A prominent Catholic leader in the Archdiocese of Chicago is alleging that Department of Homeland Security agents are stopping priests and demanding they prove their citizenship, based solely on the color of their skin.
According to Religion News Service, Cardinal Blase Cupich "made the allegation in a Jan. 17 interview with WTTW, a Chicago PBS affiliate, and in an interview published Friday (Feb. 6) in the U.S. edition of El País, a Spanish newspaper. 'I’ve had some priests who are of a different color being targeted and arrested — stopped — because of their color and asking them to prove that they’re citizens. That’s not America,' Cupich told the PBS affiliate. 'We should not have to live in a country where people have to carry around their documents all the time.'"
Cupich continued, “It brings terror into a city where not just immigrants, but the population, feel as though they’re being terrorized by the ways that these roundups are going. This is really unheard of. That kind of tactic is really fueling the outrage of people, not only because of the murders that we had in Minneapolis, but also because of our experience here.”
President Donald Trump spent months ramping up immigration enforcement in Chicago, despite the fact that crime in the city was plunging before the operation began.
Chicago has been the site of numerous protests, crackdowns, and clashes, including an incident in which an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot a Presbyterian pastor in the head with a pepper ball from a rooftop during a protest.
This comes as other experts warn that Trump DHS tactics have gone beyond demanding citizenship papers, with many people being arrested despite showing their papers and held for biometric scanning.