When Jessika heard about the Biden administration’s “Keeping Families Together” program, she felt she could breathe a sigh of relief. She hadn’t thought much about her husband Rico’s immigration status when they were dating, but after they married, she realized that the family’s sole supporter could be swept away at any time because he had come to the United States from Mexico at age two without authorization.
The couple met at the Las Vegas evangelical Christian church where she worked, married in 2014, and had two sons together. She left her job to be a stay-at-home mom. Now, to rectify Rico’s immigration status, he would be required to return to Mexico and apply at a U.S. consulate for legal immigration status. That idea terrified Jessika: Rico hadn’t been in Mexico since he was a toddler, and he had no family there. Rico’s mother went through the consular process and had spent nearly a year waiting in Mexico. A wait that long for Rico would leave his family in a dire situation, she said in an affidavit filed in federal court.
“Keeping Families Together” allowed Rico to apply for adjusted status without leaving the country. He filed on opening day, August 19. One week later, a federal judge in Tyler, Texas—one of the two based in that venue, both Trump appointees—suspended the program, based on a lawsuit that Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed with the Republican attorneys general of fifteen other states. Amid the hubbub of election week, Judge J. Campbell Barker held a trial on Election Day and ruled against the Biden administration effort on November 7.
The lawsuit exposes hypocrisy behind the supposed Republican move to create a more pro-family policy. Some five hundred thousand families in which one parent is a noncitizen are clearly the losers in a collision between pro-family goals and the Trump administration’s looming “mass deportation” designs. But the goals of “Keeping Families Together” shouldn’t be forgotten. This is an intersection the U.S. Catholic bishops could focus on, given their interest in shaping immigration laws in a way that promotes family unity.
Vice president-elect J. D. Vance surprised many when he said during his debate with Democratic candidate Tim Walz that the federal government should spend more money to improve child care. “I don’t think Senator Vance and I are that far apart,” Walz replied warily.
The exchange spotlighted what’s been a slow shift in conservative intellectual circles toward a more proactive pro-family policy, what Emma Green described in the New Yorker as “an attempt to reorient Republican politics around what’s good for parents and their children, even if that requires the Party to embrace some policies it once considered anathema.”
This school of thought has a Catholic flavor. It’s been advanced by Kevin Roberts, a devout Catholic who leads the Heritage Foundation, source of the Trump administration playbook Project 2025. And Vance became immersed in these Catholic conservative intellectual circles as he made the decision to convert to Catholicism. But in both cases, their advocacy of “mass deportation” clearly trumps concern for the unity of American families if one parent is an unauthorized immigrant.
President-elect Donald Trump made it clear in a Meet the Press interview broadcast on December 8 that he’d be happy to deport entire families with a noncitizen parent. He added, “Now if they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together.” At the same time, he advocated again for ending “birthright citizenship,” which, were he ever successful in overcoming what’s clearly stated in the Fourteenth Amendment, would allow him to expel children who were born in the United States.
While the bishops can’t be expected to change Trump’s stance on this, highlighting the link between family unity and immigration might be a way to sway the hearts of the huge number of conservative Catholics who’ve fallen for Trump’s vile claims against immigrants. If it’s too hard to raise sympathy for the five hundred thousand noncitizen immigrant spouses who were potentially eligible for Keeping Families Together, maybe it’s possible to muster some compassion for the American citizens—around 1.6 million of them—in their families? The Heritage Foundation didn’t return my messages asking about that.
The bishops have a laudable and longstanding record of helping immigrants. But their statements in support of immigrants are flickering matches obscured by the anti-immigrant fog machine based in Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s awful claims about immigrants—their “bad genes” that are “poisoning the blood of our country”—reek with the stink of a bygone era of fascism. That calls for a much more pronounced response than we’ve seen from the bishops.
They’ve been much more successful in communicating their views on abortion. It took a remark from Pope Francis on the presidential candidates to illuminate the link between immigration and the church’s pro-life teachings: “Both are anti-life—both the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills babies—both of them are against life.”
It’s not as if the bishops, including the conservative ones, don’t care. I think back to a webinar I attended a year ago from the Center for Migration Studies, a New York-based think tank created by the Missionaries of St. Charles, the Scalabrinians. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York spoke passionately about his “sacred responsibility to welcome and defend the immigrant.” In addition to his faith, he linked his passion for immigrants to his own immigrant ancestry, to his patriotic pride as a citizen of a country that has welcomed immigrants, and to his belief that immigration is good for the Church and the country. His traditional “God and country” American Catholicism would be a good antidote to the anti-immigrant Christian nationalist rhetoric that’s found a home among some Catholics.
“When I hear bigots in our Congress sue Catholic Charities, when I hear bigots in our Congress suggest that we’re the ones who are not patriotic and American, I’m saying, ‘Where have you ever read the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights?’” he declared. “It is a moral imperative for every Jew, for every Christian and, yes, for every member of the Islamic faith to rise to the welcome of and defense of the immigrant. That is part of our moral heritage.”
Dolan said that he was “honored to be criticized and to be maligned for a defense of the immigrant,” adding that he received “two stacks of hate mail,” one concerned with opposition to abortion, the other with his support for immigrants. Both causes are part of the pro-life ethic, he said.
But nothing said in a rather obscure web forum can overcome the pro-Trump messaging that was the takeaway, for many voters, from the cardinal’s chummy photos with Trump at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner (which Kamala Harris skipped).
I think also of the mealy-mouthed comments that Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the USCCB, made on immigration in a post-election interview with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo. As Michael Sean Winters wrote in the National Catholic Reporter, the archbishop went so far as to say that one reason Catholic voters broke for Trump was the bishops’ “preeminent concern for the dignity of the human person.” The archbishop sidestepped the human dignity of immigrants.
Broglio passed up the opportunity to tell EWTN’s large conservative Catholic audience about the bishops’ fears over what the Trump administration will do to immigrants. He did refer blandly to the importance of reforming immigration law. It’s fine to focus on that long-elusive goal, but whatever Congress eventually comes up with won’t really respect human dignity if the political atmosphere remains so toxically anti-immigrant. The bishops would perform a great service for their immigrant flock if they did more to help change the hearts of their fellow Catholics.
Focusing on the need to keep mixed-status families together would be an effective starting point toward that end. It should be noted that the fine print of Biden’s Keeping Families Together plan addressed concerns the public has had about immigration. For example, the program was for noncitizen spouses who’d been in the United States for at least ten years and were married before the policy was announced in June. That meant it wouldn’t incentivize a new wave of migration or sham marriages for immigration purposes. (It’s a common misconception that unauthorized immigrants automatically qualify for a green card or citizenship by marrying a U.S. citizen, attorneys say.) Department of Homeland Security officials were to decide each case individually, screening for criminal history, pending criminal charges, or any potential threat to national security.
In the lawsuit, Texas complained about the cost of providing services to the noncitizen spouses, including the future savings the state would supposedly achieve if these families decided to give up and go to the parent’s homeland.
“The point is to cause fear, and to make it harder to live their lives here in the United States,” said Esther Sung, an attorney at the nonprofit Justice Action Center who represented Ricardo and Jessika and other families in attempting to challenge the lawsuit. “It’s born out of cruelty.” The half-million or more noncitizen spouses have been in the country for an average of twenty-three years, she said, and have contributed greatly to their communities and the economy. The Texas accounting of its expenses did not consider these contributions.
In an opposing amicus brief, New York state challenged Texas. “Intact families are critical to the health and well-being of children and other dependents, while also strengthening our neighborhoods, communities, and civic society at large,” it said. “Conversely, splitting up families in the United States contradicts the values of our immigration system and will irreparably harm our families, neighborhoods, and communities.”
