Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Miércoles, 19 de Febrero del 2025
The Catholic bishops sent also on Tuesday a layoff notice to 50 workers of their office of Migration and Refugee Services.
The Catholic bishops’ decision to sue the U.S. government comes in the heels of an open confrontation between U.S. Vice Presidente Vance and Pope Francis.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
The Associated Press informed this Tuesday that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB or the Conference, sued the U.S. Federal government after the sudden end of funding for the refugee settlement program, available here.
According to the story, the lawsuit calls the action "unlawful and harmful to newly arrived refugees."
A layoff notice sent to 50 workers of the Migration and Refugee Services of the Conference states that it finds itself “unable to sustain its work to care for the thousands of refugees who were welcomed into our country and assigned to the care of the USCCB by the government after being granted legal status.”
As a consequence of the sudden end of the federal programs, the Conference filed the lawsuit at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in the early hours of this Tuesday afternoon.
The decision to sue the Federal government comes after the Trump administration decided to cut funding for this and other programs aimed at providing the required help to people who have gone through proper channels to request asylum in the United States.
It also comes after heated exchanges between leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and Rome, who have rejected U.S. Vice President’s J. D. Vance understand of the so-called “Ordo Amoris” or “Order of Love.”
According to Vance’s take of portions of Catholic Doctrine there is a way to justify both the sudden ending of programs aimed at providing relief for asylum seekers, and to also justify the massive deportations announced by Trump as flagship policies of his second term in office.
Vance’s take on Catholic doctrine was immediately repudiated by Pope Francis himself, and by a wing close to him at the USCCB while the wing closer to Donald Trump, led by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, and by the bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Robert Barron, offered support to Vance but has avoided challenging the Pope’s take on this issue.
Last week, Los Angeles Press went over the heated debate within the USCCB and the details of the letter sent by Pope Francis before entering the Gemelli hospital in Rome. On the Pope's side on this issue it is possible to find Cardinal Robert McElroy, former bishop of San Diego, California and current archbishop of Washington, DC, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, current archbishop of Chicago .
The Pope’s letter to the U.S. bishops where he explicitly decries Vance’s take on the so-called “Ordo Amoris” is available at that story, linked after this paragraph.
A few days after the Pontiff’s letter, the chair of the Conference, archbishop Timothy Broglio, head of the so-called military diocese of the United States, issued a message thanking Pope Francis for his letter.
On February 11th, Archbishop Broglio expressed wish that:
...the U.S. government keep its prior commitments to help those in desperate need. We also turn to the People of God to ask their mercy and generosity in supporting the Catholic Relief Services national collection this Lent as well as the “on the ground” work of local Catholic Charities organizations so that the void might be filled with the efforts of all.
Broglio’s letter is available in full in the box after this paragraph.
Arcbishop Broglio’s letter to Pope Francis.
In a separate document the USCCB leadership addressed the specific issue of the dramatic effects of the loss of the funds to sustain the Refugee Settlement program.
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the program operates through the so-called POWIR, the acronym of Parishes Organized to Welcome Immigrants and Refugees. Details of that program are available here, and the USCCB also published an explainer where they go into details of the kind of work they do with the funding provided until January 20th by the U.S. federal government, available here as a PDF.
Before filing the lawsuit, the Migration and Refugee Services account over X, formerly Twitter, the specialized office of the USCCB dealing with the issue, reposted on Monday a call from The Refugee Advocacy Lab, a non for profit calling “to take action to defend refuge,” as the posting after this paragraph shows.
In the video posted after this paragraph, the Migration and Refuge Services YouTube channel interviews Bill Canny, its current executive director as a way to go over the situation leading to the filing of the lawsuit at the District Court of the District of Columbia.
Around the same time, the X account of Justice for Migrants, a group coordinating the support offered by Roman Catholic religious orders and the USCCB also made a call for U.S. citizens to get in touch with their representatives and senators in the U.S. Congress to make them aware of the effects that the cuts to federal programs are having on the everyday lives of families and communities in their country.
The calls for action have been happening while Catholic media in the United States run pieces decrying Vance’s take on the so-called “Ordo Amoris,” while stressing the need to acknowledge the many contributions made by migrants to the United States and other countries in the Global North.
The USCCB's Migration and Refuge Services page available here also has a link to a study published by the U.S. Government Administration for Children and Families during the Biden administration where it estimates the contribution of migrant and refugee families to its country’s economy in more than 123.8 billion dollars.
That page has been available up until late Tuesday at its original URL here, however given the current situation with websites owned by the United States government it could be blocked in the coming hours, so if it not available it is advisable to search for it at the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.
The division within the Catholic Church is not affecting only its leaders and elites. Over different social media platforms it has been possible to find over the last few weeks bitter attacks from the most radical wings of the so-called Make America Great Again movement and the Republican Party accusing Catholic bishops as Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, of either profiting from the services provided to the migrants and refugees or linking the complains about the loss of funding from these programs with the ongoing clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, as the story linked above tells.
Other churches, religious organizations, and NGOs in the United States have criticized the changes to long-standing practice and policy on migration issues during the current and previous Trump administration.