Washington D.C., Jul 11, 2023 / 10:50 am
El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, head of the U.S. bishops’ migration committee, on Monday praised the Biden administration’s new immigrant Family Reunification Parole program and called for more immigration reform.
“We welcome this effort to provide a realistic opportunity for attaining family unity and reunification,” Seitz said in a statement released July 10.
According to Seitz, unity and reunification are “foundational” to both “the U.S. immigration system and central tenets of Catholic social teaching.”
Quoting the 2015 Synod of Bishops report to the pope, Seitz said that “family relations contribute decisively to the sound building of human society in fellowship, which cannot be reduced to simply the inhabitants of a territory or citizens of a state who live together.”