Cardinal McElroy decries “war of fear and terror” on migrants

McElroy’s blasted Trump’s policies while his former diocese launched new services to help and protect immigrants and refugees.

However, the Catholic Church remains deeply divided with bishops as KC’s Naumann endorsing conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his surrogates while confronting McElroy.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

On Sunday, February 9th, the now former bishop of San Diego, Cardinal Robert McElroy, current archbishop of Washington, DC, went back to his old diocese right on the border with Tijuana, Mexico.

Cardinal McElroy joined the Episcopal Bishop of San Diego, Susan Brown Snook, and his former auxiliaries at San Diego, Catholic bishops Ramón Bejarano, Michael Phạm Minh Cường, and Felipe Pulido López, and leaders of other faith traditions active in San Diego and Southern California to express the support of the Catholic and Episcopal dioceses and other religious traditions active in San Diego to migrants and refugees in the United States.

The activity started at 2 PM at the Roman Catholic Saint Joseph cathedral on Third Avenue, with a prayer service presided by McElroy. A few minutes before 3, Catholics, Episcopalians, and people of other faiths and multiple ethnicities begun a procession towards the Edward J. Schwarz Federal Building at 880 Front Street.

McElroy’s message to his former flock stressed the need to be now more than ever, close to the migrants and refugees, to stand with them, and to stop the spread of fear. He went as far as to call for an end to the “war of fear and terror on migrants”

As it is frequent in Catholic theology, Cardinal McElroy used the account of Jesus and his parents fleeing to Egypt during the persecution enacted by Herod, in the first century of the current era to express his support to migrants and refugees, regardless of their origin or ethnicity.

McElroy acknowledged the need for law and policy, but also emphasized the need for compassion and charity. Both Cardinal McElroy and the Episcopal bishop Brown Snook called on their flocks and the population at large in Southern California to “awake compassion” and to remember basic Christian teaching.

Both the Roman Catholic and Episcopal dioceses of San Diego have been working together and on their own programs to address the emergency brought by the new policies pursued by Donald Trump.

The Roman Catholic diocese through Catholic Charities has published a series of videos and guides as PDF files in several languages to help migrants and refugees in the San Diego metropolitan area.

The videos and PDF files are available at a microsite at the Catholic Charities website called Know your rights, located at the URL www.emergencysafetyplan.org.

During the procession, Vino Pajanor, the head of Catholic Charities in San Diego gave away cards in both English and Spanish with a QR code allowing migrants to immediately reach that webiste over their cell phones.

At that URL it is possible to find updates from some Latin American consulates, Mexico, and Colombia among them, as well as guides to deal with potential risks or threats at home or public spaces.

The Refugee and Immigration Services of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin produced the videos there. Their channel over YouTube is available here. Although all their videos are available in English, some of them are dubbed to Spanish, and it is possible to use the Control Panel at YouTube to request subtitles on several languages.

Not all Catholics

Despite his courage and agreement with Pope Francis’s take on migration, Cardinal McElroy’s message runs against the current government’s policies on migrants, but also confronts what other Roman Catholic bishops in the United States have said recently about migration.

Joseph Fred Naumann, head of the archdiocese of Kansas City, charged former President Joe Biden’s policies for creating what he called a crisis at the US-Mexico border, despite the fact that Biden deported more than 250 percent more individuals than Donald Trump during his first term in office, as the graph below shows.

Naumann went as far as to accept as valid the idea of Joe Biden’s administration being unaware or unwilling to care “about the location or the circumstances of approximately 300 thousand children and youth who entered the United States during the past four years.”

Naumann used that idea on his weekly column at his diocese’s website, available here, and Cardinal McElroy's statement in his former Cathedral has been perceived in Roman Catholic circles in the United States and elsewhere as a response to Naumann’s unfounded claims.

Those claims of scores of "lost" kids at the border was a key element of the conspiracy theories spread by Trump’s campaign in 2024 in a similar fashion to his claim about migrants from Haiti “eating the dogs, eating the cats” of their neighbors in Ohio.

As the claim about the pets in Ohio, news organizations and fact checkers in the United States and elsewhere have debunked the claims about scores of children “lost” by the Biden administration.

Back in November of 2024, both the British Broadcasting Corporation and The Associated Press ran detailed accounts debunking archbishop Naumann’s false claim of 300 thousand minors “lost” by the Biden administration.

The BBC's piece is available here, while the AP’s is available here.

The differences between Cardinal McElroy and Archbishop Naumann reflect the current state of the United States Conference of Bishops, deeply divided between a wing loyal to Pope Francis, where one kind find, besides Cardinal McElroy, the current archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, and a "MAGA wing" within the conference, headed by the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, willing to endorse Trump’s policies.

During a recent visit to Mexico City, Cardinal Cupich blasted the Trump’s migration policies, as the story linked below tells.