How grief made Archbishop García-Siller a prophetic voice on immigration

Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond

(RNS) — On May 24, 2022, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller sat with parents in Uvalde, Texas. Their children were dead — 19 of them. Most were Mexican-American, as the city sits 50 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. People there believed their children would be safe. But a school shooting that day marked another massacre in a strip of land with a long historical legacy of violence against those of Mexican descent.

Thirty-six days later, on June 27, García-Siller stood in San Antonio outside a crime scene where 53 bodies lay in a tractor trailer. In pursuit of the American dream, the migrants had suffocated in metal darkness. In five weeks, he had moved between two forms of American erasure: the sudden obliteration of childhood via school shootings and the slow suffocation of people who migrate. Both communities had been abandoned. Both experiences would stay with him.

These griefs, along with a series of poignant autobiographical details unique for a public declaration from a Catholic bishop, helped to forge García-Siller’s new pastoral letter, “We Will Come to You.” They sit beneath every word.

Born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, when the Cristero War was very much a living memory, García-Siller, now 69, arrived in the United States at 23, with no return date. He learned early what displacement meant. Years later, as a priest, he would walk alongside farmworkers in California who worked bent over in fields and who slept in farmhouse garages to avoid being deported. As a Chicago auxiliary bishop, he learned the lessons of community organizing and boarded deportation buses to hand out prayer cards.

But experiencing the immediate aftermath of Uvalde and the tractor trailer deaths completed a formation that had begun with his own exile from his home country as a missionary, as he describes in his letter. By then, he fully understood what it meant to find oneself in a moral wreckage he did not create. He understood staying.

Years later, against a surge in recent migrant deaths — Physicians for Human Rights has documented at least 52 in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the beginning of the Trump administration as of June, and others have been documented since — fathers in Texas and Maine shot during traffic stops, the ordinary machinery of immigration enforcement grinding toward its quota — García-Siller has written a letter of uncommon clarity as well as personal vulnerability. Of moral destruction he has seen much, and it shows in how he writes.

The letter substantively addresses the issue of immigration detention, now metastasizing throughout the country. For García-Siller, detention is not policy failure. Sustained by private profit, it is design. He notes that a Senate investigation documents over 1,000 credible reports or serious abuses in detention centers since January 2025. Seventy-three percent of those detained have never been convicted of anything, according to the Cato Institute.

He quotes a 9-year-old Colombian girl held for 113 days, who wrote on a piece of paper: “I am not happy. Get me out.” Seven words. The archbishop does not quote her to move us, but because she is real. She existed in that cage, and her words are the only testimony of that horrible reality some people will never leave behind.

He also names what others will not: the racial architecture underneath the campaign of mass detention and deportation. “This system’s brokenness is not merely policy failure,” he writes.  ” … A system in which racial disparity is so deeply embedded cannot deliver justice without honest reform.” He does not say every officer acts from hatred. He says the system itself is soaked in it. If anyone in the church has known this and looked away, he says that ends now: “The Church must confront the truth and name these injustices for what they are.”

The theological core of the letter is the spirituality of the cross. Human tragedy met with love becomes where God lives. It is a lens García-Siller describes looking through since childhood — learned from nuns during primary school, alongside undocumented farmworkers, on buses filled with those bound for deportation, in the cells of detention centers, with crying parents in Uvalde. He quotes border theologian Monsignor Arturo Bañuelas: “Jesus is at the border; today He is crucified in the poor.” The archbishop does not explain this. He names it. He expects us to understand.

Since Pope Leo XIV spoke against the mass detention of immigrants last year, the American hierarchy has begun to move in new ways. Bishops in El Paso and Cheyenne have named the current mass deportation campaign for what it is: grave moral evil. Bishop Bruce Lewandowski chartered a bus from Providence, Rhode Island, to Washington, D.C. after ICE arrested a judge’s 16-year-old intern outside his office. The Bishop of Knoxville, James Mark Beckman, spoke out against a painful rise in family separations on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Going outside the usual channels, a coalition of bishops opposed President Donald Trump’s enforcement expansion bill. The institutional church is waking.

García-Siller’s letter accelerates that shift. It offers a map that parallels his life experience: encounter with the reality of human suffering, then accompaniment, then organized advocacy, then lived solidarity. It is a model for what religious leadership looks like when silence becomes impossible.

The letter closes with Our Lady of Guadalupe — a woman who crossed borders, who appeared to the powerless, who knows the road of suffering. To those living in fear, she speaks: “Am I not here, I who am honored to be your mother?” García-Siller promises the same. You are not alone. The church will not be silent. We will come to you.

That promise sits heavy. It has been tested in Uvalde’s funeral homes and in that tractor trailer on Quintana Road. It has been tested in detention centers where children write their despair on paper. It will be tested again when ICE pulls someone over, when families wake to find breadwinners gone, when another community buries its dead.

García-Siller has written from the foot of the cross. His moral authority does not come from theology alone. It comes from standing where his people stood in grief. It comes from knowing what it feels like to be displaced, to have nowhere, to identify with those who are told your life does not matter.

“We Will Come to You” deserves to be read — for its integration of witness, memory, theology and pastoral specificity, as well as for its author’s story of vulnerability and growth. But read it also for what it reveals about an archbishop who allows us to see how suffering, when not numbed by privilege, becomes the ground of prophetic action. García-Siller calls the church beyond accompaniment to lived solidarity. To “primerear” — to go first, as Pope Francis asked. To become neighbor to the wounded.

His letter is a promise and a warning. We will come to you. Not with comfort. Not with the language that makes us feel better about ourselves. But with the willingness to stand in wreckage and say: Your dignity is not negotiable. Your life is not disposable. We will not look away.

Whether the church in the United States keeps that promise is up to us.

(Dylan Corbett is the executive director of the Hope Border Institute and member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Read the full article on the original source