This is part of Cardinal Robert W. McElroy's homily on the occasion of the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, delivered at St. Matthew's Cathedral, Washington, DC, on September 27. The full text is here. Please feel free to share it.
... For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.
At the beginning of 2025, when we were told that ICE enforcement efforts would be confined to securing the border and deporting those who had committed serious crimes, we told ourselves that this is acceptable. After all, Catholic teaching itself says that a nation has a right to secure its borders and deport serious criminals among the undocumented in our midst.
But then we witnessed the indiscriminate raids on farmworkers and Home Depot parking lots, nursing homes and schools, and we recognized that this was a war on every undocumented immigrant in our land, including those who had been here for decades and contributed enormously to the economy and the culture of our nation.
We saw their suffering and the injustice of it, but we just crossed to the other side of the road and passed on by.
When the expansiveness of the net of deportation began to touch us more intimately, ensnaring mothers and fathers and children and families whom we knew, fellow parishioners and coworkers who exemplify all of the best qualities that our nation is so desperately searching for, we were deeply troubled. But in the end we told ourselves that I cannot save them alone. And emotionally we crossed to the other side of the road and passed on by.
When our government laid siege to the city of Minneapolis with wanton violence and the killing of those who had spoken up in resistance, we were outraged. We could not believe that the mask had become the new symbol of American justice. We said it is unacceptable for our government, in our name, to send poorly trained troops en masse into the streets of our cities to crush the growing opposition to the wholesale war on so many innocent people. But in the end we as a people saw the suffering, crossed to the other side of the road, and passed on by.
We have been told for over a year that the reason the federal government is expelling immigrants is that they broke the law by entering or staying in the United States. In recent months the government has shown us how hollow that claim is. More than one million immigrants who came to the United States for asylum or as refugees under the TPS program were legally admitted here because of the danger that a return to their homeland would pose for them. Now, our government has decided that these endangered immigrants will be deported from the United States and returned to the danger in their homeland. These refugees never broke any law. They are being deported because of a general desire to exclude immigrants from American society. They are being deported because the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigration history is rampant once again in our nation. We know this, but so often we cross the road to the other side and pass on by.
In January, five year old Liam Ramos was arrested by ICE officers, wearing his Spider-Man backpack and wearing a blue bunny hat, totally bewildered, he was brought by agents to his home, as his school said, to use him as bait to get his mother to answer the door and be investigated for deportation. Taken to a detention center in Texas along with his father, he was imprisoned for a month until an outraged federal judge ordered him to be released. In the release documents, the judge included pictures of Liam alongside two verses from the Gospel: the first verse was “Let the little children come unto me and do not hinder them, for it is to just such as these that the Kingdom belongs.” The second verse in the judge’s order was brief: “Jesus wept.”
Jesus weeps all across our nation for the children who have been arrested, detained, transported to far-off centers with terrible living conditions, and cut off from their families.
For us as a nation we can pass by no more. We must stop, recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name, and fight every dimension of it. We must seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil or replace them. We must shed our identities as priests and Levites and become like the Good Samaritan who recognized no boundaries in rescuing the victim by the side of the road. We must recognize that in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty we are losing our soul as a nation. And we must constantly see before us the families that are being broken apart, the fear that consumes the undocumented communities, the children who are in pain. We must act now and act together. For Jesus weeps, and he will continue to weep until we go to the side of the road, lift up the victim, embrace him and make his pain our own. (our emphasis)
If only this could be read in every church, synagogue, temple, and mosque by every every religious leader who calls themself a believer in a higher being. If only the message could be absorbed by those calling themselves Christians who've forgotten or never learned the meaning of brotherhood. But the silence from so many of these leaders, especially in the "evangelical" community, has been deafening. The actions of this fascist regime pursuing its white nationalist immigration policies, its abandonment of the rule of law, and its assault on our democracy have indeed been evil, and to let this pass means losing our soul as a nation, as Cardinal McElroy says. We have at least one way coming up on the horizon when we can stop passing by the evil: November 3, election day.
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