Immigration and Migration

These types of memorials, Father Curran told OSV News, sparked the idea behind the three-foot by two-foot white cross for Villegas González. It is part of a growing collection of more than 100 identical crosses, each bearing the name of someone who died while in an ICE detention center or during enforcement operations since 2020.

The Archdiocese of St. Louis filed a lawsuit against the federal government Oct. 5 over a policy it said prohibits priests from distributing Communion and hearing confessions to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees.

The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to carry out third-country deportations — removals to a country where a person who had migrated to the United States has no ties — while a challenge to that policy continues.

Rather than passing by a suffering victim like the priest and the Levite did in the parable of the good Samaritan, Americans need to take action to support immigrants who are in this country without documents and are suffering under the government’s mass deportation policy, Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy said.

After a man was shot and wounded by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Austin, Texas, on Sept. 20, Bishop Daniel E. Garcia denounced the shooting and called for “a viable immigration policy that respects the rule of law while recognizing the dignity of every person.”

In a statement to mark National Migration Week Sept. 21-27, Bishop Brendan J. Cahill, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, urged U.S. officials and lawmakers to enact policy that upholds the “God-given human dignity” of migrants and prevents the separation of families.