(LifeSiteNews) — Auxiliary Bishop Kevin Kenney of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis suggested to an anti-deportation crowd of Catholics on Friday that blessed salt may be helpful in banishing immigration enforcement.
“What’s the best way to get rid of ice on your sidewalks?” Kenney told a crowd on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, at a prayer gathering a block away from the Whipple Federal Building. The bishop used the image of ice to represent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.
“In the Old Testament, you sprinkle that salt, you rid the area of evil and bad happenings,” Kenney said. “I would recommend you bring salt to church with you and have it blessed and share it with your neighbors to sprinkle around homes, parishes, cars. It does offer protection. … Maybe if we put salt on the sidewalk, the ice will disappear.”
The bishop, along with Father Christopher Collins, led a group of about 40 people in a decade of the rosary, and hymns for those being detained by immigration enforcement. Some attendees held paintings of Our Lady of Guadalupe in honor of her feast day.
Collins told the assembly of laypeople that the opposite of chaos “is not order, but community,” such as that of their own that day, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
The group meets often at the Whipple Federal Building but was barred from entering and asked by security to take the meeting off the building’s grounds on Friday.
The same day, the parent of a local Catholic school student was detained by ICE and the immigrant’s attorney, Evangeline Dhawan-Maloney, stopped by the prayer gathering to thank the group for its advocacy.
While the majority of Catholics support President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a rare “special pastoral message” on immigration – the first of its kind in over a decade – during their November 2025 plenary assembly. The statement, which was nearly universally decried by Catholic influencers, lamented a “climate of fear” in immigrant communities while opposing “indiscriminate mass deportation.”
In 2019, a contingent of 14 Catholic bishops who lived on the U.S. and Mexican sides of the Texas-Mexico border signed a statement rebuking Trump’s immigration policies. Both statements selectively quoted Scripture while ignoring grave consequences of unfettered illegal immigration, like cartel violence and drug smuggling, which Trump aggressively fought also when he gave $5.8 billion in aid and investment to Central America and another $4.8 billion for southern Mexico.
Catholic teaching, per the Catechism and St. Thomas Aquinas, has long affirmed that a country has a right to regulate its borders to protect the common good. Social, religious, economic, crime, education, and other facets of a nation all play a role in its common good.
Trump border czar Tom Homan, who is Catholic, has repeatedly drawn attention to the efforts the administration has taken to root out corruption and ensure Americans remain safe. He recently said that immigration official officials have located 62,000 unaccompanied migrant children, some of whom were victims of sex trafficking and child labor. “Over half a million children were smuggled into this country under Joe Biden,” he told Fox News recently.
