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The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Paul Coakley, said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s mass deportations are spreading fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities across the country.
“It’s instilling, as I said, fear in a rather widespread manner. So I think that’s something that concerns us all, that people have a right to live in security and without fear of random deportations,” Coakley said during an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
Coakley, the archbishop of Oklahoma City, called on the administration to “be generous in welcoming immigrants” while also acknowledging, “We certainly have a right and a duty to respect borders of our nation.”
“There is no conflict necessarily between advocating for safe and secure borders and treating people with respect and dignity,” Coakley said. “We always have to treat people with dignity, God-given dignity. The state doesn’t award it, and the state can’t take it away.”
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“This is kind of a fundamental principle in Catholic social teaching regarding immigration and migrations: People have a right to remain in their homeland, but they also ought to be allowed to migrate when conditions in their homeland are unsafe and necessitate moving to a place where they can find peace and security,” he added.
Coakley, although frequently aligned with the church’s social conservatives, has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Coakley is one of many Catholic leaders who have been criticizing Trump’s mass deportation plan, as fear of immigration raids has slashed Mass attendance at some parishes.
After Trump returned to the White House in January, Coakley issued a statement reaffirming that “the majority of undocumented immigrants in Oklahoma are upstanding members of our communities and churches, not violent criminals.”
Last month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a “special message” in which they slammed Trump’s mass deportation agenda and the “vilification” of migrants, expressing concern over the fear and anxiety immigration raids are stoking in communities, as well as the denial of pastoral care to migrants in detention centers.
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“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” the bishops’ statement reads. “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,” reads the bishops’ statement, which also opposed “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
The special message was endorsed by Pope Leo XIV and Bishop Ronald Hicks, who the pontiff recently named as the next archbishop of New York, replacing conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan as the leader of the country’s second-largest Catholic diocese. Dolan announced earlier this year he would resign upon turning 75, which is required by Catholic law.
“I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have,” Leo said last month. “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts, there’s a system of justice.”
The pope has previously urged local bishops to speak out on social justice concerns and has suggested that people who support the “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” may not be pro-life.
Coakley defended the special message on Sunday, saying the bishops sought to “reassure people” amid increasing anxiety about the immigration sweeps in cities across the country.
“In communities with a more dense migrant population, there is a great deal of fear and uncertainty, anxiety because of the level of rhetoric that is often employed when addressing issues around migration and the threats of deportation,” he said.
Coakley said that immigration policy must include respect for human dignity, stressing: “I don’t think we can ever say that the end justifies the means.”
“That’s kind of a foundational bedrock thing for us, that people are to be respected and treated with dignity, whether they are documented or undocumented, whether they are here legally or illegally, they don’t forfeit their human dignity,” he said on Sunday.
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