D.C. archbishop calls U.S. immigration crackdown a ‘governmental assault’

Washington Post -  Hundreds packed into the wooden pews of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington for Sunday evening Mass. The sanctuary, which seats about 1,000, was so full that attendees squeezed next to each other in overflow seating. Sunday’s order of service, with its introductory rites and liturgy of the Word, flowed into the homily as any other might, but on this night, the message was much more pointed.

For the next ten minutes, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, decried the immigration policies of President Donald Trump’s White House, located just blocks away, likening them to an “assault” that “seeks to make life unbearable for undocumented immigrants.”

“We are witnessing a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women,” McElroy said, “who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history.”

The archbishop said border security is every nation’s right, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes is “a legitimate national goal.” But that’s not what is happening, he said.

“Our Catholic community in Washington has witnessed many people of deep faith, integrity and compassion who have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed in our nation,” McElroy said. “As citizens, we must not be silent as this profound injustice is carried out in our name.”

The archbishop’s homily was an extraordinary rebuke of the current treatment of migrants in the United States and closed out an hours-long prayer march across the nation’s capital Sunday afternoon that drew hundreds into the streets.

Organized by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and Jesuit Refugee Service, the “reflection procession” coincided with the church’s National Migration Week and in observance of its upcoming 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees and the Jubilee of Migrants, the theme of which this year is “Migrants, Missionaries of Hope.”