On August 3, the archbishop of San Antonio, the Most Rev. Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS (Missionaries of the Holy Spirit), marked the centennial of the elevation of San Antonio to a metropolitan archdiocese by publishing a pastoral letter on immigration. I thank the archbishop for his thoughtful, prayerful, and emotionally powerful letter, “We Will Come to You: United in Solidarity with Our Brothers and Sisters in Migration,” but I have suggestions to improve it — although it is already over 14,000 words.

He wrote with emotion in a number of places, including:

• letters from two detained children, ages 9 and 13, seeking release to go home (Para. 20)
• how he prayed with the survivors of those being smuggled in a tractor-trailer found on June 27, 2022, with 53 dead (Para. 56)
• “In June 2025, Arianny Parra Sanchez, a 42-year-old Venezuelan preschool teacher, was seized by masked agents after an immigration court hearing in San Antonio, and her 3-year-old son was taken from her arms. She was one of more than seven people arrested in less than an hour that morning as they left the courthouse after [appearing in court] complying with the law.” (Para. 16)

First, I recognize that the document is not a proposal for legislation, not a think-tank white paper, not a memorandum of law. It is a pastoral letter. Under canon law, a bishop is responsible for all the people within his territory, Catholic and non-Catholic, whether permanent or temporary residents (§383). The Archbishop writes that the audience for his letter is indeed all the faithful in the archdiocese — as well as those “in detention centers, jails and prisons, those confined and isolated, families gathered in prayer across this vast and beautiful land, and especially to our brothers and sisters in migration…” (Para. 2) And he concludes his letter with recommendations to public authorities.

I will discuss the letter in a four-part series in the following order:

This Part 1:

• • introduction
  • fear
  • seeing things through the lens of the Gospel
  • detention of illegal immigrants

Part 2

• • racism in enforcement?
  • criminal behavior of illegal immigrants
  • mass deportation
  • the economics of mass deportation
  • family members or unmarried?

Part 3

• • failure of immigration system/right to emigrate

Part 4

• • Paul sent a fugitive slave back to his master
  • the distinction between private and government responsibilities

Fear

The letter was prompted by the fear being experienced by so many. Part I of the letter (Paras. 1-24) is titled “A Time of Fear.” People fear leaving their homes (Para. 1). There is fear of deportation, of detention, of family separation. “I have looked into their eyes and seen a fear I refuse to ignore” (Para. 9). “This fear has become a constant, grinding anxiety that reshapes every ordinary hour” (Para. 10). Fear is negatively affecting the health of 80% of those without documentation (Para. 11). They fear going to church (Paras. 11, 12).

Their fear started, however, long before their arrival in the United States. It began “in homes where parents cannot feed their children, in towns where violence has made ordinary life impossible, in countries where the conditions for a dignified human life have collapsed” (Para. 18).

In his Part III (Paras. 41-58), entitled “I Know This Road,” the good archbishop, a native of Mexico and currently a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States,[i] writes of his personal experience with immigration and fear. “Fear’s cruelest lie,” he tells his people to comfort them, “is that you are alone, that no one has ever known what it is to stand at a border with your entire life in a single bag. In part, I do. As someone with my own immigration story, whose priestly ministry has consistently included the pastoral care of people who have migrated, I now share part of my own experience so that no one feels the need to bear that loneliness on their own” (Para. 41).

Seeing Things Through the Lens of the Gospel

He wrote his letter so that people could see him “evaluate[] policy and the enforcement of laws through the lens of the Gospel asking whether they uphold the dignity of the human person, the integrity of the family, the common good, and the protection of the most vulnerable” (Para. 3). Specifically, he was concerned about “a convergence of structural and legal tactics whose relative novelty calls for the careful and well-formed moral discernment of every Catholic conscience.” Some of the “tactics” include:

• the rescission of federal protections that kept churches, schools, and hospitals safe from immigration enforcement for the last 14 years[ii]
• the invocation of a 1798 wartime statute to deport people without due process[iii] 
• an allocation of $45 billion in federal resources to expand immigrant detention centers and build detention camps at a scale unmatched in U.S. history.” (Para. 3; reformatted)

Detention of Illegal Immigrants

As a preliminary matter, some readers from outside Texas may observe that the archbishop never mentions the word sanctuary. Perhaps it is because this is not an issue in Texas because Texas state law does not allow the state or municipalities like San Antonio to offer sanctuary. Also, the archbishop makes no mention of the current revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) affecting a million residents nationally from over a dozen countries such as Haiti and Venezuela. Presumably a number of these people live within the Archdiocese of San Antonio, so its omission is curious.

With respect to detention, the archbishop identifies three detention centers in his archdiocese (Para. 13) and makes several points about detention. I identify four issues with his discussion.

(1) He states, “I have visited these detention centers and witnessed, firsthand, violations of human dignity within their walls” (Para. 14). Yet he gives no particulars of place, date, type of abuse. Instead, he cites a U.S. Senate report and a report by the Office of Professional Responsibility for ICE (Para. 14). If he has personal evidence, he should provide it.

(2) He declares that holding families in detention dishonors the sanctity of the family (Para. 20). But, if they weren’t held as families, they would be separated — to which he continuously objects (Paras. 13, 16, 74, 82). What does he propose when he objects to both alternatives?

(3) He declares that all children must be welcomed, that is, none should be held in detention (Paras. 21, 78). He does not specify the ages of “children” and therefore treats young children the same as teenagers.

(4) He states that, “In 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year in two decades, with 14 more deaths recorded in the first three months of 2026.” Although he qualifies these numbers by stating, “…the causes of death vary, some from preexisting illness, some from suicide, some from circumstances yet to be fully investigated…” he urges his readers that the number of 47 is credibly to be attributed to ICE abuse because the deaths occurred in “a system where the U.S. Senate investigation [in its report he just cited] has documented medical neglect, overcrowding, and denial of basic care” (Para. 15). So, by the Archbishop’s statistics, 47 people died due to ICE in 2025 and the first half of 2026. I researched this issue and found that, during that time, ICE held 600,000 different people for various periods of time. Admittedly, these 600,000 were not in detention for a full year. If they were, 47 would be a mere 0.008%. By comparison, between 4,200 and 6,000, or 0.25 to 0.35%, die in federal, state, and local prisons annually from all causes in a total prison population of 1.85 million.

I will continue in Part 2 of this four-part series with my suggestions for improving Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller’s pastoral letter on immigration.

[i] The Archbishop does not mention in the letter that he became a citizen of the United States on December 15, 1998. Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller – San Fernando Cathedral – San Antonio, TX. He remains a citizen of Mexico under the 1998 Mexican Nationality Law effective March 20, 1998, which allowed dual citizenship.

[ii] On August 18, 2026, the federal appeals court for the Fourth Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to issue a preliminary injunction against this ICE Memorandum in order to protect places of worship from ICE arrests because the mere threat of that option had lowered church attendance; see Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. DHS.

[iii] Please note that the Executive Order cited by the Archbishop refers in its title to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.