Yes, laws must be observed, but the real issue is, what can we do to help the children?

Friday, Jul. 18, 2014

They are children. What gets lost in all of the emotion and polemic about the laws broken by the unaccompanied minors being detained at the U.S./Mexico border is the fact that we are talking about children: all of them under the age of 18, some of them as young as 5; frightened, alone, away from home and now part of a political debate that focuses on the law rather than on these children.

Yes, the statistics are overwhelming: This year more than 50,000 children have been apprehended by the United States Border Patrol, illegally crossing into this country. The communities where the children are housed are struggling with their care; President Barack Obama has called for billions of dollars to address the issue; members of Congress are weighing in on how they think the matter should be handled.

But we aren’t talking about faceless statistics, we are talking about children. That was brought home to me last week as I drove from Tucson to Hermosillo, Mexico to visit a friend’s family. Crossing the desert in an air-conditioned car, you can appreciate the beauty of a summer thunderstorm that gives rise to a spectacular sunset. Watching the setting sun, however, all I could think about was the children who crossed that arid land. For a child far from home, traveling in the company of strangers, fleeing a dangerous homeland and heading to an uncertain future, the desert must be terrifying. Yet they undertook the journey, or their parents sent them on it, because they wanted to escape an even more a precarious place: their own home.

As we drove, that was what I couldn’t get out of my head. These children haven’t left their homes and traveled hundreds of miles on a lark. They fled seeking hope. In their home countries they live in fear of violent gangs that operate almost with impunity. Drug trafficking and the sex trade have made kidnapping and extortion part of everyday life. Many parents feel that the best way to protect their children is to send them to the U.S. What except desperation would cause parents to send their sons and daughters away on what they know will be a perilous journey, one that costs more than a year of wages to pay for, one that puts their children at the risk of being abused, abandoned or killed? 

We bishops here in the U.S. have seen firsthand the conditions these children face. Last November a delegation from Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, led by Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, traveled to Southern Mexico and Central America to learn why unaccompanied minors flee these regions.

“In short, there are no simple answers,” concluded the delegation’s report, titled Mission to Central America: The Flight of Unaccompanied Children to the United States. The report was published in November 2013.

The report noted that the conditions in children’s home countries include an absence of economic opportunity, a lack of access to education that results in an inability for individuals to financially support themselves and their families, as well as a desire to reunify with family in the U.S.; but the overriding factor was the violence that has “created a culture of fear and hopelessness.”

So how do we, as Catholics, handle this issue? To this there is a simple answer: We respond as Christ Jesus would want us to.

In saying that, I want to be very clear that this is not a question of disregarding the law. My fellow bishops and I respect the law and love the law. We continue, as we have done for many years, to urge governments to work together to deal with the factors that are causing this crisis and pushing immigrants to leave their homes. We ask leaders in all countries to find ways to curb the drug trade, the weapons trafficking and the gangs that cause such fear. In the U.S., we ask government leaders to attend to our own immigration system, which both sides of the political aisle agree is broken. 

These are very practical things that we can and must do to prevent this situation from recurring, but the immediate concern, the one we must deal with right now, is the children. We must reach out to assist them. This is what Jesus would do, and what we are called to do.

I appreciate the necessity of man’s laws, but God’s love transcends all laws. Besides, the law that I respect the most is the one Christ gave us: Love God with all your heart and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. That is the ultimate law, and the one that we must fulfill in reaching out to these children.