Washington D.C., Jan 16, 2016 / 06:23 am
The recent deportation raids targeting Central American immigrants will not discourage immigrants who are fleeing their countries as a last resort, the U.S. bishops said.
From Jan. 2 to Jan. 4, the Department of Homeland Security searched communities in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina for immigrants who were in the country illegally. Federal officials took 121 people into custody.
Many of the detainees now being held in federal detention centers awaiting deportation back to Central America are mothers and children, the bishops said.
"To send migrant children and families back to their home countries would put many of them in grave danger because they would face threats of violence and for some, even death," Bishops Eusebio Elizondo, auxiliary bishop of Seattle, and Kevin Vann of Orange, Calif. said in a Jan. 8 letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson on behalf of the U.S. bishops.