Cardinal DiNardo, bishops serve immigrants at border

January 1, 0001

Daniel Cardinal DiNardo speaks at Houston City Hall along with other community leaders June 19 against separating young children and their immigrating parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during a zero-tolerance policy that has since been nixed by an executive order signed by President Trump. Photo by Jo Ann Zuñiga/Herald.

McALLEN — Focused on the border crisis of detained immigrating families separated from their children, Daniel Cardinal DiNardo led a delegation of bishops from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to visit detention facilities July 1 and 2 in the Rio Grande Valley.

Immigrants whom the bishops met at a Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen had survived on the road for weeks and some entered looking haggard and sunburned with little more than the clothes they were wearing, some holding the hands of their children. They were greeted by applause as the group of Catholic bishops joined a chorus of volunteers and center staff welcoming them. 

In the two-day encounter, the bishops also met with U.S. border officials and toured the federal detention facility known as the Southwest Key Casa Padre that houses about 1,200 boys ages 10 to 17.

DiNardo: Strong borders, compassion not mutually exclusive

At a media conference afterwards at the National Shrine of Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, Cardinal DiNardo said, “The children who are separated from their parents need to be reunited. That’s already begun and it’s certainly not finished and there may be complications, but it must be done and it’s urgent.”

Cardinal DiNardo said the Church supports the right of nations to protect their borders. But having strong borders and having compassion are not mutually exclusive, he said. A solution with compassion can be found, he said.

At the Respite Center, Sister Norma Pimentel, a member of the Missionaries of Jesus who is executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, asked the bishops visiting the center July 1 if they could help serve food to the children, whose eyes lit up when they saw fruit or soup along with the smiling faces of volunteers replenishing their dishes and asking questions.

Nearby, Cardinal DiNardo carried a tray with bowls of soup into the room filled with children’s voices. The visit quickly took the prelates into the heart of the human drama of migration and its toll.

At the Casa Padre detention facility, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, USCCB vice president, celebrated Mass in Spanish for about 250 of the children at what was once the loading dock of a superstore. “I saw a few boys wiping tears,” he said.

A week before U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to stop separating young children from their parents in detention, Cardinal DiNardo, as USCCB president, released a national statement covered by the media urging, “While protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety. Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”

He also participated in a media conference at Houston’s City Hall June 19 opposing a proposed children’s detention facility in Houston for those separated from their families at the border.

Other bishops who participated in the border delegation were Bishop Joseph Bambera of the Diocese of Scranton in New York; Bishop Robert Brennan, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in Illinois; Bishop Daniel Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville and Bishop Alberto Aviles, auxiliary bishop of Brownsville.

Church a part of the conversation

Cardinal DiNardo said the church was willing to be part of any conversation to find humane solutions because even a policy of detaining families together in facilities caused “concern,” with one solution being family case management rather than detention.

Bishop Flores said there’s a need to address the “push factors” driving immigration from Central America, a place where people are fleeing a variety of social ills, including violence, gangs and economic instability. 

The U.S. border bishops have frequent communication with their counterparts in Mexico and Central America on variety of topics, he said during the news conference, but the problems driving immigration to the U.S. are complex.

While refugees and immigrants are two separate categories according to government terms, both issues coincided on World Refugee Day Houston on June 20 with speakers pointing out the shared desperation of families seeking safety for their children.

“If not for Houston becoming a magnet for refugees and immigrants, our city would be shrinking like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and other cities seeing decreases in their populations,” causing churches, schools and other services to close, said Dr. Stephen Klineberg of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

“This is a done deal. It doesn’t matter if they seal the borders, build the wall. Nothing will stop Houston and Texas and the U.S. from becoming more Hispanic, more black and more Asian,” he told an audience at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Sharing the journey

World Refugee Day was created by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to raise awareness on the plight of refugees fleeing persecution. Annually it falls on June 20, which this year landed amid global outrage over a “zero-tolerance” policy enacted by President Trump that forcibly separated immigrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico.

Thousands of Central Americans are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries — including El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — and are risking their lives to reach the U.S. Through April, May and June, more than 2,000 children, including infants, were taken from their parents who were detained at the U.S. border after Trump’s administration announced the zero-tolerance against illegal immigration. But amid public outcry, President Trump signed an executive order June 21 stopping the separation of families from their children at the border, which detained parents and children in separate facilities.

Refugees and those seeking asylum, according to official terms, are those forced to flee because of persecution while an immigrant is considered someone who chooses to resettle to another country. Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston was among the organizers of the World Refugee Day Houston and also is helping represent some of the immigrants and children being detained.

In a written request for pro-bono attorneys and general volunteers, Catholic Charities President Cynthia Colbert said one of the attorneys from the St. Francis Cabrini Immigration Legal Services program returned from interviewing children at a shelter and shared, “It was very hard to see all the children crying for their mommies. My heart feels broken into pieces.”

The bishops also had taken part in a mission, he said, handed on from the highest rungs of the church: to “share the journey” with migrants and refugees, referring to a campaign by Pope Francis and charitable Catholic organizations such as the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services calling on Catholics and others of goodwill to build bridges of understanding and hospitality with migrants and refugees.

“Pope Francis has invited us all on a journey with the migrant and refugee and we’re glad we’re part of the trip,” Cardinal DiNardo said.

Houston: ‘A reflection of our world’

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner presented a proclamation for World Refugee Day to Catholic Charities representatives and other organizers of the event at the museum. Listing how one out of four Houstonians are foreign-born and how 140-plus languages are spoken in the city, Turner said, “From that diversity, Houston has turned into a reflection of our world.”

He added, “We don’t build walls. We value and cherish relationships.”

The Dominican Sisters of Houston, the Dominican family and others have protested and held prayer vigils at the proposed children’s detention center at 419 Emancipation Ave., which Mayor Turner and other community leaders have also rallied against. That building is also subleased by Southwest Keys, which operates the Casa Padre facilities that the bishops toured at the border.

In a closing statement at the border’s press conference, Cardinal DiNardo said, “These are extremely complex and difficult situations. This is a hemispheric problem, not just a problem on the border here.”

In the recently released UNHCR report for 2017, about 25.4 million refugees, more than half under the age of 18, fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution. That’s 2.9 million more refugees than the year before — the steepest increase UNHCR has ever seen in a single year. But less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees make it through the average two-year UN vetting process to be resettled in other countries while most languish in refugee camps.

The Trump administration slashed the U.S. refugee resettlement quota by more than half, which may only be 30,000 this year, according to news reports. The report shows that Turkey hosted the largest number of refugees worldwide for the fourth consecutive year, with 3.5 million people. 

State Rep. Gene Wu, born in China before his family immigrated to the U.S., also spoke at World Refugee Day. Representing the diversity of his southwest Houston district, the attorney said, “These are my people, and in times of economic problems, they are scapegoats.”

He added, “We are a nation of immigrants and refugees and we are stronger because of it.”

Catholic News Service contributed to this story.