Roughly one in 12 believers in the United States either faces the loss of legal status or shares a home with someone who does. And the “vast majority of those currently subject to detention and deportation are Catholic and evangelical Christians”. This is the starting point of A Call for Christian Compassion and Wisdom in the Immigration Debate, the statement released in Washington on 13 October by Bishop Brendan Cahill, chairman of the Committee on Migration of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). “Their fear is our fear”, they write, “their tears are ours to wipe”. It is the first statement on immigration in US history jointly issued by senior leaders of the Catholic and evangelical traditions.
he statement comes at a time of sharply rising detentions and deportations, after the federal government revoked legal protections for several groups of immigrants. Families whose members have differing immigration statuses are paying the highest price, facing the threat of separation. The text rests on three scriptural truths. The first is the dignity of every person, who is “a glorious creation of God” before being “an immigrant or native-born person, documented or undocumented”: “This dignity comes from God, not government, and no earthly power may erase it”. From Ruth the Moabite to the present day, the signatories recall, “immigrants can bring renewal to congregations and communities that welcome them”, which is why they “lament approaches that pit citizens against noncitizens”. The second truth is the family, “the foundational human institution”, which “should be protected in both law and practice”. The third recognises the responsibility of government to maintain “secure and well-managed borders” and to enforce “reasonable immigration policies”. The signatories express gratitude to law enforcement officers, who “also bear God’s image, and many feel the weight of moral injury when duty and conscience collide”. Yet the reference to St Paul also becomes a yardstick: “To focus enforcement on the peaceful and productive majority, rather than on those who seek to do harm, is not an expression of Romans 13 but a departure from it”. “To tear a mother from her children”, they warn, “or leave a citizen spouse to raise a family alone is to create the very widows and orphans Scripture commands us to defend”.
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