Friday, October 9, 2026: Across US, Catholics take to streets as momentum builds for immigrant solidarity

On the last Sunday of September, Catholics marched through the city of St. Louis in support of migrants and refugees. The same day, St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski for the first time called on U.S. leaders to end "indiscriminate detention and mass deportation." For Rozanski, the urgency was local and painfully concrete.

He pointed to Nixon Perez and Glendy Gonzalez de la Cruz, a Guatemalan couple who had lived in the St. Louis area before Perez was deported and Gonzalez followed him with their family. Rozanski said the couple was later found murdered in Guatemala, their infant nearby in a severely dehydrated condition.

The archbishop said their deaths deeply affected the parish community that had known them.  "I'm so proud of our pastors who are ministering in immigrant communities who are facing such difficult conditions because of the crackdown on immigration," he told the National Catholic Reporter Oct. 5.

St. Louis is far from alone.

What happened there was part of a broader shift unfolding across the country. In recent weeks, Catholic bishops, priests and laypeople have gathered outside detention centers, celebrated public outdoor Masses, marched through city streets and joined vigils and demonstrations in support of immigrants –– in California, Indiana, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Tennessee and Washington, D.C.

These actions are not part of a single coordinated campaign, but together they point to a growing national Catholic momentum that is moving immigration advocacy from statements and pastoral letters into increasingly visible public witness. Bishops have joined processions; Catholic priests have celebrated Masses outside prisons holding detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and dioceses have organized public prayer directly outside detention facilities.

Rozanski sees this shift as rooted primarily in faith. "It all comes down to the Gospel and basic human dignity," he said. "When we see human dignity being trampled on in so many ways, particularly with our immigrant and refugee communities, we have to speak out. It is the mandate of Christ that we do."

One of the largest recent examples of this was Sept. 27 in San Diego, where more than 4,000 people joined Bishop Michael Pham in a 1.1-mile procession through Balboa Park proclaiming  "All Are Sacred." Priests, deacons, religious and about 20 leaders from other faith traditions joined the walk, while participants carried signs supporting immigrants and sang hymns in English and Spanish.

"When one person is suffering, as Paul puts it, all of us are suffering, We have a responsibility to care for the dignity of each and every human person and to respect the rights and due process that are due to citizens and anyone who lives on U.S. soil."

For Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, the geographic breadth of these events is significant. Over the past year, he told NCR, his organization has worked with Catholic leaders from New England to Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, California, Tennessee and Washington.

Corbett described pressure from church leadership and pain rising from Catholic communities as the two forces driving the change. "These are people in our pews; these are people in our Catholic schools; these are people who go to our Catholic hospitals," he said. What is changing, Corbett said, is the church's posture.

"We're moving from accompaniment to solidarity," he said. "We realize that our destinies –– immigrant and non-immigrant, first generation, second generation, seventh and eighth generation –– we're all in this together." The public demonstrations, he said, are "a manifestation of that  conversion."

"I think we're going to go through a dark night of the soul as a country on this issue. I think that there's a lot of pain ahead of us."

"But I do have a lot of hope, and I think that the church is going to have a real opportunity to contribute to the renewal in our country around immigration policy, and hopefully move the needle to make some essential reforms."

News by Camillo Barone, NCR staff reporter

This story appears in the Immigration and the Church feature series. View the full series.