James Augustine Healy in 1875 became the first bishop of African-American heritage in the U.S. He was the son of an Irish cotton planter father and a mixed-race mother who was a slave. This family from Georgia also produced two other priests, two nuns, a hardware dealer, and a famous ship captain.
Two U.S. bishops’ committee chairmen and the head of Catholics Relief Services asked the Biden administration Feb. 10 to grant Temporary Protected Status for 18 months to foreign nationals from Central America in the United States and to provide aid to their hurricane-ravaged countries.
In his first days in office, President Joe Biden wasted no time trying to reverse his predecessor’s policies. He signed several executive orders seeking to overturn policies that former President Donald Trump put in place.
Idalia Reyes remembers the desperation that drove her to seek out smugglers to take her children, unaccompanied, to the United States. Reyes and her children lived in a tent camp along the Rio Grande, where they endured crime, cold snaps and infestations of insects and snakes.
With time running out and a Supreme Court decision looming, Catholics continue to express disapproval of President Donald Trump’s desire to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census.
In the Diocese of Brooklyn, there are 220 deacons, of which 172 are active, and 48 retired. Ninety-two of the total are of Hispanic origin, which is about 42 percent of the total.
The way two panelists at a key immigration conference see it, the issue Donald Trump ran on in his successful 2016 campaign emerges in this year’s presidential contest much the same way it did before: as a battle between a group seeking to stop demographic changes and one embracing them.
The chairman of the U.S. bishops’ migration committee told a House subcommittee Sept. 23 that any stimulus bill Congress is considering must include assistance for immigrant and refugee families and also make them eligible for past stimulus relief.
Kamala Harris’s campaign positions on immigration reform, aid to refugees, and poverty, align with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But some Catholics won’t approve of her stance on abortion. Some advocates of religious freedom claim Harris has been openly hostile to their beliefs.
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post daily newspaper, Sister Norma Pimentel, known for her work with migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border near Brownsville, Texas, made a public plea July 6 to keep an eye on the plight of asylum-seekers during the coronavirus pandemic.
