Like all laws, immigration law is very succinct and specific. It defines the conditions under which a person can successfully enter and stay in America. By being very exact, it ensures that all people are treated fairly, which minimizes injustice.
With the crackdown on illegal immigrants, some Catholics are advising these individuals on ways to avoid deportation. The insinuation is that the law is unfair and can, therefore, be disregarded and resisted.
A More Open Resistance
Such activism favoring open immigration has long been practiced among the radical religious Left. However, many claim the threat of “mass” deportations calls for new tactics. By adding the word “mass” to ordinary deportation, the issue becomes supercharged and volatile. The calls for resistance are now more open and urgent.
Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter, for example, is calling for a general mobilization of Church personnel at all levels to help in any way possible. While such appeals employ legal means, they aim at obstructing the enforcement of the law.
What to Do When ICE Comes
The new activism is very specific and pondered.
Church staff should know what to do (and not do) if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials knock at parish doors looking for individuals without credentials. If, for example, officials ask for a single person, the parish personnel should encourage the person to give himself up to prevent a complete search of the premises that might net many more illegal immigrants that might be inside.
Everyone should be supplied with “red cards” to hand to officials, which contain the resources they will employ to assert their “rights.”
Preaching Creative Sermons
Winters advises priests to preach “creative” sermons that minimize the seriousness of illegal immigration. For example, a priest might begin a sermon by asking who in the congregation has gotten a parking ticket.
The priest then explains that being in the U.S. without documents is a civil, not a criminal, violation. It’s no different than a parking ticket. The punishment for a parking ticket is a fine (he forgets about car towing). However, the punishment for the migrant is deportation — an action he claims is “incommensurate to the violation.”
outlines this right of the nations.
Instead of dealing with these logical, doctrinal, and moral reasons, the Catholic Left turns the debate into an oppressive class struggle narrative of “innocent victims” targeted by “indiscriminate raids” from an oppressive government.
Getting Everyone Involved
As part of this narrative, activists like Winters recommend the whole parish get involved.
Thus, Catholics are encouraged to donate to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and Catholic Charities that have long been active in the field.
Ordinary parishioners can get involved by looking for those undocumented persons who might need help driving children to school or other trips that might expose them to street contact with ICE officials.
Activists advise priests and bishops to “work the phones” of major donors to pressure national and state legislators to change the new Administration’s policy.
A Need to Look at the Whole Picture
Absent from the debate is the plight of those on the border and throughout the country who face the problems of dealing with the overwhelming flow of immigrants, swamping government, medical, and educational systems. Absent is a discussion of the lawlessness of gangs and traffickers. Nothing is done to change the policies of oppressive nations like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that are destroying their nations and cruelly persecuting their citizens.
A real debate about immigration should not be about how to resist the law. Rather, it should clarify what must be done to eradicate the radical Left’s exploitation of undocumented migrants as pawns in their subversive effort to remake America.
Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Jesus Christ is King
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