Bishop Mark Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso stood in an ornate hall of the Vatican waiting for Pope Leo XIV to emerge from a door, alongside 10 other people from El Paso.
Everyone who was there with Seitz, including representatives from El Paso-based Hope Border Institute and La Mujer Obera, carried letters from immigrants to the United States who feared the Trump administration’s expanding crackdown on immigrants.
The letters expressed fear of leaving the house to go to work and expressed fear from qualified asylum seekers of their loved ones being returned to their home countries.
“They can’t go out,” one letter from a Guatemalan woman named María who had qualified for asylum and currently lives in San Francisco read, speaking of her family members who do not have legal immigration documents. “They are afraid to shop, to go to church and so they stay home.”
She went on to implored the Pope to intercede on the behalf of immigrants in the United States
“The Pope needs to talk to Trump and ask Trump to think about what he’s doing to immigrants,” she wrote. “The Pope needs to plead with Trump and Trump needs to listen to him. Trump has to change what he’s doing.”
They traveled halfway across the world for this meeting with leader of the Catholic church to present these stories on Wednesday, Oct. 8.
A half hour or so after their scheduled meeting, the Pope, who was inaugurated as the successor to Pope Francis in May 2025, walked through the doors. Seitz said he welcomed them, apologizing they could not sit and talk.
“He apologetically said to us, ‘I’m sorry we can’t be seated, and I said to him, ‘Then Holy Father, we’re very happy to stand with you’,” “Seitz told the El Paso TImes a few hours after the visit with the Pope.
They stood there in the hall, as Pope Leo XIV watched a four-minute-long video, which was presented by El Paso Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Celino, sharing the stories in the letters from immigrants in El Paso, San Francisco, Ohio and elsewhere.
Seitz serves as the chair of the migration committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He was in the Vatican for a committee meeting.
The brief meeting with the Pope was multi-lingual, those present said. Lorena Andrade, the executive director of La Mujer Obrera in El Paso, shared with the Pope in Spanish the situations that the communities are facing mean for them.
The Pope, who was originally from Chicago, Illinois, was receptive to the histories that the groups shared with him.
“He said this is an ‘injustice what’s happening’,” Dylan Corbett, the director of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute who had traveled to the Vatican along side Seitz, said. “He was also very candid about how the church needs to be more forceful and more united on this issue in the United States.”
The Pope expressed support for all immigrants and his opposition to increasing presence of federal policies that attack immigrants, Hope Border Institute said in a news statement.
“The church cannot remain silent,” the Pope said, according to Hope Border Institute. “You stand with me, and I stand with you.”
Trump’s expanding immigration crackdown
The visit early on Oct. 8 comes as the Trump administration has continued to escalate its immigration crackdown. Initally the crackdown was sold to the American people as a strategy to deport violent immigrants from the U.S. It’s expanded to just about any immigrant regardless of their status.
Since entering office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has carried out the largest crackdown on illegal immigration in recent history. There are currently nearly 60,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for deportation from the United States as of Sept. 21, according to data compiled by Austin Kocher, an assistant Professor at Syracuse University and Research Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.
The majority of detainees do not have a criminal record, as Kocher notes.
Seitz said that the Pope would like to hear from the migration committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops further about the situation unfolding in the United States. This is all rooted in what the Christian faith teaches: loving your neighbor and being concerned for those who are in poverty.
“We don’t want to get into the political fray,” Seitz said. “But we have to reaffirm what our faith teaches us.”
Jeff Abbott covers the border for the El Paso Times and can be reached at:jdabbott@gannett.com; @palabrasdeabajo on Twitter or @palabrasdeabajo.bsky.social on Bluesky.