“I fully expect the church to be persecuted,” says Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz. Seitz has just spoken out strongly against the anti-immigrant policies of U.S. President Donald Trump in a sermon following a march through downtown El Paso in defense of immigrants and refugees on March 24. The occasion was the feast day and 45th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who, in 1980, was killed by an assassin’s bullet while saying Mass because of his outspoken defense of the poor and vulnerable.
Before nearly 500 worshipers at an evening vigil in the Jesuit mission church of the Sacred Heart, just blocks from the U.S. border with Mexico, Bishop Seitz, who also serves as president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, called out the Trump administration’s militarization of the U.S. southern border as “simply empire masquerading as security in pursuit of benefits for a select few” and demanded the administration: “Stop the asylum ban! Stop the deportations!”
In a diocese directly impacted by the arrival of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers from south of the border and still shaken by the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Wal-Mart store, in which a 21-year-old white supremacist obsessed by the Hispanic “invasion” of America gunned down 23 innocent people, journalist Michael Tangeman sat down with Bishop Seitz to ask about his pastoral work along the U.S. border, his opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and how U.S. Catholics should be responding to injustices inflicted on the poorest in society, including migrants and refugees.
The march and vigil in defense of immigrants’ rights that you led here in El Paso seemed intended as a cohesive event to bring the diocese together. How important was that for this diocese?
I think marches have always been used in our country to give a voice to people who don’t feel like they have a voice, and [organizing a march] seemed particularly important right now as a way to show that we don’t have to cower in fear in the midst of these policies and the like that have been coming out.
I think anyone who has immigrated to this country in their lifetime is fearful right now, whether they are fully documented as citizens or not. I had a lady come up to me a couple of months ago, shortly after President Trump took office, and she said, “I was planning to go on a pilgrimage to Mexico, but I’m not sure now if I should go. Do you think it’s safe? Do you think I’ll be able to come back in?” And I said, “Well, what kind of visa do you have?” And she said, “I’m a citizen.”
[What does that say if] everybody feels like they’re not safe in their own country, and if that’s true for a person who has their citizenship? Of course, the administration has said some things that would understandably make people feel fearful, right? That they’re going to go back and look for fraud in the process and things like that.
But imagine people that came here and used CBP One (the U.S. government app for obtaining an asylum hearing), for instance, and were given an appointment, did all of the steps according to the process at the time, and now have seen their parole cancelled, the possibility of asylum simply cut off.
It’s so many tens of thousands of people who have found themselves feeling like they don’t belong in their home country and they don’t belong here, and they have no good options right now. Their children are afraid. There’s a Venezuelan family who I’ve come to know quite well since they arrived. Most families pass through El Paso; this family, because of a lot of circumstances, decided to stay. But their 7-year-old, every time he looks on the security monitor for their house and sees a police car, he freaks out. It’s almost impossible to calm him down.
The numbers of migrants crossing the border actually began decreasing in early 2024, quite a while before the November elections. Is that accurate?
I think so. There were new measures being taken as both parties prepared for the election.
How have things changed on the immigration front since January 20, since the new administration has taken office?
I’ve already mentioned the situation of immigrants who are already here: a great deal of fear. There were many people who took the risk of trying to cross right at the end of Biden’s term, and even a little bit into the beginning of Trump’s. But most immigrants have practically given up the possibility of crossing, and I think the border enforcement encounters would verify that.
I was in (Ciudad) Juárez all day yesterday and I visited a shelter, and the numbers are way down in the shelters, as well. We’re expecting that to probably change if the administration is able to follow through on their threat of mass deportations. We understand that a camp has opened in Fort Bliss now, as of this week. And it’s supposed to be set up to receive maybe up to 10,000 people. But in terms of deportations to Mexico, they haven’t significantly increased to this point.
It was pretty moving as we walked back across the bridge yesterday evening. I was surprised by a group of maybe 30 men who were going toward Mexico. And then I realized there were Border Patrol people on both ends of the group. And one of them said in English, “Pray for deportees.” It was very sad to see. So, it’s happening, but not in the kind of numbers that we were anticipating.
I’m sorry about that. Of course, there are a lot of flights, and El Paso is receiving lateral flights now at a greater number than in the past. A Honduran friend of mine from Florida called to say that a friend of hers was arrested and transported to El Paso, actually. She’s being held here and likely will be deported. I’ve heard of others.
Why is the church called to address this situation? There are people—some Catholics—who say immigration is a border control issue best left to civil authorities, that it’s not really the church’s remit. How would you respond?
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 since the time of the gospel. You can look at stories of Jesus’ care for people who weren’t considered people of Israel. The widow in the Tyre and Sidon area, the Samaritan woman, the story of the Good Samaritan—which kind of puts the shoe on the other foot, with the foreigner being the one that practiced the law in its fullest realization, as opposed to the Jewish person. So many examples we could give.
If you follow the church 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. When people have to leave their homes, when they feel forced to seek a place of refuge because of war and violence and famine, things like that—then it has fallen to the church to care for them.
Our monasteries set up hospices, places to receive people who were on the move, either on pilgrimage or because they were immigrants, and it developed into care for the sick. Certainly, that was always present as well, but those hospices developed into what we now call hospitals. The Vatican initiated the World Day for Migrants and Refugees, which has now been marked every year since, I believe, 1909. So, this is not new, but rather it is the work of the gospel that continues in the church. If we didn’t do it, we would not be the Catholic Church.
Just by definition, by virtue of its “catholicity,” its universality, the Catholic Church has always been a “big tent.” Within that tent are both many “haves”—those who have prestige, wealth, position, power, and a sense of their own worth—and many “have nots”—those who are poor, powerless, dispossessed, and vulnerable. As a pastor, how do you navigate that dichotomy? How do you keep everyone inside the tent and yet focus on giving voice to the voiceless, ministering to the needs of the poorest?
As you read the gospels, you see that Jesus had to deal with that contrast, as well. And I don’t think it could escape anyone who even has a light knowledge of the gospel that Jesus had special love for the poor, and he challenged the rich. Read St. John Chrysostom, one of the fathers of the church, and oh my gosh! Any preaching that any Catholic preacher does now seems mild compared to John Chrysostom.
So, it’s helpful to recognize that this challenge of being that broad tent, you might say, and preaching to everyone, but zeroing in on the particular risks, if you will, of the rich, has been a part of Catholic preaching from the beginning.
And I want to say that while the church has a special calling and a special responsibility to serve the poor, it’s not exclusively the work of the church, and we don’t try to monopolize it, if you will. We recognize that we ought to be leading the way in a certain sense. We ought to be the conscience of the broader society to say, if you want to be a healthy society, if you want to be a healthy nation, you’ve got to care for the ones that are struggling, the ones who are poor and needy, and including the ones who are considered the strangers among you. You have to have a way to receive them, to care for them, and to integrate them, as our Holy Father has reminded us.
It’s not simply the fact that it’s what Jesus has called us to do, which he has. But it’s the fact that if you want to be a healthy nation, you have to be a nation that doesn’t have a class of oligarchs at the top and then everybody else somehow living a life of misery. That’s a formula for a disintegration of the society. That’s a formula, eventually, that leads to revolution, and nobody wants to see that.
It can be addressed when people who have the means are willing to share with those who don’t. If you could have an ideal society, people would just donate that and work through non-profit organizations or the church. But knowing people’s frailty in that regard, the church realizes that it’s a good thing to be able to respond to those needs as a good and just nation by applying tax monies to that work, and a government can do it in a way that a church simply cannot, on a level that a church cannot.
Besides, the government also has a responsibility to help set up the building blocks for a healthy economy that responds to those issues and make sure that we don’t create either a nation or a world where it’s divided that way. If you want to actually lessen the number of immigrants that are coming to your country, then think about the countries especially close to you that are in need and if you have the resources and the ability, help them to build a bit of stability.
In your pastoral letter following the 2019 Wal-Mart shooting, right up front you mention the “false god of white supremacy.” And that was preceded by a line taken from a pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference that said, “Racism is not merely one sin among many; it is a radical evil.” In terms of the current anti-immigration campaign, the threat of mass deportations, and the militarization of the southern border, is it fair to say there is a racist element to this anti-immigration campaign?
Racism is a word that I always hate to use. I guess because I know that there’s a whole spectrum of reasons and a lack of awareness of the underlying issues when people come out against certain groups. But by the same token, especially in recent years, there have been people even very outspokenly taking racist positions, making claims that the white race is going to be wiped out if people come from other countries.
Racism, like most sins, is a kind of sin that people seem to rationalize in some regard and fail to see [that they’re doing that]. But it has a negative enough tone that most people would not say, “Yeah, I am racist.” That being said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we respond differently to people of color, to people of a different culture and language, than to people who look like us. And that should cause all of us to pause, because in the kingdom that God chooses to build, they are our [siblings] and part of the beautiful tapestry of humanity.
You look at some of the Trump administration’s decisions, and again, while I hate to use words like white supremacy and racism, what do you say when refugee resettlement has been closed off to all of the places that we were receiving them from, except a new channel is open to white Afrikaners, a group of people that benefited from an apartheid system for so many years, that is still in need of correction in South Africa? But now, we’re giving them the red carpet to come to our country if they want to and closing the door for people who are poor and starving.
There’s a kind of classism that is also involved in all of this. When a person who can pay 5 million dollars is practically automatically given a green card and we don’t care about what happens to people who have nothing, what does that say?
Are American Catholics called to stand up to this kind of racism, this sort of injustice in our society? Is it incumbent upon them to speak out, much the way many Catholics marched for civil rights in the 1960s?
I think so. I think it’s incumbent on the church to speak out about this, even at the risk of her own well-being in a certain sense, at least in the sense of having the kind of protections that we’ve become used to—and appropriate ones, we think—our full religious liberty and the different benefits that come from that. Because we recognize that we serve the nation by sharing the gospel, by sharing our religious faith, whatever that faith might be. So, there are risks, but how can we not call these things out?
Standing up to the powerful is very risky and has its consequences. Martin Luther King Jr. knew that, Mahatma Gandhi knew it, and Óscar Romero certainly knew it and was martyred for standing up to power. Why should Catholics feel compelled to take these risks and face these consequences? And how do you think that will be taken by the “powers that be” in this country?
I fully expect the church to be persecuted, because if you look around in society right now in our country, who else really is there to speak up to these issues? I think the Democratic Party has been somewhat cowed at this point. We have disagreements with both parties in the church. We don’t belong to a party. But where they have platforms that are in accord with church teaching, we certainly say, “Yeah, we support that.” And when they don’t, we say that, too.
But the Democrats really are trying to find their voice, I suppose. And most different groups within our society right now are really quiet. Business leaders, for instance. They obviously have lots of power, and they also have lots to lose if they don’t speak up, frankly, because they’re going to suffer if some of these policies are pursued. So many companies rely on immigrants to do the work.
As is often the case, I think the church ends up being practically the only voice sometimes, and so it really is important for us to speak. It’s riskier than it may appear to many people who are not involved in the day-to-day, because the administration has not at all hesitated—I kind of hate to use the word, but maybe it’s appropriate—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.
And that’s not all, but there is this entire web of people who see themselves as the enforcers of the administration, who will take something that could be considered rhetorical, but feel that they need to put it into action. The Wal-Mart shooter was an example of that kind of action. But I’m sure one could cite many other examples.
And so, it’s not lost on people in leadership today that if they make these people angry, that there are so many lethal weapons running around, that it just takes one slightly crazy person.
Do you have any hope that the administration may walk back some of these more draconian measures on immigration and deportations, or do you think they’re pressing full steam ahead and the worst is yet to come?
I think that they certainly are pressing on, and we’re going to see some more difficult days.
I do anticipate that at a certain point, people in our country will say this is going too far: “I wanted you to remove the criminals,” meaning the people who cause violence or do harm to our community. “I didn’t want you to remove my gardener, my neighbor, my waiter at the restaurant. I didn’t want you to put people in situations where they are losing their lives or where they’re starving.”
I believe too much in the goodness of our country than to think that we won’t have at least a limit when it becomes broadly known what the consequences of these actions are: the family separations, the children whose lives are changed forever, and so on. Then, of course, there are the economic consequences, which will surely come as well. And so, if a kind of morality doesn’t kick in, their decision will perhaps be moved by their own self-interest.
Other than the possibility that people will stand up for morality or self-interest, is there anything that gives you particular hope right now?
Jesus Christ always gives me hope. His love, especially for the poor, his presence in the people of this nation, his promise of ultimate victory, that’s what keeps me going. I have moments when I forget that, in a sense, and I’m somewhat overwhelmed by the suffering I see that I can’t remedy. But then I remember that my hope ultimately is not in this world but in the reign of God.
Photo by Michel Tangeman. Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz (center) leading line of Catholic bishops at the head of a march in defense of immigrants’ rights, El Paso, Texas, March 24, 2025. (L to R) Bishop Peter Baldacchino of Las Cruces, Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, N.M., Canadian Bishop Noel Simard of Valleyfield, Quebec.
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