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What Does the Catholic Church Say About Immigration?
In November 2025 a group of Roman Catholics gathered outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. The occasion was a mass to celebrate All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation in which Catholics are required to receive Holy Communion. During the mass, several members of the delegation asked to enter the center to administer the sacrament to the people being held inside—many of them people from Latin American (and predominantly Catholic) countries. But the group was denied access by police and ICE officials.
It was the second time in two months that they had been turned away in their attempt to minister to the spiritual needs of their fellow Catholics. Father Sergio Romo, the pastor of a Chicago parish and the son of Mexican immigrants, told the Chicago Catholic, “Our parish is very concerned about what is going on. We have a very clear sense of what the church is supposed to be doing, which is welcoming the stranger.”
The group in Broadview is not alone among Catholics who have advocated for the rights of migrants, whether in the United States or around the world. Although immigration has become a divisive issue in many countries, in the Roman Catholic Church the humane treatment of migrants and refugees is considered a moral obligation and a core principle of the church’s social teaching. According to this view, all Catholics, from the pope to the people in the pews, are expected to “welcome the stranger” and support fair and merciful immigration policies that uphold human dignity.
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What popes have said about immigration
Soon after the incident at Broadview, Pope Leo XIV—a native of Chicago whose family arrived in the United States by way of Italy, France, Spain, and Cuba—made several statements about immigration. First he told reporters that the spiritual rights of people who have been detained should be tended to and respected. Later he commented on a statement released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the unified body of bishops in the United States, that strongly rebuked the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The pope said, “I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter. But when people are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least—and there’s been some violence unfortunately—I think that the bishops have been very clear in what they said. And I would just invite all people in the United States to listen to them.”
These weren’t Leo’s first comments about immigration. In October 2025 he issued Dilexi te (“I Have Loved You”), an apostolic exhortation that contains a section on “Accompanying migrants.” Pointing out famous examples of human migration in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Leo wrote, “Abraham sets out without knowing where he is going; Moses leads the pilgrim people through the desert; Mary and Joseph flee with the child Jesus to Egypt. Christ himself, who ‘came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’ ([John] 1:11), lived among us as a stranger.”
Leo, who began his career in the church as an Augustinian priest, also publicly waded into the immigration debate shortly before he was elected pope. Early in 2025 U.S. Vice Pres. J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, sparked controversy when he invoked St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (“order of love”) to justify recent immigration crackdowns by claiming that Augustine’s theology obliges Christians to put love of family and country ahead of “a stranger who lives thousands of miles away.” In response, Cardinal Robert Prevost, soon to be Pope Leo, shared a post on social media with the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, also addressed the rights of migrants in Fratelli tutti (“Brothers All”), an encyclical issued in 2020. Francis was the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina. After being elected pope in 2013, his first papal visit was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, a gateway for African and Middle Eastern migrants arriving in Europe by boat. The island had received tens of thousands of refugees fleeing violent government crackdowns during the Arab Spring (2010–11), and many had died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Francis’s sole purpose in going to the island was to meet with migrants and call for an end to global indifference to people seeking political asylum or a safer place to live.
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Leo also visited Lampedusa early in his papacy—notably, on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States. That day he issued a message of congratulations to his home country that reminded Americans of the contributions immigrants have made to their country’s character. He also asked Americans to receive newcomers “with compassion and generosity.”
Both Leo XIV and Francis drew upon the teaching of earlier pontiffs, including Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum novarum (“Of New Things”) is the blueprint of Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII wrote Rerum novarum in 1891 to address workers’ rights and the rise of socialism and communism. He mentions migrants only once in the encyclical, but it’s a pointed statement that spells out the reason why most people emigrate: to seek out better social and economic opportunities.
Typically held in September, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees originated with Pope Pius X in 1914. That year the Vatican’s Special Office for Emigration at the Consistorial Congregation (created by Pius in 1912) sought to raise funds for its work with Italian emigrants and a college to train missionaries. Eventually, the fundraising appeal became annual, and the office’s pastoral outreach was extended to other emigrants.
In 1952 Pope Pius XII issued the apostolic constitution Exsul familia (“The Exiled Family”), dubbed by the Vatican as “the magna charta of the Church’s thought on migration.” Its title refers to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape King Herod’s massacre of the infants of Bethlehem. Exsul familia is significant because it lays out in detail the church’s responsibility for the care of migrants around the world. Since its publication, succeeding popes have reaffirmed the rights of migrants again and again in their official pronouncements.
The bishops enter the immigration debate
As mentioned above, Pope Leo XIV’s comments in November 2025 came on the heels of a rare “special pastoral message” by the USCCB that condemned the U.S. government’s immigration policies. Their message states, “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.”
The USCCB also lamented the separation of families, including children from parents, in immigration sweeps and the arrests taking place in churches, schools, and hospitals, many of which have historically provided sanctuary to migrants. Citing the church’s teaching “to recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants,” the bishops called for “a meaningful reform of our nation’s immigration laws and procedures.”
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development is the bureau responsible for overseeing the church’s pastoral care to migrants and displaced people.
Many other national bishops’ conferences and individual prelates have spoken out. In 1950, two years before Pius XII’s Exsul familia, Australia’s bishops released a landmark pastoral letter to address their country’s influx of immigrants in the wake of World War II. Titled “On Immigration,” the letter encouraged Australian Catholics to welcome newcomers: “Patience, kindliness, sympathy and practical help must be rendered to all unfailingly and in God’s name.” Since then the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has reiterated its support for migrants, as in 2015, when a heated debate about the country’s strict immigration policies led them to release a statement that “challenges Australians to think again about our national response to asylum seekers, especially those who come to Australia by sea.”
That same year many European bishops were expressing divided opinions about how to respond to the exodus of people from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan fleeing war and persecution for asylum in Europe. The crisis had compelled Pope Francis to ask every parish and religious community (meaning, monasteries and convents) in Europe to take in a family of refugees. (The pope also announced that the Vatican would be hosting two families.) But some Catholics (both laypeople and clergy) objected to opening their parishes and communities to people of another faith (most of the refugees were Muslim). Others said they simply didn’t have the space. Cardinal Péter Erdő of Hungary, who had previously criticized liberal immigration policies on the basis that they “would break down public order” in Europe, equated the sheltering of refugees with human trafficking. However, after Francis’s plea, Erdo quickly reversed his position on taking in refugees.
Immigrant parishes and the sanctuary movement
The Roman Catholic Church has about 1.3 billion followers, with parishes and religious communities in all corners of the world. How did a religion based in Rome (with its origins in Jerusalem) become a global faith? Evangelization through international missions had the most obvious role in the spread of Catholicism. But immigration is another reason. This is especially true in the United States, where hundreds of Catholic parishes sprang up in the 19th and early 20th centuries to serve Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. Many of these same parishes later welcomed Polish, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Filipino Catholics to their communities, even offering masses in the newcomers’ languages. Without these waves of Catholic immigrants, Americans likely wouldn’t have such traditions as St. Patrick’s Day parades, St. Joseph’s Day tables, or Día de los Muertos festivities.
Catholic parishes have also ministered to people through sanctuary, the practice of providing shelter and legal protection to immigrants without legal status. In the United States the sanctuary movement began in the 1970s, but the tradition of Christian churches serving as safe havens for anyone in need of protection from the law dates to the 4th century. Over time different countries have changed their laws regarding sanctuary.
For decades, houses of worship in the United States were deemed off-limits to immigration officials until this special status was rescinded in 2025 by Pres. Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Since then, ICE agents have been able to enter churches, schools, health care facilities, and other “sensitive locations” to arrest people, leading to lawsuits by groups that say the new guidelines infringe on their religious freedom. Similar lawsuits have been filed by the USCCB and the group that assembled at the ICE detention center in Broadview. In February 2026 a judge ruled in favor of the Broadview delegation being allowed to administer pastoral care to detainees on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar.
Solidarity and accompaniment by charities and religious orders
Long before the Vatican established an official department for helping migrants, religious orders were doing the work of caring for displaced people, often with the support of lay volunteers. Most missions around the world were founded by priests, friars, and nuns, who also set up charities to offer food, shelter, and medical care to refugees.
In the 21st century prominent global organizations that serve migrants include Caritas Internationalis, Catholic Relief Services, and the Jesuit Refugee Service. At the U.S.-Mexico border, much of this work is performed by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley under the leadership of Sister Norma Pimentel, who began working with migrants in the 1980s and founded a center in McAllen, Texas, in 2014. Her tireless advocacy has earned her the nickname “the immigrants’ nun.” In 2020 Time magazine included Pimentel on its list of 100 most influential people, but five years later her organization faced a six-year funding ban after DHS accused it of violating federal grant requirements. Some Catholics, however, think that DHS’s real aim is to discourage and dismantle the charity’s aid to immigrants.
Despite these challenges, Catholic religious and volunteers continued to find ways to help. Some nuns, such as Sister María Magdalena Silva Rentería in Mexico City, have vowed to accompany migrants from Venezuela and other Latin American countries who have given up their dream of a better life in the United States and decided to return home. Known as “reverse migration” or “self-deportation,” such journeys have become common because of increasingly restrictive immigration policies and budget cuts to humanitarian aid.
This also means shelters such as Silva Rentería’s have struggled to stay afloat. But she told Our Sunday Visitor that she intends to stick it out and stand in solidarity with migrants: “As Pope Francis says, in migrants we touch the flesh of Christ.”