Caring About Immigrants: Now and Then

The contrast in the response from U.S. bishops during the Obama administration and the Trump administration proves this has a lot more to do with politics than concern for migrants.

I will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me.  The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not.

Now, I don’t think this statement is especially controversial – most people don’t want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending on the context.  So why am I saying it?

I have been concerned about the treatment of immigrants for a while.  I was concerned, for example, when President Barack Obama was deporting 3.1 million immigrants over his eight years in office, a number far in excess of what the Trump administration has carried out.

According to DHS, between Trump’s January 2025 inauguration and December, the administration had deported 605,000 illegal aliens. ProPublica reports that ICE also detained 170 U.S. citizens during the year, which is true, but according to The New York Post, 130 of them were arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers.  Only about 40 or so were detained accidentally or erroneously, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours.

By contrast, in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (bookings), and four mistaken removals of U.S. citizens.  When President Obama’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs was questioned about the Obama record on immigration and replied: “What the president is doing is enforcing the law of the land.”

To her credit, one person who noticed the problem back then was Maria Hinojosa, whose 2011 Frontline special “Lost in Detention” should be viewed to get a sense of how many of the same issues upsetting people now were happening then, but with much less bitter opposition or controversy.

I don’t remember hordes of people demonstrating violently then, putting themselves between ICE officers and immigrants.  I don’t remember masked citizens putting up check points to keep ICE agents out.

Even if you lauded all those actions now, you have to admit they weren’t happening back then. And back then, Obama was deporting millions more immigrants than Donald Trump has been able to deport.  I don’t remember the Democrats in Congress shutting down the government to force changes in ICE then.

Continue reading at The Catholic Thing
 

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