The Immigration Industrial Complex: Catholic Charities

The Immigration Industrial Complex (full series)
Woke Immigration Policy | Where Does the Money Go?
Catholic Charities | Global Refuge | Influencing Elections?

Catholic Charities

According to its website, Catholic Charities aims “to provide service to people, families and communities in need, to advocate for justice in social structures and to call the entire church and other people of good will to do the same.” The group claims to have served “more than 15 million of our at-risk neighbors” in 2023, and it includes 168 diocesan Catholic Charities agencies. Each agency falls under the authority of its local bishop or archbishop in the Roman Catholic Church. The organization dates to 1910 with the National Conference of Catholic Charities.

This storied Catholic organization has ties to the Left’s dark money network. In 2017, the Arabella Network group New Venture Fund contributed $150,000 to Catholic Charities USA.

On May 8, 2023, Catholic Charities President and CEO Sister Donna Markham sent a letter to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), urging them to oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.

Why did Catholic Charities oppose the bill? The nonprofit’s president, Donna Markham, wrote that the bill “would severely restrict vulnerable people’s access to asylum, detain more families including children, undermine U.S. efforts to effectively manage immigration, and dismantle the public-private infrastructure currently in place to manage the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its impact throughout the country.”

“The gospel calls us to provide shelter for those who are homeless, feed the hungry, and ‘welcome the stranger,’” Markham added. “The work of Catholic Charities is humanitarian not political. While we do not oppose all the provisions in H.R. 2, several of them, if enacted, would severely hinder the government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from aiding migrants who need services, care, and assistance.”

The claim that H.R. 2 would “undermine U.S. efforts to effectively manage immigration” seems absurd, and some supporters of H.R. 2 might say that undermining the “public-private infrastructure” that helps illegal aliens settle throughout the country might be part of the point.

Markham has traveled to the White House at least eight times during Biden’s tenure.

Anthony J. Granado, vice president of government relations for Catholic Charities until August 2023, when he re-joined the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, visited the White House at least nine times.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops runs a Migration and Refugee Services ministry separate from Catholic Charities.

The USCCB previously listed 10 types of grants it receives from the federal government, but the web page with this list appears to have been deleted. The list included a Department of Homeland Security grant “for the processing, reception and placement of Cuban and Haitian entrants paroled by DHS into the U.S.,” an HHS grant to provide “enhanced services to newly arrived refugees at sites selected for their proven success in resettlement,” and a grant to serve “unaccompanied children who have been apprehended by immigration officials.”

Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, released a statement opposing H.R. 2. He wrote to lawmakers in Congress, expressing the USCCB’s “strong opposition to H.R. 2, the ‘Secure the Border Act of 2023.’”

“If enacted, this measure would fundamentally weaken our nation’s decades-long commitment to humanitarian protection,” he wrote. He warned that the bill “would endanger unaccompanied children and inflict harm on other vulnerable persons, decimate access to asylum, mandating damaging detention and removal practices, restrict access to legal employment, limit—and potentially eliminate—federal partnerships with faith-based and other nongovernmental organizations, undermine the rule of law, and more.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration urged members of the U.S. House of Representatives to oppose a bill codifying Title 42 into law, claiming it would “unjustly deprive vulnerable persons of the legal right to seek humanitarian protection in the United States.”

Three USCCB leaders, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio (the president), Archbishop William E. Lori (the vice president) and Rev. Michael J.K. Fuller (the general secretary), met with John McCarthy, special assistant to President Biden, at the White House on July 20, 2023.

The conference’s associate general secretary, Rev. Paul B.R. Hartmann, had a White House meeting on September 17, 2023.

A Note on Catholic Social Teaching

Former Congressman Tim Huelskamp, now advisor to the conservative Roman Catholic nonprofit Catholic Vote, explained in an interview for this book that Catholic social teaching does not require Catholics to support illegal immigration. In fact, he argued that abetting the border crisis conflicts with Catholic social teaching.

“Facilitating lawlessness at America’s southern border and throughout the country is completely inconsistent with Catholic social teaching,” Huelskamp said. “Catholic groups promoting an open border are defying centuries of teaching, and they must be held accountable for enabling the resulting historic and humanitarian border crises of massive human trafficking, the deadly drug trade, and an influx of criminal aliens.”

Huelskamp wrote a chapter in the book For God, Country, & Sanity: How Catholics Can Save America, dedicated to exploring Catholic social teaching on the immigration issue.

He noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church places obligations on immigrants, as well as on the governments that deal with them.

“Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens,” the Catechism states.

“By extension, these fundamental obligations logically fall upon those assisting immigrants, including charitable and religious organizations such as Catholic Charities USA,” Huelskamp writes. “It is well documented that tens and thousands of these charitable entities and employers, not to mention the immigrants themselves, have promoted and developed lawless, often cash-only economies specifically designed to avoid detection, hide income from taxation, and illegally qualify for government benefits.”

“As a result, legal immigrant workers and just employers who seek to obey the law and ‘assist in carrying civic burdens’ are pressured by competition, lax social mores, lack of clear Church teaching, economic hardship, or even bureaucratic complexity to ignore this obligation,” the former congressman adds.

“Under no Catholic doctrine is one country, no matter how wealthy, meant to be the band-aid for the wounds of another country, for the Church in another nation, or for the people and families of another homeland,” he concludes.

In the next installment, the nonprofits Global Refuge, Church World Service, and U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants oppose efforts to curtail immigration.