No, Kansas Catholic Conference statement backing Trump immigration crackdown isn’t fake | Opinion
When I saw what sure looked like written testimony from Chuck Weber, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference, commending President Donald Trump for the way he’s handling the immigration issue, I actually thought it might be fake. So I called Weber, hoping he’d say that it was.
“That is ours,” he said. The testimony was in support of a GOP Kansas Senate bill calling on Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to get fully behind Trump deportations. I had to make sure it was real, I told him, because I was so surprised.
“Why would we not support our current laws?”
Because we’re an immigrant church? And have always supported migrants?
“We do support migrants. We can do two things. We support finding, arresting and deporting criminal elements.”
But some of those being deported are not that at all, I said.
He admonished me for talking over him, and maybe I was, because it’s not every day that your church throws in with ICE and your country throws in with Putin. If the church doesn’t stand with those who need our help and America is no longer on the side of democracy, I don’t know who we are anymore.
Is the Catholic Conference also OK with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents coming into churches, then, I asked?
Weber, a former Republican lawmaker in Topeka, again scolded me for interrupting, but said no, the conference would have concerns about that. He repeated that the church cares for the dignity of every person, and in the long run supports a path to citizenship. They simply want those deported “that are not documented in Kansas, hard stop.” Being without documents is a civil, not a criminal, violation.
“Two things can be true at the same time,” he said.
No, these things cannot both be true
Catholics have been told this at least since Galileo, Pope Urban VIII’s longtime friend, was somehow expected to argue that the planets might hypothetically revolve around the sun but without challenging the orthodoxy that they do no such thing, since the church had long taught that Earth didn’t move.
But in the year of our Lord 2025, while the innocent are being hunted along with the guilty, children are staying home from school in fear, civil liberties don’t seem to matter any more and people are being sent to Gitmo without any proof that they really are dangerous gang members, putting out a statement commending Trump on securing the border makes all of the accompanying nice words about also supporting migrants just so much blah-blah.
So no, those two things cannot be true at the same time.
“Allowing violent gangs, individuals with serious criminal histories, dealers of lethal illegal drugs, human traffickers and those who pose threats to our national security to enter our country and harm U.S. citizens is a serious dereliction of duty by our elected leaders,” Weber’s testimony to the Kansas House State and Federal Affairs Committee says. “We commend President Trump and those in his administration for addressing this serious, national threat.” Then it goes on to talk about human dignity “of such worth that Jesus gave his life on Calvary.”
In bold, the letter says that “these two positions are not in conflict, but compliment (sic) each other.” It concludes, “bottom line, we stand in support of the State of Kansas cooperating with enforcement of immigration — while at the same time recognizing the human dignity of the migrant.”
That’s not what’s happening. Which is why the U.S. bishops are suing the Trump administration over its cruel freeze on refugee resettlement funding. And why Pope Francis, before he fell ill, chastised American bishops to be a lot stronger in standing up against mass deportations.
Francis correctly called the Trumpian policy on migrants a “major crisis.” And he understands the stakes: “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. … I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
What Weber says, though, is very much in keeping with the words of his boss, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, who likewise tipped his hat to Trump in a recent column: “Allowing violent gangs, individuals with serious criminal histories, dealers of lethal illegal drugs, human traffickers and those who pose threats to our national security to enter our country and harm U.S. citizens is a serious dereliction of duty by our elected leaders. I commend President Trump and those in his administration for addressing this serious, national threat.”
What Pope Francis was talking about
In this moment in particular, I can’t understand the morality of perpetuating the dangerous myth that migrants are a bunch of thugs, when they are in fact much much less likely to commit any crime than those of us who were born here. Nor can I understand the purpose of sending attaboys to this administration on policies that are antithetical to what Jesus and the church teach.
Intentionally or not, to do so is to advance what Francis called narratives that discriminate and cause unnecessary suffering.
If either Weber or Naumann has spoken out against the massive layoffs at Catholic Relief Services that Trump caused, I missed it. CRS, which does lifesaving work, is the top recipient of funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which Trump is working hard to kill.
“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle,” a White House official told the Washington Post, “and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” Many, many starving kids. And this is dignity?
I don’t see care for the human person in any of the president’s policy changes about migrants, or in his words about them, either. As the Miami Herald reported, this administration “has targeted not only undocumented immigrants, both with and without criminal histories, but also hundreds of thousands of people who are in the country legally, limiting and ending temporary deportation protections for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitians.”
For about a week, it suspended legal representation to unaccompanied minors, which is very much against our current immigration laws.
Trump is also unconstitutionally attempting to end birthright citizenship and has declared a national emergency on the border, where troops had little to do once they got there since months before the presidential election, crossings were already at a four-year low.
The president has suspended the right to asylum, which is based on both U.S. and international law, and has left persecuted refugees bound for Kansas City on the runway.
So no, this is not about supporting our current laws.
Eppur si muove. And yet, it moves, Galileo supposedly said. Whether or not he did, it does. The Earth does move, which means it does not also stand still.
So too, whether or not these Catholic leaders can see it, you cannot both applaud Trump’s immigration policies and support the dignity of every person.
