Year of Mercy—mercy needed for the treatment of immigrant moms and children
Recently, I attended the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Justice for
Immigration in Chicago. I knew that our present immigration system is out of date,
complex, in dire need of improvement and held hostage because of political division.
But I had no idea of the volume and humanitarian issues that our migrants, refugees and
victims of human trafficking face in trying to seek security and opportunity. We need to
address this horrific problem with a moral framework. Since the spring of 2014, there
have been close to 110,000 of unaccompanied children and families—fleeing to our
southern borders in search of protection from violence in the Northern Triangle of
Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—countries with some of the
highest murder rates in the world. In response, the US Department of Homeland Security
launched a policy of detaining immigrant families in prison-like detention facilities
located throughout the U.S. but primarily along the US-Mexico border. They have
rapidly expanded capacity by building new facilities with the goal of increasing bed
space for them.
Immigration detention is an explicit concern of the U.S. Catholic Bishops. “We bishops
have a long history of supporting the rights of immigrants. The special circumstance of
immigrants in detention centers is of particular concern. The government uses a variety of
methods to detain immigrants some of them clearly inappropriate.” Bishop Eusebio
Elizaondo, Seattle, Chairman of the U.S Bishops Conference on Migration declared “it is
inhumane to house young mothers with children in restrictive detention facilities as if
they were criminals.”
These detention facilities are not only inhumane, they are costly. 34,000 people are
detained daily and 440,000 yearly. They are imbedded in the For Profit Prison System.
At Dilley, Texas the largest in the U.S., it costs $320.00 per night for one person and
$1000.00 a night for a mother and two children. Detention facilities costs taxpayers $2
billion dollars a year. We need to find alternatives to detention.
In closing, our religious sisters have been at the forefront of fighting these inhumane
issues. I was so touched by their stories of horrific situations and yet so proud of the
courage and leadership they show of changing systemic oppression. I would vote to put
our tax dollars in financing them instead of for profit prisons! In my opinion, we surely
do not give them enough credit of heeding the call to justice. They seem to understand
what Pope Francis asked our elected officials to do in applying the Golden Rule in
responding to those less fortunate who ask for help: “In a word,” he said, “if we want
security let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunity, let us
give opportunity. The yardstick by which we measure others is the yardstick by which
time will measure us.” Please pray for all who advocate for common sense and humane
immigration reform
.Jacky Miller, Pastoral Minister