By Dennis Sadowski
WASHINGTON
(CNS) — Leaders from six organizations want Americans and President Donald
Trump to understand that refugees, especially those from war-torn Middle Eastern
countries, are average people with careers, comfortable homes and loving families rather
than see them as a monolithic threat to the United States.
Their appeal
during a Feb. 1 news conference at Casa Italiana at Holy Rosary Church in Washington came as
refugees continued to be denied entry into the U.S. nearly a week after Trump
ordered a 120-day suspension of the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
Officials
of Catholic Charities USA, Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc.,
Catholic Relief Services, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities and
the Center for Migration Studies called on Trump to rescind his presidential memorandum
implementing the suspension, saying the country has a moral obligation to
welcome people fleeing for their lives.
They
called the world’s refugee crisis a pro-life issue.
“One
of the issues for many of us in this country is that we can’t imagine that the
refugee is a person like ourselves, that many of the people that are now caught
in camps or horrible situations are people like ourselves who woke up one morning
and learned that everything they had was destroyed,” said Dominican Sister
Donna Markham, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA.
“We
all have to stop objectifying them. These are human beings like you and I,”
she said, recalling the people in northern Iraq she recently contacted via online video communications.
Other
leaders cited the country’s long history of welcoming refugees as well as church teaching on welcoming the stranger. They said
the U.S. should not relinquish its role as a moral leader in refugee
resettlement, especially for those who have been cleared or are awaiting final
approval to enter the country. Any delay in their arrival puts them at greater
threat, the leaders said.
“These
refugees are victims of the same violence that we are trying to protect
ourselves from,” said Jill Marie Gerschutz-Bell, senor legislative specialist
at Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas relief and development agency. “And yet it is American principles, of course,
that we are trying to protect. So a disproportionate security response leaves
us wondering: What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Catholic?”
Welcoming
refugees can be an act that not only protects them but also protects U.S. security,
said Don Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies in New
York City. “It’s not really a balance. Refugee protection actually
advances and furthers security,” he said.
“That
doesn’t mean that there doesn’t have to be careful screening and that there’s
responsibilities for improving that screening based on intelligence,”
Kerwin added. “Those need to be implemented. But the fact is we have a very,
very secure screening process for refugees. It’s more secure than any other
admission process for any other category of immigrants.”
Trump’s
memorandum, one of three
governing immigration issues during the first week of his administration,
suspends the entire U.S. refugee resettlement program for 120 days and bans
entry of all citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries — Syria, Iraq,
Iran, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia — for 90 days. It also establishes religious criteria for refugees, proposing to give priority to religious
minorities over others who may have equally compelling refugee claims.
The resettlement program’s
suspension also will affect about 700 employees of Catholic Charities agencies
nationwide, with layoffs expected for nearly all of the workers because the stream
of refugees has ended, said Sister Markham.
“We absolutely depend on
the partnership between public and private funding to support these
programs,” she explained. “We don’t have the resources to carry them
without that partnership. Four months carrying 700 employees with no income is
not feasible for a charitable organization like Catholic Charities.”
The bishops’ MRS department in conjunction with diocesan Catholic Charities agencies
resettled about 23,000 of the nearly 85,000 refugees admitted into the U.S. in
fiscal year 2016. The majority of them were women and children, said William
Canny, MRS executive director.
The number of refugees resettled is
a small proportion of the 21 million refugees tallied worldwide by the office
of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Canny noted.
He also expressed concern that
the resettlement program had enjoyed bipartisan support from Congress and Democratic
and Republican White Houses over the years, but that “in the last year or
so we saw a breakdown” in such backing.
Trump’s other executive
memoranda — one calling for a surge in immigrant detention and deportation and
the other setting the stage to build a multibillion dollar 2,000 mile wall
along the U.S.-Mexico border — drew criticism from Jean Atkinson, executive
director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
An increase in enforcement by
federal and local officials “threatens due process and makes our communities
and their residents, American and foreign-born, less safe,” Atkinson said.
“We’re already seeing men and women afraid to go out into their communities,
to go to work, to take their children to school to take them to medical appointments.”
While
the organizational leaders pledged to advocate for refugees as long as needed,
they also invited Catholics to voice their objection to the president’s
actions.
J. Kevin
Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for
Migration Studies, said if Catholics mobilized, they could influence the
president to change his mind.
“This
is a really important moment for Catholics in our country,” he said. “The
church is in a particular position to influence this administration I think in positive
ways on these issue. Catholics voted for President Trump for various reasons,
so they have the ability to convince the administration that they are on the
wrong course.”
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Follow
Sadowski on Twitter: @DennisSadowski.
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