If you want to understand what’s been going on in Los Angeles, consider this report from a priest I know: At a recent parish confirmation celebration, twenty-five out of eighty teens did not show up for their own confirmation. That particular incident and many others like it illustrate how immigration raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere have a much broader impact than many people realize, including on the faith life of Catholics.
Part of the reason that immigration enforcement is having such detrimental societal effects is a recent shift in enforcement tactics intended to drive up numbers of arrests and frighten people into “self-deporting.” In the past, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions mostly involved targeted raids on specific businesses and planned arrests of people with serious criminal records or outstanding deportation orders. Those types of actions continue, but ICE also now appears to be raiding random places where undocumented people are presumed to gather (like Home Depot), or even occasionally picking up people who “fit a certain profile” off the street.
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