They’re at it again. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to support President Donald Trump in terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for a host of foreign nationals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is once again raising the hue and cry. Here’s what USCCB Migration Committee chairman Bishop Brendan J. Cahill had to say:
Revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people residing in our country creates a moral crisis when returning to their country of origin is not a safe or reasonable option. If we are truly to affirm the God-given dignity of every human person, we as a nation cannot turn a blind eye to such an injustice and the impossible choices it will create for families and communities.
First of all, as the name suggests, TPS is not exactly the same thing as legal status, properly understood. Instead, TPS is intended to be temporary, which is exactly what the Supreme Court and the Trump administration agreed on. Second of all, returning to Haiti is in no way an unsafe or unreasonable option for Haitian nationals.
Deporting those who have no right to be in the country to their home countries … is not an affront to the dignity of the foreigners.
Haiti was first granted TPS in 2010, following a major earthquake in January of that year. The designation has been repeatedly renewed for more than 15 years; first, it was renewed due to slow recovery from the earthquake, then due to a cholera epidemic, then due to hurricanes, and, under former president Joe Biden, due to a combination of factors like poverty, political instability, and the impacts of COVID-19. The only time anyone has tried to terminate TPS for Haiti was under both the first and second Trump administrations, when the decision was challenged in court.
Syria was first designated for TPS in 2012, due to armed conflict in Syria and the violent suppression of rebellion by then-president Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Al-Assad and his regime were overthrown in 2024 and al-Assad fled the country.
In the cases of both Haiti and Syria — as in the cases of countless other countries designated for TPS — the de jure “temporary” relief afforded to foreign nationals hailing from those places has de facto become permanent, long after conditions returned to the status quo and the cause for offering temporary relief came to an end. Cahill and his brother bishops conveniently ignore this fact. While the bishops say that “we as a nation cannot turn a blind eye to such an injustice” as returning foreign nationals to their home countries, in a manner that is both safe and humane, the USCCB has been happy to “turn a blind eye” to the horrors wrought upon American citizens by these “temporary” visitors who have long overstayed their welcome.
Earlier this year, Haitian national and TPS beneficiary Rolbert Joachin bludgeoned a 51-year-old woman to death in Fort Myers, Florida. Joachin was repeatedly striking a vehicle at a gas station with a hammer when the female gas station clerk approached him. The TPS beneficiary abandoned the car, walked over to the woman, knocked her to the ground with a blow to the head, and then continued hammering at her until she was dead. Last year, federal authorities arrested Honduran national and TPS beneficiary Felix Bustillo Diaz, who was granted TPS even though he had a criminal record, including illegal entry to the U.S. Diaz was accused of repeatedly raping his 12-year-old grand-niece, who had been illegally smuggled into the U.S. in 2014.
Another Honduran national in the U.S. under TPS, Julio Ceasar Herrera Gonzalez was driving drunk in Nashville when he crashed his Maserati (how does a TPS beneficiary from an impoverished nation afford a Maserati?) into oncoming traffic, killing a 37-year-old woman and nearly killing her husband, who suffered serious injuries. In 2023, Haitian national and TPS recipient Hermanio Joseph was illegally driving in Springfield, Ohio, on a Mexican driver’s license, when he crashed into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark and injuring 20 other children.
Crickets from the USCCB. Of course, these are only some of the most egregious, horrific examples of the abuses that the American people have suffered at the hands of TPS beneficiaries; there are countless instances of American families being forced from their homes because TPS recipients have taken their jobs or have outbid American families thanks to the taxpayer-funded housing stipends they receive, countless instances of TPS beneficiaries causing property damage, taking over neighborhoods, and transforming the streets of small-town America into the unlivable, trash-littered streets of the Third World slums they hail from. Again, no comment from the USCCB.
Cahill and his brother bishops complain that it may not be “safe” or “reasonable” for foreign nationals to be returned to their countries of origin, long after the end of the adverse conditions that prompted the offer of temporary relief in the first place. Never once do the bishops seem to ask what would be “safe” or “reasonable” for the American people. While they complain that poverty in Haiti is such a grave matter, they never once turn their attention to the poverty of the American families whose livelihoods and homes have been ripped away from them by the invading foreign horde, with their government-funded stipends and benefits. While the bishops decry the abuses that Syrian nationals suffered under the al-Assad regime, they have done far too little to speak out against the abuses that American Catholics — their own flocks! — suffered at the hands of the Biden regime.
The bishops — not just the USCCB, but even the Bishop of Rome, as I wrote about recently — lay great emphasis on treating foreigners with respect, dignity, and charity, but “turn a blind eye” to the fact that, in many cases today, those same foreigners threaten the dignity of the American people. Deporting those who have no right to be in the country to their home countries — or to safe third countries, as the Trump administration has managed to do in some cases — is not an affront to the dignity of the foreigners and secures the dignity of the American people, too. The tone-deaf and (seemingly willfully) myopic responses from the bishops on the immigration crisis are ignorant — both of the Church’s longstanding teachings and of the needs of the people that the American bishops are tasked with caring for.
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:
Mass Deportations Are ‘The Christian Response’ to Mass Immigration
One Way or Another: The Insanely Easy Choice Facing America on Immigration
