Catholic leaders — including Syracuse’s bishop — issue rare ‘special message’ that condemns Trump’s deportations

Syracuse, N.Y. — The leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse this week joined other bishops to issue a rare “special message” that condemns the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting in Baltimore, said in the message that they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.“

“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” the message said. “We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.”

It’s the first time in 12 years the bishops issued a special pastoral message.

Syracuse Catholic Bishop Douglas Lucia was one of 216 bishops to vote for the message. Five bishops voted against the message and 3 bishops abstained, according to the bishops conference.

The message said the bishops “lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”

“We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools,” the bishops said. “We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”

Lucia, in his own statement Thursday to the Syracuse diocese’s nearly 200,000 members, urged the faithful to help immigrants and not to forget that both the “documented and undocumented members of our communities” are “made in the image and likeness of God.”

“Let us assist them with our prayers and works, just like other immigrants and aliens who came to a new world seeking a better life, and especially one where they could live out their faith in God,” he said.

The statement from Lucia, as well as similar messages issued by state and national church leaders, add up to an attempt to push back on President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign that has proven unpopular.

The statements also arrive as Pope Leo XIV has pushed church leaders to strongly support immigrants.

Dozens of people in Central New York have been swept up in the president’s deportation efforts, including Chinese restaurant owners, workers at a Cayuga County factory and janitors at Upstate University Hospital.

This week, federal immigration agents tried to grab a man in the city’s Hawley-Green neighborhood. They were thwarted by friends, family and strangers who rallied to the area.

Lucia acknowledged in his message that some might see church leaders as playing politics.

“This could not be further from the truth!” he said. “The present world situation is calling all men and women of goodwill — but especially those who claim to be believers — to remember the gospel message of Jesus Christ and to use it as one’s guiding light in dealing with the situations confronting our society."

Lucia also signed a statement issued by the Catholic bishops in New York State titled “For You Too Were Once Aliens.”

“Those immigrants or refugees who commit crimes should face the appropriate criminal and civil penalties, including deportation,” the statement said, in part. “At the same time, general enforcement of the immigration laws must be carried out in a humane manner that does not target the hard-working and law-abiding; that does not permit the wanton and unnecessary separation of families; and that does not rely on campaigns of fear that cripple whole communities.”

The New York bishops encouraged Catholics to sign the “Cabrini Pledge,” named for Mother Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants.

The pledge asks, in part, to “affirm, in word and deed, the inherent dignity of every person, regardless of immigration status or country of origin, seeing each as a child of God before all else.”