El Paso Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz has launched a blistering pastoral broadside against the nation’s mass detention and deportation campaign, calling it “a grave moral evil” and urging Catholics to answer it with prayer, peaceful action and concrete acts of solidarity. In the letter, he zeroes in on Camp East Montana near Fort Bliss, a sprawling tented ICE facility that has seen illness and multiple deaths this winter, and holds it up as a stark example of the policy’s human toll. The diocese says this is the first pastoral message by a U.S. bishop focused specifically on mass detention and deportation.
“The current campaign of mass detention and deportations is a grave moral evil, one which must be opposed, with prayer, peaceful action and acts of solidarity,” Seitz wrote, according to KTSM. He presents the letter as a pastoral response, not a partisan manifesto, and asks parishioners to walk with detained people and their families rather than look away.
Camp East Montana has become Exhibit A in that moral case as reporting has detailed overcrowding, medical neglect and multiple deaths. According to The Washington Post, internal ICE records and local findings raised serious questions about how the facility was being run. The Associated Press has separately documented repeated 911 calls, disease outbreaks and a contractor change as federal officials reviewed conditions at the Fort Bliss site…