CNA Newsroom, Jul 19, 2025 / 10:45 am (CNA).
From Detroit to California to Florida, Catholic clergy are rallying to show support and solidarity for immigrants facing deportations.
While the Tennessee bishops and Bishop Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino recently granted dispensations to the Sunday Mass obligation for those who fear arrest, other Catholic clergy are attending marches to show solidarity and support for immigrants.
In Detroit, one Catholic priest took a unique approach — delivering a letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Father David Buersmeyer, the ombudsman of the Office of the Archbishop of Detroit, shared his growing concerns about immigration enforcement operations in a letter addressed to ICE’s Detroit field office and its director Kevin Raycraft.
“Over the last few months, not only in Detroit but throughout the nation, we have been seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel become more confrontational [and] less transparent, in ways that have created more fear and chaos among many of our immigrant communities,” Buersmeyer told CNA.
Buersmeyer is a chaplain for Strangers No Longer, a Michigan-based Catholic grassroots immigration advocacy group. Earlier this week, the group held a prayerful march to the local ICE office to deliver the letter, which was signed by Buersmeyer and the group’s board president, Judith Brooks.
Archbishop Edward Weisenburger of Detroit also joined the march, which was made up of several hundreds of people, including Catholic clergy, women religious, Protestant clergy, and Jewish leadership, according to Buersmeyer.
The procession began with prayer at the Most Holy Trinity Church — which Buersmeyer calls “a longtime symbol” for immigrants and those in need — and ended at the nearby ICE office.
Though the office refused to accept the letter at the door, Buersmeyer said the advocates passed the correspondence on to a congressman and a senator who agreed to deliver it to the director.
The letter cited concerns about facemasks and lack of identification of ICE agents during immigration action, urging the director to enforce ID requirements and ban facemasks. Additionally, the letter urged ICE to not act without a federal warrant and to communicate with local police during enforcement.
Finally, the letter criticized the separation of families when ICE arrests men, leaving women and children behind.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement this week that “rather than separate families, ICE asks mothers if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone else safe the parent designates.”
Despite being turned away at the door by ICE staff, Buersmeyer hopes for “dialogue.”
“Our hope is that enough people will come to see that the current procedures in place for treating immigrants leads too easily to inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary actions,” Buersmeyer said.
“That in turn can lead to a dialogue about national policies that can provide a more just and less knee-jerk framework for handling immigration cases.”
The subject of masking and identification is being discussed in Michigan and around the US. Earlier this week, the Michigan attorney general and other attorneys general sent a letter urging federal lawmakers to prohibit ICE officers from wearing masks.
Several federal Democrat legislators recently proposed a bill that would require ICE agencies to better identify themselves.
But in the same week, the Department of Homeland Security reported a spike in assaults and doxxing of ICE agents and expressed concern over “charged” rhetoric in the media.
“Because our city has a major ICE field office we wanted to let him know that there are large numbers of community leaders who have the pulse of the people being affected by these newer enforcement procedures and that there are ways to both respect the work that ICE needs to do and to lessen that fear and work more positively,” Buersmeyer said.
For Buersmeyer, the march was also about “solidarity” and living out Catholic social teaching.
“We wanted to publicly witness to our support of such communities,” he said.
Across the country in Los Angeles, a local Catholic priest had a similar goal — he hoped to bring spiritual guidance to his flock amid the unrest.
Father Brendan Busse, the pastor at Dolores Mission Church, said that intensified activity from immigration and customs enforcement has deeply shaken the people he serves.
In the largely Hispanic neighborhood of Boyle Heights, people are filled with “anxiety” and have to make “hard decisions,” Busse explained.
“We’ve received calls here at the parish — you know, ‘Father, I’m not sure our family feels safe coming to Mass,’” Busse told EWTN News President Montse Alvarado on “EWTN News in Depth” this week. “I think it’s affected everybody.”
Busse participated in a June 10 peaceful gathering in Los Angeles’s Grand Park as well as a procession to a federal building, along with other faith leaders including Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, who has repeatedly called for action on immigration reform.
“We walked between protesters and National Guardsmen in a moment that was very tense,” Busse recalled. “And we brought into that place a spirit of peace.”
The Diocese of San Bernardino faces similar challenges, leading to the archbishop’s decision to dispense Mass attendance for those affected by ICE activity.
John Andrews, a spokesman for the San Bernardino diocese, said that ICE has come onto parish property twice that he is aware of, including the arrest of a parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes in Montclair.
“A man who was doing landscaping work on the parish property was taken into custody there, arrested, and was later taken to an immigration facility in Texas,” Andrews told “EWTN News In-Depth.”
In Florida, meanwhile, concerns have proliferated over the state’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility for illegal immigrants in the Everglades. State leaders have touted the facility’s remote location as well as its being surrounded by dangerous wildlife.
Venice, Florida, Bishop Frank Dewane said earlier this month that it was “unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good” to speak of the threat of alligators and other dangerous animals in the context of the immigrants housed there.
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, meanwhile, told “EWTN News in Depth” this week that his “greatest concern is the health and care of the people that are being detained there.”
“It’s in a very isolated place far away from medical facilities. It’s in a swamp that is very hot on a tarmac, which makes it even hotter,” the bishop said.
The archbishop said that advocates are calling for “a minimum of standards,” and that “one of those standards should be access to pastoral care.”
He described the difficulty of arranging Masses and spiritual care at the detention center, claiming that the Florida state government and the federal government are “arguing among themselves who is accountable for this place.”
The prelate said people should be aware of the difference between illegal immigration and “violent crime or felonies.”
“Most of the the immense majority of these people,” he said, “are here and working in honest jobs and trying to make a living for themselves and their families, trying to just have a future of hope for themselves and their families.”
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Its my opinion that clergy should keep their nose out of national security and legal issues. Many people and the media were busy attacking Trump about the deportation of the so-called “Maryland Dad”. Until he turned out to be a human trafficker and a wife beater. Criminals get away with a great deal because they are so good at hiding in plain sight by masking who they REALLY are. If you commit one crime, you will find it easier to commit the next one.
People who have broken the law have broken the law. Period. Maybe those non-criminal illegals should self-deport as suggested by our govt., and apply for re-entry in a LEGAL way.
It’s clear that far too many of our Catholic bishops are on the wrong side of the immigration issue. When you support people breaking the law, you begin to lose any little credibility you might have once had. Unfortunately, the bishops don’t get it.
I think the most constructive way for the clergy to help the immigrants would be to partner with the immigration officials who make the determination whether an individual or family is “OK” to enter our country.
Let them stand next to these officials and participate in questioning and interviewing the prospective immigrants and using their God-given spiritual insight and abilities to discern truth and untruth, and then give input to the officials about who is honest and sincerely wishes to become a full-fledged American citizen (and do the work that will get them to that place!), and help ferret out those who are hiding criminal intentions and a twisted, evil soul.
I think that, sadly, many of us have come to be wary of clergy in general, Catholic and Protestant, because of the many sexual and financial scandals, especially in our schools. I don’t want the clergy to open the doors and let everyone in! I’m sorry that the many good and honest clergymen have to suffer our distrust because of the sins of their fellow clergy, but…they need to realize that they are under suspicion just for being “clergy,” and that by asking for accountability and discernment from our border officials (and our clergy!), we are NOT being unreasonable or uncharitable!
There are plenty of criminal gangs and mobs in this country who are probably very happy to capitalize on the gullibility of clergy who are naive about the ability of criminals to conceal the truth (lie). I don’t want these criminals moving into my city and into my neighborhood and terrorizing my fellow Americans, including immigrants who have become American citizens!
What happened to the voices of these so_called “shepherds” when millions of people were coming over the border Illegally?
Since they were the “silence of the lambs” then, we say: no Bueno.
“A man who was doing landscaping work on the parish property was taken into custody there, arrested, and was later taken to an immigration facility in Texas.” Good! Now, stop employing illegal immigrants, something that is forbidden in every country. Stop facilitating the invasion on the southern border. Stop facilitating child sex-trafficking, drug trafficking, and the infusion of criminal gangs into our cities. Stop facilitating the fraudulent use of Medicare and the defrauding of the Social Security workers’ and employers’ tax system. Stop facilitating election fraud. Above all, stop proclaiming that your lawlessness is based on the Gospel of Christian charity.
That sums the AmChurch (AKA the RCCino)’s social justice for illegal immigrant programs perfectly. The only additional item is the AmChurch RCCino’s accepting U.S. government funding, saying the money was needed to resettle ‘refugees.’
Except for the farcical AmChurch beings themselves, does anyone believe anything they say and do in the name of morality or Church teaching?
Throwing open the borders of our country to every person with two legs to cross has resulted in gross injustices – not only to those American citizens who have been murdered, raped, and molested but to the illegal immigrants themselves. It is an injustice to encourage people to break laws by entering a foreign country and to steal its resources to which they are not entitled. Our bishops are PROMOTING INJUSTICE. Instead, they should all return to their country and make application to enter the USA legally. Then, and only then, will justice be served.
Would a conscientious father of a family throw open the doors to the house and allow any and all passerbys free rein in his home? That would be unconscionable and irresponsible on the part of the father. Why would a good father place his family’s welfare in jeopardy?
From the comments on this thread, as well as from discussions with fellow Catholics and other Christians in person, I think it’s obvious that the U.S. Government is doing the right thing to turn criminals and suspected criminals away from entering the U.S.A. Our kindly priests seem to be naive about the dangers of just “opening the gates and letting everyone in!”
I hope that the American Catholic priests will listen to their parishioners. Showing mercy does not mean welcoming violent criminals into our cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
We need to work to alleviate any injustice that is done to legitimate immigration candidates, most likely because the border officials are short-staffed and overworked.
Allow those who have been turned away the right to remain in a decent “holding facility” (NOT a jail or prison!) that provides basic human needs (food, water, heat or cooling, beds, clothing appropriate for the temperature, toys for children, etc.) and given whatever help they need to be able to verify their claims that they are not criminals or gang members. THAT’s something that priests and other parishioners can help out with!