Trump’s deportation spread fear ‘in a widespread way,’ says head of US Catholic bishops

The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Paul Coakley, said on Sunday that the expulsion of officials from the Trump administration is spreading fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities across the country.

“It instills, like I said, widespread fear. So I think that’s a concern for all of us, that people have the right to live in safety and without fear of random deportation,” Coakley said during an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Coakley, the archbishop of Oklahoma City, urged the administration to be “open-handed in accepting immigrants” while acknowledging, “We certainly have a right and a duty to respect our nation’s borders.”

“There is no conflict between promoting safe and secure borders and treating people with respect and dignity,” Coakley said. “We must always treat people with dignity, the dignity given to us by God. The state does not respect us, and the state cannot take it away from us.”

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“This is a kind of basic principle in Catholic social teaching on immigration and migration: People have the right to live in their country, but they should also be allowed to migrate when the conditions in their country are unsafe and they need to move to a place where they can find peace and security,” he added.

Coakley, although often aligned with the church’s social conservatives, has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Coakley is one of many Catholic leaders who have been critical of Trump’s mass deportation plan, as fears of immigration raids have reduced Mass attendance in some villages.

After Trump returned to the White House in January, Coakley issued a statement affirming that “the majority of undocumented immigrants in Oklahoma are strong members of our communities and churches, not violent criminals.”

Last month, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a “special message” in which they criticized Trump’s agenda of mass deportations and the “defamation” of immigrants, expressing concern about the fear and concern of the growing attacks of immigrants in communities, and the denial of pastoral care to immigrants in detention centers.

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“We are saddened to see among our people a state of fear and anxiety regarding the questions of writing information and the enforcement of immigration law,” the bishops said in a statement. “We are saddened by the state of the current debates and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in the detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care,” read a statement from the bishops, who also oppose “mass deportations indiscriminately.”

The special message was approved by Pope Leo XIV and Bishop Ronald Hicks, the pope who recently named him the next archbishop of New York, succeeding Cardinal Timothy Dolan as leader of the country’s second-largest Catholic diocese. Dolan announced earlier this year that he would step down when he turns 75, which is required by Catholic law.

“I think we need to look for ways to treat people with humanity, to treat people with the dignity they have,” said Leo last month. “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to handle that. There are courts, there is a justice system.”

The Pope has previously called on local bishops to speak out about social justice concerns and suggested that people who support “the brutal treatment of immigrants in the United States” may not be part of life.

Coakley defended the special message on Sunday, saying the bishops wanted to “reassure people” amid growing concern about the influx of immigrants into cities across the country.

“In communities with a large population of migrants, there is a lot of fear and uncertainty, anxiety because of the level of rhetoric that is often used when dealing with issues related to migration and threats of deportation,” he said.

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Coakley said immigration policy must include respect for human dignity, stressing: “I don’t think we can ever say the end justifies the means.”

“That is our foundation, that people should be respected and treated with dignity, whether they are documented or undocumented, whether they are here legally or illegally, they do not lose their human dignity,” he said on Sunday.