Pope Francis has sharply criticized the second Donald Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and other policies cracking down on immigration, saying they are driving a “major crisis” that “damages the dignity of men and women”.
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Mass deportations are a ‘major crisis,’ Pope Francis warns in Letter to U.S. Bishops
We reported that Nigeria ranks third among African nations with the highest number of citizens scheduled for deportation, following closely behind Somalia, Ghana, and Senegal.
Over the past few days, a large-scale crackdown by ICE officials has led to the arrest of thousands of undocumented immigrants across major US cities.
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In the letter on Tuesday, February 11, addressed to the US Roman Catholic church’s bishops, the pope pushed back against efforts to characterize all migrants as criminals.
The Guardian reported that Pope urged people “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters”.
Francis wrote:
“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations.”
“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
Trump’s immigration: Pope Francis insists policy ‘will end badly’
Francis acknowledged the right of a nation to defend itself and to keep communities safe from individuals who have committed violent or serious crimes “while in the country or prior to arrival”.
But, he said that the act of deporting people who “in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness”.
He added: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
Francis, who has served as pope since 2013, has been a longstanding critic of Trump’s immigration policies.