It’s a fundamental cornerstone of American personal freedom – that, according to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
And it’s not just for American citizens – the U.S. Supreme Court has maintained certain rights apply to everyone living in America, whether U.S.-born, naturalized, or not.
Indeed, immigrants in the country illegally have specific rights under the Constitution – among them, those outlined in the Fourth Amendment, as well as access to due process and legal counsel – which raises a host of legal and moral questions concerning a mass deportation program proposed by the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald J. Trump.
On the Trump campaign website, the second item listed among “President Trump’s 20 Core Promises to Make America Great Again” reads, “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Trump repeated that promise July 18 at the Republican National Convention – where delegates waved signs reading, “Mass deportation now!”– and it gained further traction at ensuing campaign rallies.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs, “The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.”
But Trump’s mass deportation plan appears to run afoul of the Church’s teaching at the highest level. St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“Splendor of Truth”) and 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) – both quote the Second Vatican Council’s teaching in “Gaudium et Spes,” the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which names “deportation” among various specific acts “offensive to human dignity” that “are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”
The late pontiff underscored their moral severity in “Veritatis Splendor” by calling them examples of “intrinsic evil,” explaining that, no matter the motives, these acts are “not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person.”
“It just seems like a prescription for chaos,” commented Erin Corcoran, an associate teaching professor and executive director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
“Even in the immigration context – which is not criminal, it’s civil – the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that noncitizens are entitled to procedural due process, that they are constitutionally guaranteed that,” Corcoran told OSV News. “So summarily rounding people up and deporting them without any kind of process flies in the face of that.”
Nelson Camilo Sánchez – an associate professor of law and director of the Immigration, Migration and Human Rights Program at the University of Virginia – agreed, predicting impacts upon individuals, families, communities and the country.
“When you have a policy that is massive – and that is not taking into consideration the specificities of each case – what you are risking is due process, humane treatment, access to legal representation,” Sánchez explained.
Racial profiling, he noted, is also a hazard that could ensnare citizens.
“Law enforcement authorities ... will have to go out to communities and try to find those people that would be part of a policy,” observed Sánchez. “So that would lead to racial profiling, wrongful detentions, and even – we have seen this in the past – mistaken deportations of U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
It’s happened before.
The Palmer Raids – a communist “Red Scare” during 1919-1920 – targeted Italian and Russian-Jewish immigrants, while the “Repatriations” of the 1930s forced about 1 million people of Mexican descent out of the country.
Mexicans were again targeted in the 1950s under the Eisenhower administration’s slur-titled “Operation Wetback” – at the time the largest deportation operation in U.S. history – which swept up at least 1.3 million people. As recounted by news website Axios, “Border agents raided Mexican-American neighborhoods, demanded ID from ‘Mexican-looking’ citizens in public, invaded private homes in the middle of the night, and harassed Mexican-owned businesses.”
While specific details of Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation – estimated to cost $315 billion by the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based nonpartisan organization conducting immigration research and policy analysis – remain undisclosed, there is a precedent.
“One thing we’ve seen happen in the previous Trump administration is having local and state law enforcement be engaged,” noted Corcoran.
But that’s not without challenges.
“If you’ve been granted asylum, there’s about 12 different documents that might actually be evidence you’ve been granted asylum, depending on when in the process it happened, and what document you’re carrying with you,” Corcoran explained. “So the idea that law enforcement, who don’t know our immigration system, can even accurately determine who has valid status and who doesn’t is problematic. The documents vary because the processes vary.”
Nor would migrants alone have cause to worry, said Corcoran.
“There’s lots of Americans who don’t have passports or proof of citizenship. We don’t normally carry these documents around on us. We don’t actually have a national identification card,” she added. “People are not expected to be stopped by a police officer on the street and produce a document and demonstrate a right to be on the street. That goes against our values.”
Sánchez echoed the same concern.
“If you have to resort to stopping people on the street, that would bring questions around constitutional rights – if such activities can be conducted or not. This would lead to constitutional challenges, and a lot of court cases,” he predicted, “because it is completely foreign to the idea of individual civil rights as we conceive them here in this country.”
Communicating with potential deportees is another issue, said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, an independent and nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
“We’ve seen a really wide diversification of where immigrants are coming from in recent years,” Gelatt emphasized. “That’s always been true, but that also brings up major language access issues – it’s hard for people to exert their rights if they don’t even understand what a government official is saying to them.”
But Churches – which have typically been considered humanitarian spaces free from incursion – could potentially find that status challenged.
“In Project 2025, it calls for eliminating ICE’s (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Sensitive Locations Policy, which currently says that ICE shouldn’t conduct immigration enforcement at Churches, at schools, at hospitals,” noted Gelatt.
Project 2025 is a 900-page document designed by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation as a policy template for the next Republican president. While Trump has said, “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” numerous officials who staffed the previous Trump administration were involved in writing it.
The Heritage Foundation declined comment to OSV News, stating its experts were unavailable.
“What really matters to us is that we see human beings in every single person – seeking refuge, asylum; seeking to keep their families together for a better life,” said John Herrera, director of Immigration Legal Services for Catholic Charities of Oregon.
“We obviously understand that every country and every state has the right to secure their own borders. They have the right to protect their own citizens,” he said. “But what we always align with the Catholic social teaching is (that) we just do it in a way that is humane. That’s all we ask.”
Congress, Herrera suggested, has a job to do – in and out of an election cycle.
“What we’ve really been asking as a society, is to fix the immigration system. That’s what needs to be done. And that’s not the job of an organization like the Catholic Church. It’s the job of the Congress,” said Herrera. “Congress is the one who needs ... to fix the immigration system that is so broken – and is keeping families separated, and families apart.”
On Oct. 11, Trump announced “Operation Aurora” at a rally in the Colorado city of the same name, which he said is threatened by gang violence – something its mayor denies.
“We will send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country,” Trump said.
“Think of that, 1798. Oh, it’s a powerful act,” Trump said, referring to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Regarded and confirmed by the Supreme Court as a wartime statute, its use is, however, limited to “whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government.”
The act was last invoked during World War II to register and forcibly intern German, Italian and Japanese nationals as suspected “enemy aliens” as their countries were at war with the U.S.
But the application of criminal law, noted Sánchez, “requires a case-by-case analysis rather than blanket policies based on the race or nationality of the offender.”
“My initial reaction,” said Corcoran, “is that the president doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally do this.”
For now, the U.S. bishops’ conference is keeping its powder dry.
“We’re not going to speculate on hypothetical policies of any political candidate,” stated the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops through its spokesperson, Chieko Noguchi. “In upholding the dignity of life, the Catholic Church teaches that we must serve our brothers and sisters in need, which includes welcoming migrants and refugees,” she told OSV News.
“The U.S. bishops have consistently stated that comprehensive immigration reform is needed to fix what has been recognized by both political parties as a broken system,” Noguchi added, “and the conference will engage appropriately when public policies are put forth by the office holders.”
