Report
MRS: Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the U.S. Immigrant Detention System (2015)
MRS: Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the U.S. Immigrant Detention System
A Joint Report of the USCCB Migration and Refugee Services and The Center for Migration Studies
As Catholic bishops in the United States, we approach immigrant detention not so much as a public policy issue, but as pastors concerned with the well-being of those we love and serve. Each day, we witness the baleful effects of immigrant detention in our ministries, including our pastoral and legal work in prisons and detention centers. We experience the pain of severed families that struggle to maintain a semblance of normal family life. We see traumatized children in our schools and churches. We see divided families that are struggling to support themselves in our parishes, food pantries, soup kitchens and charitable agencies. We host support groups for the spouses of detained and deported immigrants. We lament the growth of “family” detention centers which undermine families and harm children. We see case after case of persons who represent no threat or danger, but who are nonetheless treated as criminals.
We also view immigrant detention from the perspective of our biblical tradition, which calls us to love, act justly toward, and identify with persons on the margins of society, including newcomers and imprisoned persons. Our long experience as a pilgrim people in a pilgrim church has made us intimately familiar with uprooting, persecution, living outside the law’s protections, and imprisonment. We recall that in the Old Testament, the Jewish people were deported, exiled, enslaved, scattered and dispersed. From this experience, they learned to love and identify with migrants, not to oppress them (Dt 10:12-18).
The following report is a result of our visits to detention centers across the nation—in Texas, California, Illinois, Arizona, and New Jersey. It examines the flaws in the current U.S. immigrant detention system and their impact on the human rights and dignity of our fellow human beings, and offers recommendations for reform of the system. We endorse the findings and recommendations of this report.