The U.S. Catholic Church is shutting down two of its migration programs amid pressure from ordinary Catholics and the U.S. government.
“A very sad day has dawned,” wrote Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in an April 8 op-ed for the Washington Post. He continued:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) had to make the gut-wrenching decision this week to end our work with the federal government to resettle refugees and coordinate support services on the government’s behalf for unaccompanied children entering the United States. Our programs — among the nation’s largest and longest-serving refugee resettlement efforts — will shut down by the end of the fiscal year.
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This is a painful end to a life-sustaining partnership the Catholic Church in the U.S. has had with our government and that has spanned decades across administrations of both political parties.
The retreat comes after voters — including many Catholics — picked President Donald Trump to end the federal government’s very unpopular policy of importing workers, renters, and consumers into the nation’s communities.
That ruthless economic policy had imposed poverty, lower wages, higher rents, and chaotic diversity on many American communities which were already suffering from the loss of jobs and investment. The church-backed policy also led to the deaths of thousands of migrants.
Forty-three percent of 1,342 self-identified Catholics said they want the inflow reduced, according to a June 2024 polling report by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University. Just 23 percent favor more migration, even though 37 percent of the respondents said they are Latinos and 41 percent said they are Democrats. Just 30 percent said they were Republican.
The announcement ends the church’s role in the federal refugee programs, which pick poor people from poor countries for transfer into American communities. The refugee program is not related to illegal migration over the borders, but it is expensive for taxpayers because the migrants must be financially supported, educated, and advised on how to fit into Americans’ free-market, merit-oriented society.
Trump largely ended the refugee program in his first term, but President Joe Biden revived the programs partly because meatpacking companies want fresh labor.
The church is also ending its participation in the federal “Unaccompanied Alien Children” program. The program has relayed more than a million young migrants from coyotes and cartels to unscrupulous labor traffickers and illegal-migrant parents throughout the United States. In April 2024, Breitbart reported the following:
An illegal alien has been sentenced to six months in prison in Bedford County, Virginia, for sex crimes with a 15-year-old girl who arrived in the United States as an Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC).
Isauro Garcia Cruz, a 43-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, pleaded guilty in Bedford County this month to consensual sex with a child 15 years or older. Cruz was given 12 months in prison with six months suspended.
But Broglio insisted the migrant shutdown would not stop the church hierarchy from supporting more migration:
I want to be clear that this decision to end our resettlement agency does not mean walking away from helping refugees and others. The Catholic Church will find new means to help those we have served in the past and will serve in the future. The bishops will also continue to advocate energetically for public policy reforms that provide orderly, secure immigration processes and ensure the safety of everyone in our communities. There is no change in our collective commitment to advocate on behalf of men, women and children suffering from the scourge of human trafficking.
“The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ, and we must work to make sure that that does not happen,” Pope Francis’ new Cardinal in D.C. said in a March 24 speech to the Jesuit Refugee Service organization in D.C.
Cardinal Robert McElroy celebrated the migrants but downplayed the migration system, with all of its vast incentives for exploitation, arbitrage, abuse, and cruelty:
They are exactly the type of people that we wish to come to our nation to help build it up, to make it more beautiful, to make it a place where so many of the values which are atrophying in our society with its secularism are replaced by faith and by a sense there is something greater than the individual here.
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This really is the greatest challenge: That we come to understand once again and reclaim our heritage as our nation, that we are a people that were built by immigrants of every generation who came in that very same way, all of them desperate, in so many ways, seeking a new life for themselves and their families. We must make that the centerpiece… of how we respond to this.
Also, the Catholic Church is not shutting down migration activities by related groups. For example, the independent Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., played a large role in helping Biden’s deputies to move, hide, and support at least 9 million southern migrants. The group’s website says:
CLINIC provides training and support to a dedicated network of more than 400 Catholic and community-based immigration law providers in 49 states. By supporting approximately 3,000 network employees with diverse and in-depth training, real-time updates and best practices, CLINIC ultimately serves nearly 500,000 immigrants a year, making it the largest nonprofit immigration law organization in the country. In addition to supporting the network, CLINIC offers highly specialized direct legal representation, and training and technical assistance for immigrant defenders about current practice and strategy before the courts. We also have a dedicated team that specializes in religious immigration law to assist religious workers coming to the United States.
However, several other non-profit enterprises continue to earn money by helping the government extract refugees from poor countries.
Those groups are likely to shed many employees and some facilities as Trump’s deputies sharply reduce the refugee program from Biden’s plan to import at least 100,000 people during 2025.
