The leaders of two of the country’s largest religious blocs — evangelicals and Catholics — issued a joint statement this week calling on Congress to overhaul immigration enforcement and expand legal pathways for immigrants, in what observers are calling the first statement on immigration ever jointly issued by senior leaders of both traditions.
The statement, released October 13 and titled “A Call for Christian Compassion and Wisdom in the Immigration Debate,” was signed by Bishop Brendan Cahill, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, and the Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The two co-chair the Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue on Immigration, a joint body the two organizations established in March with five members from each tradition.
Timed to a sharp rise in enforcement
The statement’s release follows a steep increase in immigration enforcement activity over the past year. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 236,000 arrests in fiscal year 2025, more than double the prior year’s total. The number of people in immigration detention climbed from roughly 39,000 in January 2025 to about 48,000 two months later and to nearly 70,000 by February 2026, according to figures cited in coverage of the statement. Of those currently detained, 73% have no criminal conviction, and only 5% have been convicted of a violent offense.
The refugee admissions ceiling for fiscal year 2026 has meanwhile been set at 7,500 — the lowest level since the modern U.S. refugee resettlement program began in 1980.
What the statement says
Cahill and Kim wrote that “there is much that can be done to avoid the rupturing of our families and communities brought about by indiscriminate and aggressive enforcement actions,” according to a USCCB press release. The statement does not call for an end to immigration enforcement or border security, which it describes as legitimate government functions. Instead, it asks Congress to pursue enforcement that is “targeted, proportionate, and humane,” while expanding legal pathways for long-term residents, protecting families from separation, guaranteeing detained immigrants access to legal counsel, and rebuilding channels for refugee and worker admissions.
The two leaders framed the statement’s significance as resting less on new policy ideas than on the fact that it was issued jointly at all. “What is unique about this statement is not the content, which is grounded in centuries of Christian teaching and tradition that we have already affirmed separately, but the clear unity that exists between us in this moment,” they said.
Why religious leaders say this affects their membership directly
The statement builds on an earlier joint report, “One Part of the Body: The Potential Impact of Deportations on American Christian Families,” produced by the USCCB’s migration office alongside the NAE, the resettlement group World Relief, and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. That report estimated that more than 10 million Christian immigrants in the U.S. are currently vulnerable to deportation — about 80% of everyone at risk nationwide — and that nearly 7 million U.S.-citizen Christians live in the same household as someone who is.
A companion Lifeway Research survey of 667 Protestant pastors found that 98% said legal immigration benefits the country and 82% said the U.S. has a moral responsibility to accept refugees, while 89% supported prioritizing people with violent criminal records for deportation. A separate Lifeway poll from February 2025 found 74% of evangelicals support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the country.
Context
Evangelical voters and Catholic voters have often been treated as a single voting bloc in U.S. politics, but the two groups have historically diverged on immigration specifically, with white evangelicals polling as more supportive of restrictive enforcement than Catholics, who have a larger immigrant and Latino membership. This week’s statement is notable in part because it was produced by an ongoing, institutionalized dialogue between the two groups’ national leadership bodies rather than a one-off joint letter, and both organizations frame it as the start of continued collaboration rather than a single event.
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