For two decades, members of Priests for Justice for Immigrants have worked to encourage priests in the Archdiocese of Chicago to speak out for and stand in solidarity with immigrants, and to educate their parishioners about immigration issues.
The group is continuing its work and maintaining hope, despite a drastically changed immigration landscape, members said.
Current efforts include the walking pilgrimage of Father Gary Graf, pastor of Our Lady of the Heights, from Pope Leo XIV’s childhood home in Dolton to the Statue of Liberty in New York and reaching out to priests in other dioceses, as well as continuing to encourage fellow priests in the Archdiocese of Chicago to stand in solidarity with immigrants as federal agents detain and deport people.
In December 2005, when Priests for Justice for Immigrants began, “we held the first meeting, and five priests came,” said Elena Segura, the archdiocese’s senior coordinator for immigration ministry — national. “I told them all to bring five more to the next meeting.”
Among those first five members was Father Don Nevins, now retired from his last assignment as pastor of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Little Village.
“Twenty years ago, we really thought that there was a possibility of changing the whole immigration system,” said Nevins, who spent nearly his whole priestly career ministering in the Latino community.
2005 was the year the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops started its Catholic Campaign for Immigration Reform, now known as Justice for Immigrants, and the year Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy introduced an immigration reform bill. Similar bills were introduced the following two years, but none of those bills was ever called for a vote.
“It was going to give people the opportunity to get their status changed,” Nevins said. “There was a path to citizenship for people. We really saw hope. We were really vocal about what we were doing, and we were reaching out to other priests, getting them to talk about it. We really worked at it.”
But there were already storm clouds. Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s bill stiffening penalties for immigration violations and making it a crime to assist undocumented people passed the House of Representatives in December 2005, although it did not pass in the Senate.
“There was a growing anti-immigrant rhetoric that was floating around, but there was some openness to some dialogue on this,” said Father Larry Dowling, a retired pastor who now serves as moderator of Priests for Justice for Immigrants. “We were in the mix on that, trying to push when there were Democrats and Republicans that were trying to work on this. How do we support the immigrant community, how do we raise awareness among our brother priests, how do we advocate at the legislative level, how do we bring our faith tradition into that?”
Since then, immigration has been a major theme of the last three presidential elections. At the same time, the immigration landscape has changed. The population of Mexican-born people in the U.S. has decreased since 2010, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and more people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border come from other Latin American countries as well as from Africa and Asia.
A wave of people, many from Venezuela, fleeing political and gang violence and seeking asylum, arrived in the U.S. in the early 2020s, prompting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bus and fly many migrants to northern cities led by Democrats without giving the receiving cities any notice or opportunity to prepare to receive them, and often without explaining to the migrants where they were going or what conditions they would encounter. Over two years, Chicago received tens of thousands of such migrants.
Advocates for immigration reform point to statistics that show immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, have a lower crime rate than native born citizens; that people seeking asylum are legally allowed to stay in the United States until their cases are adjudicated; and that, for many, many people, there is no other legal route to immigrate to the United States.
Over the years, active participation in Priests for Justice for Immigrants has fallen from a high of about 200 priests to about 100 members, as many of the original supporters, including Auxiliary Bishop John Manz, have died. A core group of 10 to 12 attends most monthly meetings, Dowling said, with more coming out for planned activities including prayer services to draw attention to the plight of migrants or the archdiocese’s annual posada for immigration reform.
Graf, a member of Priests for Justice for Immigrants, said he undertook his more than 800-mile walk because he could not stay in his parish and watch the immigrant population suffer.
“I hear the pain of families being separated and this is something I can do,” Graf said. “My goal is to try to tell the truth that I know having lived with the immigrant community, knowing it is very difficult for them to speak the truth because of their situation.”
Details of his walk can be found on stepupspeakout.org, a website that is also collecting and anonymously posting immigration stories from children and families, and in his Instagram posts.
Graf is visiting parishes both with and without large immigrant communities to share his story of ministering 10 years in Mexico and then to predominantly Latino parishes in the Chicago area, and to hear their stories.
“There are many different truths I’m trying to get out,” Graf said in a phone interview shortly before crossing from Indiana into Ohio. “One, we’ve summoned inexpensive, hard-working labor into this country for decades. Two, families don’t want to be separated. Three, what we hear is that the ‘illegals’ are the criminals. They’re God-fearing people, wonderful Catholic individuals. They desire to come to this country for the same reasons my great-grandparents did from Ireland and Germany.”
When his great-grandparents came, he pointed out, all they had to do was show up and pass a cursory health inspection at Ellis Island. That’s one reason his endpoint is the Statue of Liberty, which stands in New York Harbor near the island that was once the clearinghouse for immigrants arriving by boat from Europe.
While Priests for Justice for Immigrants was founded in 2005, the same year the archdiocese started its Office for Immigration Ministry, other groups started soon after, including Sisters and Brothers of Immigrants, for women and men religious, and Pastoral Migratoria, for immigrants to offer pastoral assistance to other immigrants in their parishes.
Pastoral Migratoria’s immigrant-to-immigrant ministry has spread to several dioceses across the United States, Segura said.
That has led to priests in other dioceses becoming interested in Priests for Justice for Immigrants, Dowling said.
Graf’s pilgrimage will likely carry the message to more dioceses, and Dominican Father Brendan Curran, another member, has been contacting priests around the country as well.
“The effort to create similar groups in other places is something we always we wanted to do,” said Curran, who added that Priests for Justice for Immigrants has always offered a place for diocesan and religious priests to build connections.
Curran has distributed prayer cards and posada prayers for migrants to people from around the country who request them, he said, while Priests for Justice for Immigrants is getting more requests for resources.
“A crisis might be a moment where people are needing to ally themselves with an overall coalesced group,” he said. “Religious priests, diocesan representatives, we connected with each other and with national migrant offices.”
But, he cautioned, ministry is always based on relationship, and relationships take time to build.
Dowling agreed, adding that members of Priests for Justice for Immigrants have had to lean on their relationships with one another in recent years.
“It’s connecting and mutual encouragement and all of that,” he said. “I have had priests and others tell me they need encouragement. What’s the depth of our faith? Do we trust God to get us through this? God’s in control. I ask God for the wisdom to do what I need to do.”
Still, Segura said, she sees growth in Priests for Justice for Immigrants as it completes its second decade.
“There is a new energy,” she said. “We have new priests, new people, seminarians. It’s a blessing to have a network and a space and a committed group. I have lost count of the many ways they have been a candle of light, a candle of hope.”