The US border bishop standing up to Trump

Bishop Mark J Seitz. Photo: Michael Tangeman

EL PASO, Texas - Just days into the second term of US President Donald Trump, millions of Americans watched live as his administration went on the attack against the country's Catholic hierarchy over its objections to Trump's plan for mass deportations of immigrants and refugees, legal and illegal alike.

While apparently directed at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the individual who lies squarely in the crosshairs of the administration's attack plan is Bishop of El Paso Mark J Seitz, the elected chair of the USCCB's Committee on Migration and Refugees.

It was Bishop Seitz, two days after Trump signed a flurry of executive orders overriding existing laws and federal government policies on immigration, who issued a response on behalf of the USCBB saying the orders appeared "specifically intended to eviscerate humanitarian protections enshrined in federal law and undermine due process, subjecting vulnerable families and children to grave danger."

The next day, Seitz led the heads of the Catholic Health Association of the United States and Catholic Charities USA in criticizing Trump's rescinding of the government's long-standing guidance for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to refrain from conducting raids and making arrests in schools, places of worship, hospitals and other sensitive locations.

The Trump administration's reaction came in the form of an aggressive attack by Vice-President JD Vance three days later in a nationally televised interview. Identifying himself, without prompting, as a practicing and devout Catholic, Vance falsely accused the church of resettling "illegal immigrants" and implied it was harbouring "violent criminals" in churches and schools.

What's more, he charged the Catholic hierarchy with hypocrisy and acting out of financial interest, referencing millions of dollars it was reimbursed for services provided to refugees in partnership with the government's own congressionally approved U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

"The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit," Vance said. "Are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?"

In a cautious response, the USCCB noted that every refugee resettled under the USRAP program is vetted and approved by the government itself and clarified that monies received do not fully cover the church's expenses for services provided under the program.

From the Vatican, Pope Francis sent an open letter of support to the US bishops. Team Trump again went on the offensive, this time in the person of Tom Homan, a burly former policeman and Border Patrol officer - and the man who devised the policy of family separation during the Obama years - now the designated "border czar" for Trump's second term in office.

"I've got harsh words for the Pope," Homan snapped, when questioned by a reporter at the entrance to the White House, after first volunteering that he is a lifelong Catholic.

"He wants to attack us for securing our border? He's got a wall around the Vatican, does he not? He's got a wall around to protect his people and himself, but we can't have a wall around the United States?" he said. "He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us."

If this was the first skirmish in what appears to be the Trump administration's intention to go to war with the U.S. Catholic church over questions of immigration and refugee asylum, then they couldn't have found a happier warrior to go up against than Bishop Seitz.

A mild-mannered and plain-spoken prelate who hails from the upper Midwest, his easy way with people and gentle, winning smile are nonetheless steeled by a profound faith in Christ and underpinned by a deep theological understanding of the Biblical basis for the church's work with the poor and vulnerable. He is also apparently esteemed by Pope Francis, well known as he is in Vatican circles, for his pastoral work at the border.

Immigration hawks in the Trump administration know him, as well, as a thorn in the side of the government when it comes to immigration. Over the past two years, as the American Catholic church's "point man" on matters of migration and refugees, his voice was amplified as a critic of Biden-era immigration policies and as a defender of migrant rights.

Asked why the church is so focused on immigration and refugee issues, Seitz replies with a slight smile and shrug of the shoulders, raising an eyebrow as though he thinks this should be something everyone already knows: "Well, it's pretty much 'Gospel 101'!"

"Unfortunately, a lot of people are (now) just beginning to notice the church's work with immigrants, but it's been going on from the time of the Gospel," he said. "The Church, if you follow her through history, you see how she has always, always, always cared for the poor, and very often those poor have been migrants. There's really no separating the two."

Born and raised far to the north in small-town Wisconsin, the eldest son in a large Catholic family of 10 children - three brothers and six sisters - Seitz found his way to Texas as an 18-year-old in 1972, bound for Holy Trinity Seminary and undergraduate study at the Catholic-run University of Dallas.

Staying on and ordained to the priesthood in 1980, Seitz was to spend more than four decades in Dallas - including 13 years teaching at the university and serving as spiritual director and vice-rector of Holy Trinity, earnings Master of Divinity and Theology degrees along the way. He then spent 17 years as pastor in consecutive stints at two local parishes - while at the latter, donating a kidney to one of his parishioners, a woman who had been on dialysis for a dozen years and faced near-certain death without a transplant.

During a panel discussion in February on Migration, Refugee Resettlement, and Mass Deportation at Washington, DC's Georgetown University, Seitz said he "never would have guessed that I would find myself doing this work" with migrants and that he could easily have stayed on as a parish pastor in Dallas.

"I felt called to be a parish priest," he said. "I fell in love with the Latino community in Dallas, where I served, and gained so much from them and from work at our sister parishes in Mexico and Honduras."

The experience of the Dallas years, including his last three years serving as Auxiliary Bishop of the diocese, had seasoned the bishop for his next posting to El Paso, which Pope Francis named him to lead in 2013. Yet while the two dioceses are both located in Texas, they nevertheless stand in stark contrast to one another.

Dallas, with a population of 7.5 million is the fourth largest urban area in the United States, while El Paso holds just 859,000 people spread across a vast area of 27,000 miles of high desert. Latinos account for 81 percent of El Paso's residents, nearly twice the proportion of the 41 percent in Dallas. And while Catholics comprise just 24 percent of the population there, in El Paso fully 80 percent of those living within the diocese consider themselves Catholic.

More importantly, and critical to Bishop Seitz's future, Dallas lay nearly seven hours' drive north of the US border with Mexico. El Paso is a lynchpin of the Texas Borderlands region, abutting the border along the Rio Grande River as it traverses the Chihuahua Desert at the far-western tip of the state, an historic crossing point and the second busiest along the nearly 2,000-mile length of the US-Mexico frontier.

Known from the late 16th century by Spanish explorers as El Paso del Norte (the Northern Pass), in 1888 Mexico renamed the original town south of the Rio Grande as Ciudad Juárez, prompting local authorities on the US side to take the name El Paso for their burgeoning border settlement. Ever since, the twin cities of Juárez and El Paso have been a vital point on the border for the legal and illegal crossing of goods, services and people.

The cross-border flow of undocumented Mexican nationals had ebbed significantly in the years preceding Bishop Seitz' arrival, the combined result of a hike in deportations by the Obama administration and increased employment in Mexico, linked to the Northern American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

But beginning in 2013, thousands of Central Americans, mostly women and unaccompanied minors, began to arrive through Mexico to seek refuge in the United States from violence directed against them by organized crime gangs and drug cartels operating in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

The Obama administration struggled to address the surge, as the number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the border jumped nearly 80 percent to 68,541 by early 2014. In El Paso, tapping into the diocese's longstanding relationships with local nonprofits providing support to migrants, Bishop Seitz and his pastoral team jumped into action and began coalescing resources into an infrastructure to help with the migrant crisis.

Relying on the Annunciation House migrant shelter, founded in 1978 by a former head of youth ministry for the diocese, and Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services, a semi-autonomous nonprofit legal aid provider set up in 1986 through a collaboration of the local church and the USCCB, the diocese began providing shelter and asylum-application assistance to the migrants.

In 2015, Seitz and the diocese were also instrumental in founding the Hope Border Institute, an independent nonprofit organization that is a combination of humanitarian relief agency and immigration research and policy centre.

For Seitz personally, the work of the diocese with migrants has involved a process he refers to as "accompaniment". He was clearly moved by the closer contact with the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable, "to meet so many coming through and hear their stories and walk with them a bit in their life … people (who) themselves are traumatised by what happened in their home country. They're traumatised by what happened on their journey."

In 2017, Seitz penned one of a number of eloquent pastoral letters he would write to the people of El Paso, a moving treatise and reflection on cross border migration, titled Sorrow and Mourning Flee Away.

Filling a gap of ten years since the last pastoral letter by a U.S. bishop on the subject, Seitz decried a "broken immigration system" as a "wound on this border community," criticised the first Trump administration's "divisive political rhetoric and new edicts", denounced increasing efforts to militarise the border, and called on the faithful in El Paso to "grow in our commitment to charity and justice on our border and towards our migrant brothers and sisters."

At the end of 2018, the Trump administration imposed a "Remain in Mexico" policy, locking down the border and forcing migrants and asylum seekers back into Mexico, and with the Covid-19 pandemic used Title 42 of the U.S. Health Code to prolong the lockdown.

Then, tragedy stuck El Paso in 2019: a 21-year-old white supremacist obsessed by the Hispanic "invasion" of America murdered 23 people and injured 22 others in a mass shooting at a Wal-mart store.

Bishop Seitz responded with another moving pastoral letter, titled Night Will Be No More. Condemning racism and "the false god of white supremacy", the bishop's letter sought to heal a traumatised community. He told the faithful that although hate and prejudice had again reared their ugly heads in America, not to be afraid, to trust that their faith would lead them to a brighter future: "For even if a whole army of hate should threaten us, if we are faithful to Jesus and hold on to love, in the words of the poet Julia Esquivel, what can they do but threaten us with Resurrection?"

Fast forward to another hike in migrants arriving in 2022, this time primarily Venezuelans escaping the violence accompanying political upheaval and a collapsed economy, and the diocese and affiliated organisations were stretched to the limit. Annunciation House assembled a network of 25 faith-based "hospitality shelters" from El Paso to Las Cruces and Albuquerque, in neighbouring New Mexico, to house thousands of Venezuelans and other migrants granted Temporary Protective Status entry.

In 2024, Seitz described an overflow shelter for migrants on the grounds of the diocesan pastoral center, a stone's throw from his own quarters, as "a very simple and ordinary operation" much like migrant shelters anywhere. Yet, for him, it was something much more profound: "A place where you have deep, unmediated access to your neighbour, often people undergoing severe physical or emotional trauma, a place where you can feel compassion again - were your shared humanity can come to life again in a world where we live anesthetized to the impacts of human suffering … a place where the disjointedness of the world is being woven back together again."

It was this sense of community, compassion and shared humanity that crossed boundaries of race and class and nationality that Seitz would come to identify as the ultimate target of attacks by those who want to close down the border to migrants and refugees.

And those attacks began in earnest in early 2024. Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott first began bussing migrants and refugees away from the border to dump them into cold northern cities thousands of miles away and called on the Texas National Guard to lay hundreds of miles of razor wire along the Rio Grande.

The Texas state legislature then approved a Senate bill intending to criminalise the act of illegally entering the state - although signed into law by Abbot, it has become ensnared in legal challenges and appeals. And shortly after, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Annunciation House in El Paso, currently awaiting resolution before the Texas Supreme Court, claiming the church-affiliated shelter was intentionally harbouring undocumented migrants and calling it a "stash house" for the trafficking of illegal aliens.

"To hear this place of refuge and care for the poor, characterised as a 'stash house', to say that they are somehow not protecting people from organized crime, from human trafficking, but facilitating it," said Bishop Seitz, "is mind-boggling."

As if that were not enough, the battle has shifted since Trump's inauguration to the federal government and the slew of anti-immigrant edicts and policies coming from the White House, including a campaign to systematically slash and claw back federal funding for programs that channeled aid to migrants and refugees via faith-based organisations.

In response, the diocese and the Hope Border Institute called a protest march and vigil last month on the Feast Day of Saint Óscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop killed while saying Mass on March 24, 1980, for defending the rights of the poor and vulnerable in El Savlador, whose prophetic words and martyrdom have loomed increasingly larger in Bishop Seitz's pastoral messages.

At El Paso's Jesuit mission Church of the Sacred Heart, speaking at a vigil that followed the march, Bishop Seitz said it was no accident that the protest that day was called to coincide with Romero's Feast Day. And he pledged that he and his diocese will not back down in the face of attacks against their own defense of the poor and vulnerable crossing the border.

"Our ability to contribute to the common good is threatened and there is a clear attempt to delegitimise our voice," he said. "Anchored in faith, we will not be cowed or intimidated."

In an interview a few days after the march, asked if he understood and was ready to assume the consequences of standing up to powerful forces seeking to close the border and crush support for migrants and refugees, Bishop Seitz was clear in his response.

"The administration has not at all hesitated," he noted, "to target groups that disagree, to threaten them with consequences for simply doing things that in any other context would simply be expressing our own freedom of speech and our religious liberty."

He said that despite the Church being targeted for its defence of poor migrants and refugees, it will remain steadfast.

"I fully expect the church to be persecuted," he said, "because if you look around in society right now in our country, who else really is there to speak up to these issues?"

Or, as he wrote in his pastoral letter of 2019, Night Will Be No More: "We must continue to show the rest of the country that love is capable of mending every wound. What can they do but threaten us with Resurrection?"

Michael Tangeman is a journalist and author of the book Mexico at the Crossroads: Politics, the Church, and the Poor.

LINKS

"Executive Actions Will Subject Vulnerable Families and Children to Grave Danger, says Bishop Seitz," Office of Public Affairs, USCCB, 22 Jan 2025 - www.usccb.org/news/2025/executive-actions-will-subject-vulnerable-families-and-children-grave-danger-says-bishop

"Human Dignity is Not Dependent on a Person's Citizenship or Immigration Status", statement by Bishop Mark J Seitz (USCCB), Sr Mary Haddad, RSM (CHA), and Kerry Alys Robinson (CCUSA), Office of Public Affairs, USCCB, 23 Jan 2025 www.usccb.org/news/2025/human-dignity-not-dependent-persons-citizenship-or-immigration-status

USCCB Statement on its Work with the US Refugee Admissions Program, Office of Public Affairs, USCCB, 26 Jan 2025 www.usccb.org/news/2025/usccb-statement-its-work-us-refugee-admissions-program

Interview with Vice President JD Vance on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan", 26 Jan 2025
www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-transcript-face-the-nation-01-26-2025/

Letter of the Holy Father to the Bishops of the United States of America, 11 Feb 2025
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2025/02/11/0127/00261.html

US 'Border czar' Tom Homan's criticism of Pope Francis, NewsNation, 11 Feb 2025
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtV4nzLy-L0

Migration, Refugee Resettlement, and Mass Deportation: Moral, Human, and Policy Choices, panel discussion, Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life & Institute for the Study of International Migration, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. https://catholicsocialthought.georgetown.edu/events/migration-refugee-resettlement-and-mass-deportation-moral-human-and-policy-choices

The Future of Immigration in the 2024 Elections, seminar Keynote by Bishop Mark J Seitz, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, Houston, TX, 14 May 2024 www.bakerinstitute.org/event/future-immigration-2024-elections

Sorrow and Mourning Flee Away, pastoral letter, Bishop Mark J. Seitz, 18 July 2017 www.elpasodiocese.org/uploads/5/4/9/5/54952711/sorrow_and_mourning_pastoral.pdf

Night Will be No More, pastoral letter, Bishop Mark J. Seitz, 19 Oct 2019
www.hopeborder.org/nightwillbenomore-eng

Diocese of El Paso, Texas - www.elpasodiocese.org/

Hope Border Institute, El Paso - www.hopeborder.org

Annunciation House, El Paso - https://annunciationhouse.org/

Estrella del Paso (formerly 'Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services') https://estrelladelpaso.org/