The Dispatch Podcast - Welcoming the Stranger | Interview: Bishop Mark Seitz

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Mark Seitz, a Catholic bishop from the Diocese of El Paso, joins Victoria to discuss his approach to immigration and response to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against a migrant house under his diocese. The Agenda: —Annunciation House and Paxton’s immigration lawsuit —Policy solutions —Addressing crime and fear of immigrations —Is the Church for open borders? —Biden and Trump’s recent border visits Show Notes: -Watch this episode on YouTube -Bishop Mark Seitz: Statement in Support of Annunciation House -GOP lawmakers once praised Catholic Charities. Now they want to defund the group -Report: The mythical tie between immigration and crime -CNN: I asked criminologists about immigration and crime in the US. Their answers may surprise you Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Victoria Holmes, Associate Audio and Video Producer for the Dispatch Podcasts. Today, we talk to Bishop Mark Sites, a Catholic bishop from the Diocese of El Paso, Texas. We discussed an ongoing lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against an nunciation house, a migrant shelter for, quote, facilitating illegal entry into the United States. We also dive into the complexity surrounding border and immigration policy and politics surrounding it. I hope you enjoy. Bishop Mark Sites, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Now first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you've been in El Paso, and for people not familiar with the Catholic Church, can you explain how you ended up there? I wish I could explain that to myself, but I grew up in Wisconsin, actually, and came down to Dallas, entered the seminary in Dallas at the University of Dallas, and it wasn't my plan, but I came to love the Dallas area, the Church of Dallas, which was dynamic growing with immigrants from Mexico and also from the north and east. I served there as a priest for 30 years, and then one very very unexpected day, I was informed that I had been named by Pope Benedict as an auxiliary bishop there. I served there for three years as an auxiliary, then making long stories short. On the third

anniversary of my ordination as a bishop, I received a call from the papal nuncio in the United States, his representative in the United States informing me that I had been named as Bishop of El Paso. And I wanted to answer him and say, well, that's great. I've never been to El Paso. But it's turned out that God has much better plans than we do. And I felt embraced here. And it's almost like all my life prepared me for this work. So I invited you on this podcast because you wrote a letter in response to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxson,

who stood a place called Annunciation House. Paxton's office accused Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, of, quote, facilitating illegal entry to the United States and, quote, human smuggling, filing a lawsuit and attempt to shut it down. And Annunciation House has pushed back against these claims. First, can you tell us what is Annunciation House? Anunciation House is an organization that was founded 46 years ago by a man by the name of Ruben Garcia, who, had worked for the Diocese of El Paso, but then went off on his own to found this entity, if you will, which is dedicated to the service of immigrants. He saw after a meeting with Mother Teresa an opportunity to serve the poorest of the poor, you might say, in our community here. And

what he noticed was that the immigrants who were passing through, El Paso had no organized way of being received and cared for. Some of them had to remain on the streets with their children through the heat of our summer and the cold of our winters. And so he drew others around him and they began this work of service in a loaned building. Now he has several facilities that he runs. and he is like the coordinator in El Paso, in our reception of immigrants. We have a whole network of shelters that have that we've opened five run by the church of El Paso in foreign parishes,

one right here where I live at our pastoral center, our offices and classroom facilities. We work very closely with Ruben in this work. You responded with your own letter for that lawsuit, stating that you are dealing with two major issues, saying, quote, we are challenged by serious federal neglect to provide a safe, orderly, and humane response to migration at our southern border. And then you go on to say, we are now witnessing an escalating campaign of intimidation, fear, and dehumanization in the state of Texas. Now, in regards to the escalating campaign of intimidation, fear, and dehumanization, how has that looked like in the past couple of years? More and more we've seen all along our border that the work of receiving those who have come and are on their way to places after having been processed has been characterized by many as an effort to shield them from the law and to also hide them from legal processes. that's really so opposite of what is actually happening because the truth is that the human trafficking they're accusing these organizations of right now is actually what we're preventing

by providing a safe space for them to be sheltered rather than falling to the efforts of traffickers to find those who are vulnerable and use them for their own purposes. We simply give people food, we give them shelter, we give them new clothing and a shower so that they can clean up sometimes after weeks without those facilities and they continue their journey. And I need to mention that what happens before we receive them, in practically every case is that they have turned themselves in to the border authorities, Border Patrol, and they have been vetted, processed, given documents to legally stay in the United States and make their asylum case and to travel.

So these are the people that we're primarily dealing with. And I want to talk about solutions in what you call almost a seemingly impossible situation. And you also mentioned federal neglect in that letter. Are there any policy ideas that you've heard that you think might help with this issue? Well, of course, the church has been calling for years for a reform of our immigration system. And it's one of the most complex and non-functional systems that you can point to in in the country, it's more complicated, I think, than the internal revenue service, if that gives you an idea. Even people who work in this as their profession, they don't always know what

the answer is. So it needs to be reformed. It needs to be simplified, clarified, and one of the most important aspects is that we need to make sure that it's responsive to our commitments as a nation towards asylum seekers, for instance, that law was created after World War II when the United States turned back a boat with Jewish immigrants who were escaping Hitler. We turned them back, and they went to the concentration camps, and we had some national sense of culpability for that, and rightly so. So we worked with other nations to form asylum law, and to say that a person who has been forced to flee from their home by some kind of oppression needs to be received and given the

opportunity to make that claim that they are needing this kind of protection. So we need to make sure that those who have a legitimate or at least a potentially legitimate asylum claim are able to make their case in the United States. That's our national law, that's international law. We also need to have a system that allows people who are choosing or wanting to work in the United States, that opportunity. The fact is that today we have over 8 million jobs going unanswered in our country. It's not jobs that Americans are looking for. They're jobs like laboring on our farms, picking our crops, and working in. our chicken plants and meatpacking plants and things like that, we desperately need laborers

in these places. And so we could permit so many more people to come temporarily and work in our country and do what they would love to do. Return home when they've been there for a season or for a time. So these are things that our immigration law should address. We think that this would have the result of an more orderly system at the border, and one in which would separate out those who have legitimate claims and needs to cross, to be able to be crossing at ports of entry, and allowing our border authorities to zero in on those who might not have those positive, helpful purposes in coming. And I kind of want to move on to some, like, your experience on the ground.

with some of these people who are entering through El Paso, Texas. Can you give us an account of your experience in regard to the migrants? Well, the center that we run is actually ours, you might say. It's the work of the church, Annunciation House, receives a list from the Border Patrol every day of those who are ready to be released and from ICE, which is the detention authority in this area. So it receives a list of those who are being released. and then it sends the immigrants to the various shelters.

Some are run by Annunciation House, and many others are independent, you know, for the working for the church or, in fact, the Lutheran Church, other evangelical churches have them, their local government agencies, and so on. Annunciation House does that distribution for all of us. And can you give us an account, a firsthand account of the people that you come across? I've encountered people that inspire me because of their courage, because of their faith, because of their love of their families. We actually have a family that has been with us for some time now more than a year.

That's unusual because most of our families are just, as I said, passing through to their ultimate destination. But this family came from Venezuela. Mom and dad in their early 30s, the two children, four and two, and the grandmother, 74 years old. They decided to leave when the father who worked for the government through working for a judge said to him he could no longer in conscience continued to do the work he did. When he quit, he began receiving threats. So they made the 3,000-mile journey from Venezuela through the Darien Gap, through that jungle. The two-year-old, when she had just arrived, told us that she saw dead people in the jungle.

They ran out of water. They ran out of food. They got lost for days. They got sick. They had just so many incredible experiences crossing rivers with the children and so on. And who could hear their stories without thinking, my God, what people can endure? And how could they have done it without the help of God? And certainly that's what they believe.

when they arrived, that very day, the mom, who was also seven months pregnant when they began the journey, began to go into labor. She gave birth by a C-section, and we were told they can't travel. So we had to come up with another idea to place them, and they've been through other difficulties because the baby that was born got terribly sick shortly after. So, long story, but what incredible faith, and I've witnessed it. I've been amazed at the way that they have trusted in God. He was so anxious to work when he came, the father, and so frustrated that our laws would not allow him to.

It took a year to get permission to work. Finally, by the time he came through, he had shown he had so many skills he could have worked in so many ways he could. repaired cars and paint and all kinds of skills. We didn't let him do that when he got his work permission because we hired him to be the director of our shelter. So he's working with such diligence and such a beautiful compassion for people who have been through what he experienced. And just one more follow-up question about the lawsuit. How is the Attorney General's lawsuit affecting operations on an enunciation house now?

Well, it's not really affecting us or them, I should say, at the moment, because there's an injunction against the attorney general's requests. There was a court hearing yesterday. The judge is still considering his response. So meanwhile, we don't know what the next step will be, whether the judge will say, turn over all your documents, turn. over some of them. And I should mention some of the documents they're asking for have a lot of personal information on them, medical information, and so on. But we don't know if you'll say that or if you'll say this is witch hunt. You know, Attorney General stand down. And just for a listener context, we are recording this on Friday morning. So the injunction would have been Thursday,

March 7th. Going on to the next question, in a country where politics is becoming more polarizing, especially on the immigration issue, where do you see the Catholic Church's role in immigration policy? We have an extremely important role, I think, in our society, along with our brothers and sisters of faith, both Christian, Jewish, and pretty much any faith, which has a teaching about our care for the stranger and for people who are in need. We have a responsibility to live our faith. And without interference from the government, that is our responsibility, our role. We certainly want to work in accordance with our laws, and we believe we do. But this kind of threat that we have received makes us fear whether the government make a work of Christian charity turn into something that is seen as,

a violation of the law. So we're very concerned and we will continue to make clear what our responsibility as Christians is, to love our neighbor, to serve the one who said, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

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And I do want to pivot to talk about crime. There are people who do live in fear. For example, the University of Georgia student, Lake in Riley, who was murdered by, quote, what some news media outlets are calling an illegal immigrant. What do you say in response to those people living in fear and even the term illegal immigrant? Is that a word you would use? No. I wouldn't speak of them as illegal immigrants or as other sometimes people say illegal. it because, you know, under the, we don't speak about our brother and sister human beings as being illegal, you know, that characterizes the whole person. It doesn't respect the complexity of the issues, which I hope from our conversation are already clear that they're exercising a fundamental human right when they feel forced to migrate and look for some other place. It's like somebody whose house is on fire and they run next door. How sad our country would be if people would start saying, well, sorry, but you're trespassing on my property. First of all that. And then also the stereotyping that's going on because it's not a problem of saying this one person who was an immigrant did this horrible action.

That's not what's being said. What's being said is these people, they're criminals, they're illegal, and so they are something to fear. Surveys and studies have shown that, in fact, if you want to identify the group that is more responsible for crime in our country, and if you look at divided into two groups, those who are citizens of our country and those who are not, you'll find that more responsible for crime in our country. And if you look at, divided into two groups, those who are citizens of our country and those who are not, you'll find that more crime is committed by people who are citizens than by people who have recently arrived. In fact, immigrants tend to be the most law-abiding and free of these kinds of crimes than others. So we have a great concern about that kind of stereotyping. Have you ever had someone, because I've heard conversations like this in religious circles,

if someone would come up to you and say, you know, Bishop, I just, I want to, you know, help my brothers and sisters out and I don't want to use these terms illegal immigrants, but I'm scared. I have a daughter or a son who is not getting the help that they deserve at school because resources are being taken away from them, or I'm scared because they're hearing these stories about rising crime and quote-unquote illegal immigrants causing these, or acting on these crimes. What would you say to a person who's just like, I'm still stuck in a hard place in trying to help these people out? I think maybe the first thing I'd say is, I'd like you to meet an immigrant.

I'd like you to hear their story. Because when that happens, a person's view of these others, can change dramatically, we begin to see that they have the same fears, the same concerns, and perhaps even more reason for those fears and concerns than we do. We see that they are just like us. And as Christians, particularly, but certain, as I say, people, all people of faith, or even citizens who are people of goodwill, we can. We can't just stereotype a whole group or throw them to the side. We need to be willing to meet them, talk to them, hear their concerns, and then work together. Yes, it calls for some kind of willingness to reach out beyond our own familiar setting. But when we do that, it actually enriches us. The truth is that our nation is receiving a great resource, a great human resource. in those who are coming. They are the ones who are going to be helping to keep our Social Security

in the black because we're not producing enough children to pay into it. They're the ones that are paying many of our taxes. And they're actually a benefit to our schools because a school is given an allotment based on the number of students. So some of these fears are not well-founded. And so I have just three more questions. What do you think people get wrong about the Catholic Church's approach to this issue? Well, I think as many things in the political realm are today, there is a lot of misinformation out there and labeling.

And so one thing you hear a lot is the churches for open borders. that that has become the trope. And the truth is that the church has never said that. We never said that everyone who comes to our border necessarily has to be admitted. We ourselves have always said that those who come need to be processed, vetted, and that those who would do us harm should not be admitted. So that would certainly be one big one. I suppose there are others that we could raise,

but that would be the main one that comes to me. Republican lawmakers used to praise non-profits like Catholic charities, but have made efforts in the past to defund the group due to the immigration issue specifically. And we'll link a report breaking that down in the show notes. But what would happen without groups like Annunciation House and Catholic charities? Well, as I alluded to earlier, it is these shelter efforts, which are a work of the church. We've been doing it with or without government help for many, many years, not because it's a profit to us. In fact, it's always costing us even when we receive government funds.

Perhaps that's another misunderstanding. You know, we do not because it helps us, but because we want to serve Jesus Christ and we want to serve our brothers and sisters. It's that, you know, it would be a sad thing, wouldn't it, if people of faith could be characterized just as in it for themselves, you know? The whole point of being a person of faith is that we serve others. We do this work for love of him and for them. I actually have one more question before my actual last question, but I'm curious to know, as the Bishop of El Paso, how much time does the border issue and immigration issue take up in your day?

Is there like another issue that is even bigger than that, or is it about the split even with something else? Well, of course, I'm responsible for a diocese, which is the territory of the Catholic Church. I oversee the parishes and priests and ministers and the work of the church in this West Texas region, which is territory the size of West Virginia. And so, as you might imagine, there's plenty of work to do that if I were just to talk about the celebration of the sacraments and the formation of people in faith and so on. This is a particular reality in our area, and it is a particular responsibility of the church.

If I were to tell people, don't pay attention to those immigrants passing through, then I would be telling them something against the gospel. When I have this responsibility to form people in their faith, I have the responsibility to tell them their faith shouldn't be just kept in the churches. You know, and it's not just to immigrants, but here in El Paso, that is a particular reality. I say, here in El Paso, you can't live the faith in the abstract, you know, these realities and also of a significant number of people who are poor are with us, are part of our community

every day. So we're serving them. If we weren't doing this, then, as I alluded earlier, then it would really be playing directly into the hands of organized crime, of traffickers, of people who want to use and abuse people who are vulnerable, including our children. We're helping to keep them safe at this moment, this important transitional moment of their journey after they have sought refuge in our country. And now let me in with this question. We are in an election year and politics has been pretty polarizing lately. What are your thoughts on President Trump and President Biden visiting

the border in the last few weeks or any other elected officials visiting the border? Well, one of the concerns I have about that is that so many people in politics focus on the border as though that is the heart of the reality of immigration. Obviously, we think our border is important and we love it, but I worry about the zeroing in on a line that separates our country from another, another friendly country, I might admit, as the place where all of our immigration challenges need to be. to be dealt with. The truth is that here, yes, we see some symptoms of a broken immigration

system. And yes, those symptoms need to alert us. But if someone comes to you and says, my leg really, really hurts, and you just say, take these two aspirin, see if you feel better, but we don't check to see if they have a broken leg, then we have a problem. At the border, we see symptoms, not causes of an immigration challenge. And so if we're ever going to really address a system that is not going to be overwhelmed, if you will, by the number of people coming, then you need to focus more on the situation of instability and violence and so on in sending countries in places they're coming from. And you also need to have a system not just at the border, but in our country by which people are received and integrated into our country as generations

of immigrants have been through the life of our nation, a nation of immigrants. Bishop Mark Sites, thank you for joining us on the Dispatch Podcasts. Pleasure being with you. Thank you. Thank you.