The heads of the main U.S. evangelical umbrella body and the Catholic bishops' migration committee have issued a joint statement urging Congress to open legal pathways for longtime immigrant residents, while affirming that the government has a duty to secure the country's borders.
The statement, "A Call for Christian Compassion and Wisdom in the Immigration Debate," was released Wednesday (Oct. 14) by the co-chairs of the Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue on Immigration, Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Bishop Brendan Cahill of Victoria, Texas, who chairs the Committee on Migration of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Drawing on Scripture, the five-page document sets out three principles: human dignity, protection of the family and the proper role of government, and it argues that current U.S. enforcement practices have departed from them.
Its release follows a year in which the U.S. government sharply increased immigration arrests and deportations and nearly halted refugee admissions, while Christians in the United States remain divided over how to weigh border security against humanitarian obligations.
"As Catholic and evangelical Christians, we have doctrinal differences, but we are united in our conviction that God calls us to stand both with our fellow Americans who are experiencing economic and cultural anxieties and with our immigrant neighbors who are facing existential challenges," the two leaders wrote.
The NAE and the USCCB formed the dialogue in March 2026 to bring leaders of both traditions together on immigration, according to the NAE. Participants found broad agreement on the theological principles that should inform national policy, the association said.
Three principles based on the Old and New Testaments
The first principle rests on Genesis 1:27, which describes human beings as created in God's image. Before anyone is classified as a citizen or noncitizen, documented or undocumented, each person is a neighbor with "a claim on our conscience," the statement says.
"This dignity comes from God, not government, and no earthly power may erase it," it reads.
The authors cite Old Testament commands to love the foreigner, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Ruth the Moabite. They add that the same biblical obligations apply "with equal force" to U.S. citizens living in poverty, and they reject approaches that set citizens against noncitizens.
Family unity is the second principle, grounded in Genesis 2:24. The statement asserts that most people now facing detention and deportation in the United States are Catholic or evangelical Christians, and that roughly one in 12 Christians in the country either risks losing legal status or shares a home with someone who does.
Those figures come from "One Part of the Body," a March 2025 report by the USCCB's Migration and Refugee Services, the NAE, the evangelical relief agency World Relief and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The report estimated that more than 10 million Christians were vulnerable to deportation at the end of 2024, about 80 percent of all those at risk. Catholics made up 61 percent of that group and evangelicals 13 percent, according to the report, which also found that nearly one in five U.S. Catholics was either at risk or living with someone who was.
"Their fear is our fear; their tears are ours to wipe," the co-chairs wrote.
The third principle, taken from Romans 13:1-7, affirms the government's responsibility to protect citizens and enforce "reasonable immigration policies." The document expresses gratitude for law enforcement officers and says many of them experience "moral injury when duty and conscience collide."
Even so, the co-chairs read the passage as describing authority that restrains wrongdoing. Directing enforcement at "the peaceful and productive majority" rather than at those who intend harm, they wrote, "is not an expression of Romans 13 but a departure from it."
Strengthening legal pathways
Both the executive branch and lawmakers bear responsibility, the statement says, but only Congress can correct what it calls "statutory shortcomings" in the legal immigration system. Existing routes to permanent status are "extremely limited and out of reach for most," the authors wrote, including for immigrants who have lived in the country for decades.
According to the document, majorities of evangelicals and Catholics favor reform that would allow longtime residents to regularize their status. A February 2025 Lifeway Research survey, sponsored in part by the NAE, found that 74 percent of self-identified evangelicals backed a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally who meet certain qualifications.
The co-chairs say reform legislation should also secure borders through "targeted, proportionate, and humane measures" that prioritize people who threaten public safety and respect due process.
They also call for strict limits on detaining nonviolent immigrants, especially children and families, with access to chaplains and legal counsel for everyone held. Legal routes for workers, family members and humanitarian migrants, they wrote, should be "safe, reliable, and efficient."
The leaders pledged to work with authorities so that every detainee, "of all faiths and none," can receive spiritual counsel and take part in the sacraments.
Enforcement and admissions figures
The statement itself does not cite enforcement statistics. Government data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C., indicate the scale of recent changes.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for arrests and removals inside the country, made about 236,000 administrative arrests in fiscal 2025, more than double the previous year's total, according to figures cited by the institute. MPI estimates that the agency carried out about 333,000 deportations over the same period.
Border encounters with migrants dropped to 692,000 in fiscal 2025. That compares with 2.9 million the year before and a record 3.2 million in fiscal 2023, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data reported by MPI.
The U.S. immigrant population reached a record 50.2 million in 2024, or 14.8 percent of residents, the institute reports. About 74 percent held legal status as of 2023, when MPI estimated the unauthorized population at roughly 13.7 million. Some 18.3 million children lived with at least one immigrant parent in 2024, and 85 percent of those children were born in the United States.
Refugee admissions have fallen to historic lows. The fiscal 2026 ceiling of 7,500 is the lowest since the modern resettlement program was created in 1980, and of the 3,158 refugees resettled in the first five months of that year, all but three came from South Africa, MPI reports.
Christian Daily International reported in September that World Relief and Open Doors US, in a report titled "State of the Golden Door," projected fiscal 2026 would likely be the first year in at least a quarter century in which no refugees facing religious persecution were resettled in the United States. The two Christian organizations said asylum approval rates in immigration court for applicants from the 50 countries on Open Doors' World Watch List fell to 10 percent in the first nine months of fiscal 2026, down from 58 percent in fiscal 2023.
The NAE-USCCB statement lists protecting the persecuted among the government's duties, alongside border security and upholding religious liberty.
The case for stricter enforcement
Support for the administration's approach remains strongest among white Christians. A Public Religion Research Institute survey released in March found that white evangelicals, at 69 percent, and white Catholics, at 53 percent, were the only religious groups in which a majority viewed President Donald Trump's handling of immigration favorably. Favorable views had declined in both groups, and in every other religious group surveyed, since March 2025.
The same survey found that 63 percent of white evangelicals and 55 percent of white Catholics agreed the federal government should hold immigrants in the country illegally in "internment camps" until they can be deported, compared with 41 percent of Americans overall. At the same time, 72 percent of Americans, including 55 percent of Republicans, said the United States should provide refuge to people who arrive facing serious danger in their home countries.
Those who favor stricter enforcement raise concerns the statement addresses only in part.
Many frame the issue as one of national sovereignty and the rule of law, arguing that a nation has the right to decide who enters and stays, and that failing to enforce existing law erodes public trust. The rise in border crossings that peaked in fiscal 2023 strained shelters and public services in several U.S. cities and became a central issue in the 2024 presidential election.
Critics of unauthorized immigration also argue that it is unfair to people who wait their turn. More than 4 million people were on the State Department's immigrant visa waiting list as of November 2023, according to MPI, and some family-based applications being processed in March 2026 had been filed in April 2001.
Public safety is another concern. Proponents of tougher enforcement point to crimes committed by people in the country illegally and argue those offenses could have been prevented by removal. The administration suspended Diversity Visa issuances in December 2025 and paused asylum decisions after fatal shootings allegedly carried out by noncitizens, MPI reports.
Economic effects are also debated. Some economists have argued that large inflows of lower-skilled workers depress wages for the native-born workers who compete most directly with them, particularly those without a high school diploma.
The case for expanding legal routes
Advocates for reform point to a legal system whose core limits have not changed in more than three decades. Annual caps of 226,000 family-sponsored and 140,000 employment-based green cards were set in 1990, and no single country may account for more than 7 percent of those visas, according to MPI. Nearly 946,000 approved employment-based petitions were awaiting an open visa slot as of June 2025.
Labor demand forms part of that argument. Immigrants and their U.S.-born children accounted for all growth in the prime working-age population since 2000 as birth rates declined, the institute reports.
Supporters of expanded legal migration, including the statement's authors, contend that wider legal channels would reduce irregular entry and free enforcement agencies to focus on public-safety threats.
Some who favor tighter limits counter that legalizing people already in the country could encourage future unauthorized migration. They point to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted legal status to about 2.7 million people but was followed by rapid growth in the unauthorized population.
Resources for congregations
Immigration remains one of the most contested issues in U.S. public life, and the disagreements run through congregations as well as political parties. Christians who share convictions about human dignity and the authority of Scripture often reach different conclusions about how to weigh border security, the rule of law and obligations to the stranger.
In presenting the statement, the NAE pointed to “the complexity of the issue” and “the need for faithful engagement,” describing the document as a resource for churches, leaders and citizens.
It has proposed three ways for churches to use the statement. It encourages prayer for immigrants, policymakers and law enforcement officers, and suggests teaching the three biblical principles as a sermon series or small-group study.
The association also urges evangelicals to visit their members of Congress alongside a Catholic counterpart, or to write joint opinion pieces, as a sign of shared witness.
The statement links its appeal to the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, quoting its affirmation that all people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." The co-chairs committed to further education and dialogue within and between their traditions and invited local congregations to do the same.
"We do not offer these words in anger or partisanship but in hope, trusting that the God of the exile and the stranger has not abandoned his people," they wrote.
