Paul Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said Sunday that the Trump administration’s mass deportations are invoking fear in immigrant communities across the country.
“It’s instilling, as I said, fear in a rather widespread manner. So I think that’s something that concerns us all, that people have a right to live in security and without fear of random deportations,” Coakley told host Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Last month, the USCCB rebuked the administration’s immigration enforcement campaign, saying they were “disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement.”
“We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care,” the bishops noted. “We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”
Pope Leo XIV, who previously called on American bishops to express their concerns with the administration’s crackdown on migrants, said days later that their message was “very important.”
The pope also noted that while there are “problems” within the U.S. immigration system and he is not in favor of the country having “open borders,” the administration is treating migrants — including those who have been in America for many years — in a “troubling” manner.
On Oct. 27, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that more than 527,000 migrants without legal status had been removed from the U.S. since President Trump returned to office. DHS added that roughly 1.6 million migrants without legal status have left the country voluntarily since Jan. 20.
The administration has ramped up immigration enforcement in cities across the country, including Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and Charlotte, N.C.
Coakley, the archbishop of Oklahoma City, said Sunday that while the country has a “right and a duty to respect borders of our nation,” Catholic social teaching and U.S. tradition calls for respecting and welcoming migrants.
“There is no conflict necessarily between advocating for safe and secure borders and treating people with respect and dignity,” he added. “We always have to treat people with dignity, God-given dignity.
“The state doesn’t award it, and the state can’t take it away.”
