Greg Daly
Fr Brendan Mcbride Irish community chaplains in the US have warned of a climate of fear and anxiety, following sudden clampdowns on immigration to the country by President Donald Trump.
Sr Christine Hennessy who works with Irish immigrants in New York, told The Irish Catholic that “there is fear among the undocumented” that they will suffer as a result of the president’s hostile views on immigration.
“That executive order is against everything we believe in as Christians,” she said.
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Roughly 5,000 of the 50,000 undocumented Irish in the US live in and around Boston, where Cork-native Fr Dan Finn is based. “There’s a sense of fear and anxiety about the unknown,” he said.
“We’re just waiting and trying to remain calm to see what would happen with regard to the undocumented,” according to Fr Finn.
Mr Trump provoked controversy and a wave of protests after he ordered the closure of US borders to refugees for four months and indefinitely called a halt to refugee resettlement from Syria.
He also suspended entry for three months for citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations. The president claimed the suspensions were needed to protect the US from potential terrorists.
San Francisco-based Fr Brendan McBride, president of the Irish Apostolate USA, told The Irish Catholic that “things are changing very quickly day by day…uncertainty is the worst thing at the moment.
“There’s a real fear of what’s to come,” he said.
The Donegal-born cleric joined a protest at San Francisco airport which he described as a powerful testimony to the broad opposition to the executive order.
He pointed out that while pro-immigrant demonstrators would normally be 90% Hispanic, the airport protest “was straight across the spectrum of all nationalities and peoples”.
“There was great energy and a feeling that we have be aware that these things are real and we’re going to have to fight them in the courts, or through our public representatives, or by making our feelings known through peaceful protest,” Fr McBride said.
In Boston, Fr Finn said anxiety caused by the president’s actions are having a particularly difficult effect on families. He cited the example of an Irish mother he met who says she wanted to go home because she feared the current “uncertainty”, but whose husband wants to stay because of having a good job.
He said that the Church was committed to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with affected communities pointing to what he described as a “sense of solidarity about the issue”. He said the Church is “trying to be there as best we can for people and respond as best we can, given the resources that we have”.
The executive order, issued just a week after the president’s inauguration and just days after another executive order directing the construction of a border wall with Mexico follows announcements in recent months that Mr Trump intends to deport or imprison up to three million illegal immigrants with criminal records before making a “determination” about the country’s remaining undocumented immigrants.