Apr 12th, The Tablet

President Donald Trump promises to deport ‘millions and millions of criminal aliens’ but the evidence from church-affiliated shelters on either side of the US-Mexico border is that he is scrambling to find the numbers that will satisfy his Maga base / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico. They stand silently, facing the altar and the massive raised platform next to Chamizal park and within sight of the Rio Grande river, where in February 2016 Pope Francis celebrated Mass, delivering a homily exhorting the powerful on both sides of the border to treat poor and long-suffering migrants and refugees with compassion and dignity.

Eleven huge white field tents of waterproof canvas now stand here arrayed in the sun, anticipating the arrival of thousands of immigrants that the US administration of President Donald Trump says will soon be deported, dumped unceremoniously over the border into Mexico from the United States.

Across that border, in El Paso, Texas, the construction of a 10,000-bed immigration detention centre at the massive 1,700 squaremile Fort Bliss army base is about to begin, announced during a 26 March visit to the base by Trump’s newly appointed secretary of the army, Daniel Driscoll. Four days later, the first two of eight M1126 “Stryker” armoured fighting vehicles arrived at El Paso, visibly underscoring preparations for Trump’s promised “hardening” of the US border. It was all part of the pledge made to his supporters in November to deliver the “largest deportation programme in American history”.

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Apr 8th, U.S. Catholic magazine

Jesus makes it clear: the church has a special responsibility to serve the poor and the stranger—even if this leads to persecution.

“I fully expect the church to be persecuted,” says Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz. Seitz has just spoken out strongly against the anti-immigrant policies of U.S. President Donald Trump in a sermon following a march through downtown El Paso in defense of immigrants and refugees on March 24. The occasion was the feast day and 45th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who, in 1980, was killed by an assassin’s bullet while saying Mass because of his outspoken defense of the poor and vulnerable.

Before nearly 500 worshipers at an evening vigil in the Jesuit mission church of the Sacred Heart, just blocks from the U.S. border with Mexico, Bishop Seitz, who also serves as president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, called out the Trump administration’s militarization of the U.S. southern border as “simply empire masquerading as security in pursuit of benefits for a select few” and demanded the administration: “Stop the asylum ban! Stop the deportations!”

In a diocese directly impacted by the arrival of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers from south of the border and still shaken by the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Wal-Mart store, in which a 21-year-old white supremacist obsessed by the Hispanic “invasion” of America gunned down 23 innocent people, journalist Michael Tangeman sat down with Bishop Seitz to ask about his pastoral work along the U.S. border, his opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and how U.S. Catholics should be responding to injustices inflicted on the poorest in society, including migrants and refugees.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW at U.S. Catholic

Mar 25, The Tablet

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, the chairman of the US Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, delivered strong words and a warning on Monday to the administration of President Donald Trump over its escalating crackdown against immigrants and asylum seekers along the country’s southern border and nationwide.

In a sermon delivered to a congregation of nearly 500, as well as scores of diocesan clergy and members of religious orders, a dozen US and Canadian bishops and a Vatican cardinal, Bishop Seitz criticised those whose actions in this world are motivated by the desire for wealth or empire as “idolatry of the worst sort”.

He then turned his argument to the Trump administration’s so-called “hardening” of the US-Mexico border, involving the deployment of US Army troops and the increased presence of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents throughout the borderlands region, calling it “simply empire masquerading in the guise of security for the benefit of a select few”.

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