Mass deportation is taking an enormous toll, whether we realize it or not.
If you want to understand what’s been going on in Los Angeles, consider this report from a priest I know: At a recent parish confirmation celebration, twenty-five out of eighty teens did not show up for their own confirmation. That particular incident and many others like it illustrate how immigration raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere have a much broader impact than many people realize, including on the faith life of Catholics.
Part of the reason that immigration enforcement is having such detrimental societal effects is a recent shift in enforcement tactics intended to drive up numbers of arrests and frighten people into “self-deporting.” In the past, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions mostly involved targeted raids on specific businesses and planned arrests of people with serious criminal records or outstanding deportation orders. Those types of actions continue, but ICE also now appears to be raiding random places where undocumented people are presumed to gather (like Home Depot), or even occasionally picking up people who “fit a certain profile” off the street.
In immigrant-rich cities like Los Angeles, such raids and arrests are particularly devastating. According to analysis of census data by the University of Southern California Equity Research Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, and other research centers, eight percent of the population of Los Angeles County is undocumented—somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million people. Eleven percent of the workforce is undocumented, including more than half of workers in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and wholesale trade. Seventy percent of undocumented residents of L.A. County have lived in the United States for more than a decade, and almost a third have lived here for more than twenty years. One out of five children (and more than 30 percent of Hispanic children) have at least one undocumented parent.
With such a population, a concerted enforcement campaign like the present one quickly becomes socially disruptive in catastrophic ways that touch nearly everyone. The raids affect people’s family members, neighbors, and fellow parishioners. Car washes and other targeted businesses close, restaurants receive half their usual number of patrons, workers stay home, and religious-education classes shrink. Immigration enforcement feels very personal to many Americans, especially in a place like Los Angeles.
All over the country, Catholic and other religious leaders are making valiant efforts to respond. Pastors—though not enough of them—stand in front of their congregations and ask parishioners to let them know if someone needs help or support. A few parishes do “know your rights” trainings. In some places, dioceses and denominations let their clergy know what to do in the case of a raid on church property, something that has not yet occurred at Catholic churches in Los Angeles, despite changes in government policy to allow for it. Catholic immigration advocates and other volunteers show people how to locate their family members once they have been detained and even accompany people to immigration court. Parishioners contribute to GoFundMe efforts for families who have lost their only breadwinner. In one city, volunteers from a synagogue stood outside an immigrant Catholic parish during Sunday Mass to serve as witnesses so that if anything happened people would feel less scared and less alone. Behind the scenes, a lot of good people are working to love their neighbors in difficult circumstances.
Many Catholics, of course, voted for the current administration and were supportive of its immigration policies, though perhaps without a true sense of what mass deportation might entail. They perhaps did not foresee that refugee resettlement would come to a complete halt, stranding persecuted people around the world, even as a group of white South Africans would be welcomed without even customary levels of vetting. They may not have realized that the administration would want to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cameroon, and Afghanistan. Perhaps they did not expect that allies of the administration would openly advocate for eliminating all legal and illegal immigration from the “Third World.” Maybe they did not know that administration supporters like Charlie Kirk, who campaigned for the president last year, would keep talking about “replacement theory,” openly wondering if immigration enforcement could be used to make the country more white.
Pope John Paul II, no progressive by anyone’s standards, described mass deportation in his encyclical Veritatis splendor as an “intrinsic evil,” that is, something that can never be justified. Some more conservative Catholic thinkers today argue that the pope was not talking about the mass deportation efforts of today, noting that the term appears alongside ethnic cleansing and genocide in the text (no. 80). The situation he had in mind, they argue, was what he witnessed as a young man in Europe during and after World War II, when governments expelled people from ethnic groups or cultural communities they simply did not want. But Veritatis splendor also cites Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes from 1965, where “deportation” (likely mass deportation) appears on a list of “infamies” that violate human dignity, along with subhuman living conditions, slavery, and human trafficking (27). The argument also misses similarities between World War II–era efforts to expel certain ethnic groups and the ambition of at least some figures in the Trump administration to rid the country of immigrants from certain countries. The target of the administration’s mass-deportation campaign is ethnically specific—three quarters Latin American and half Mexican. And the government has banned citizens from twelve other countries from even entering the United States. Whatever John Paul II had in mind, today’s mass-deportation campaign seems to fit.
In the passage John Paul II cited from Gaudium et spes, mass deportation and other social injustices are said to “poison human society” (27). All of the disruptions to life in Los Angeles, including those empty pews, are proving him right.
Brett C. Hoover is the author of Immigration and Faith: Cultural, Biblical, and Theological Narratives (Paulist Press, 2021). He teaches theology at Loyola Marymount University.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
