Pope Leo XIV greets El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz (right and El Paso Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Celino during an October 8 meeting at the Vatican. (Photo: Hope Border Institute)
By Gary Gately
El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz, an outspoken advocate for immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border for the past decade, has been awarded the 2025 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Most recently, as chair of the Migration Committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) since November 2022, Bishop Seitz has been a “courageous defender of immigrants and their families who are being cruelly and unjustly persecuted by the current administration in the United States,” Pax Cristi, the Catholic peace movement, said in a statement.
“His prophetic pastoral letters, his denunciation of the separation of migrant children from their families and of the deaths of six detained migrant children, his protection of this vulnerable population, the opening of diocesan facilities and parishes as shelters, and his leadership among the bishops in upholding Catholic Social Teaching and the Gospel mandate to welcome the stranger, even in the face of persecution of both immigrants and those who come to their aid, are truly extraordinary,” Pax Christi said.
The 71-year-old Seitz, together with his team at the Diocese of El Paso, will be formally presented with the award at Pax Christi International’s World Gathering, the conference celebrating its 80th anniversary, from November 5-9 in Florence, Italy.
Three other organizations and their leaders also will receive special recognition from Pax Christi: Annunciation House, the 48-year-old Catholic shelter network in El Paso, and Rubén Garcia, its founder and executive director; the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, a Catholic organization that advocates for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and advises the El Paso diocese, and its executive director, Dylan Corbett; and the Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an El Paso nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrants and refugees in West Texas, New Mexico and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and its executive director, Marisa Limón Garz.
Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute (Photo: X)
Rubén Garcia (left), founder and executive director of Annunciation House, and Marisa Limón Garz, executive director of the Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center (Photos: Annunciation House, Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center)
Corbett led a delegation of U.S. immigration advocates who met last with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on October 8. They shared with him more than 100 letters and a video featuring testimonies from immigrants in the country, many of them undocumented or living with family members here illegally, who expressed fears of being deported to countries they fled because of violence, poverty and persecution or being separated from family members.
Corbett said in a post on X after the meeting that Leo expressed concern about immigrants being targeted by President Donald J. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. “Today, with @BishopSeitz and members of the immigrant community, @HopeBorder met Pope Leo and gave him messages and a video from those fearing Trump’s mass deportations. ‘The church cannot stay silent before injustice. You stand with me. And I stand with you.’”
Leo also called on U.S. bishops to speak out more forcefully against the Trump administration’s immigration policies, a video from Hope Border Institute shows.
Many Catholic leaders have increasingly spoken out against Trump’s mass deportations; the shutdown of legal access to asylum for the most vulnerable immigrants; the suspension of refugee programs; and ICE raids and arrests of immigrants. The policies have stoked widespread fears in immigrant communities in the U.S., where a third of Catholics are Hispanic.
Pope Leo XIV watches a video featuring messages from immigrants in the U.S. on a laptop held by El Paso Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Celino. (Photo: Vatican Media).
El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz presented letters from immigrants in the U.S. who fear for their futures to Pope Leo XIV during an October 8 meeting at the Vatican. The letters, wrapped in twine, include a yellow note that reads in Spanish: “Pope Leo, please listen to the clamor of those who are being marginalized.”(Photo: Hope Border Institute)
Trump administration officials say the largest deportation program in U.S. history protects law-abiding Americans from violent threats they say migrants pose. But multiple studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 60,0000 immigrants detained in ICE immigrant facilities have no criminal records and almost all those who do face non-violent charges.
Last Sunday, Bishop Seitz urged churches and nonprofit groups in the El Paso diocese to support immigrants.
Decrying the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, Seitz said: “What has happened to our heart? What has happened to the word compassion? Can it, where can it be found? Today, in this country and in this world, sometimes I wonder if I can even recognize our country because we were founded on these principles, and our Statue of Liberty has stood where so many of our immigrants have entered as a sign of hope, as a place of justice.”
El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz (Photo: Diocese of El Paso)
Pope Francis, who had sharply criticized Trump’s immigration policies dating to the president’s first term, appointed Seitz as El Paso’s bishop in 2013, about a month after Francis’s election. The late Jesuit pontiff, who had praised Seitz for his advocacy on behalf of immigrants, met with the bishop several times, including during Francis’s 2015 visit to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just south of El Paso.
Before becoming pope, then-Cardinal Leo Prevost, who served as a missionary and bishop in Peru for two decades, had often shared posts on social media that criticized the first Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The October Vatican meeting marked Seitz’s first with Leo as pope, though they also met in September 2024, when then-Cardinal Robert F. Prevost invited the bishop to speak to other bishops in Rome about his immigration ministry.
For their part, conservative Catholic critics, including 10 U.S. bishops, have intensified their attacks on Pope Leo since September 30, when he responded to a reporter’s question about the decision by the archbishop of the pontiff’s native Chicago, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, to bestow upon Senator Dick Durbin a “Lifetime Achievement Award” for his work on behalf of immigrants despite the Illinois Democrat’s support for abortion rights.
“I think it is very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I am not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate,” Leo said.
Speaking at the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, Leo said: “I understand the difficulty and the tensions, but I think, as I myself have spoken in the past, it’s important to look at the many issues related to the teaching of the Church. Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they’re very complex issues.”
In response to the Holy Father’s comments, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I would reject that there is inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States under this administration. “This administration is trying to enforce our nation’s laws in the most humane way possible, and we are upholding the law,” she said. “We are doing that on behalf of the people of our country who live here.”
Leavitt, who is Catholic, then criticized the Biden administration’s immigration record, saying, “There was, however, significant, inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants in the previous administration as they were being trafficked and raped and beaten, in many cases killed over our United States southern border.”
Five days later, speaking at an August 5 Mass for migrants and missionaries in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo told tens of thousands of the faithful: “The story of so many of our migrant brothers and sisters bears witness to this: the tragedy of their flight from violence, the suffering which accompanies it, the fear of not succeeding, the perilous risk of traveling along the coastline, their cry of sorrow and desperation. Those boats which hope to catch sight of a safe port, and those eyes filled with anguish and hope seeking to reach the shore, cannot and must not find the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination.”
Meanwhile, a record 79% of Americans expressed support for immigration in a July Gallup poll, marking a dramatic reversal from a year earlier. Just 33% of Americans supported reducing immigration, down from 55% a year earlier, and, among Republicans, support for reducing immigration plummeted from 88% to 48% during that period.