith-based organizations. Faith-based organizations bring great expertise to this work and adhere to high humanitarian standards. However, they need the flexibility to be themselves.