DO ILLEGAL migrants have rights? The question is being raised in both Washington, DC, and Westminster. In the United States, threats to the rights of undocumented migrants have increased sharply with the intensified round-ups, often physically violent, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials (News, 14 November). In the UK, the reforms announced by the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, have been described, even by her supporters, as “draconian” and the most significant tightening of immigration since the Second World War.
In the US, things have come to such a pass that those detained for deportation have even been denied access to the eucharist. Nuns, priests, and even a bishop carrying the Sacrament have been turned away at the door by ICE officials in Chicago, the home town of Pope Leo XIV, who has offered his strongest criticism yet of the Trump administration.
So grave is the crisis that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued its first Special Message for 12 years on the subject. The treatment of immigrants has now replaced abortion at the top of the Bishops’ political agenda. They warn of a “climate of fear and anxiety”, of parents “who fear being detained when taking their children to school”, and of families who have “arbitrarily lost their legal status”. They issued an unprecedented video, in which each prelate reads a punchy line from their prepared message. Even bishops who previously supported Trump have become critical.
In the UK, Ms Mahmood declares that she is on a “moral mission” in announcing that incomers must reapply for refugee status every 30 months, and may be forced to return home once their countries are deemed safe — taking with them children born in Britain. Appeals will be curtailed. The definition of “inhumane and degrading treatment” will be narrowed. And there is much else. If liberals won’t enforce borders, she argues, fascists will, and more harshly.
But is her agenda any more moral than President Trump’s?
Trump defenders in the US persistently confuse human rights and civil rights. Civil rights spring from the “social contract”, which implies that those who pay taxes, follow the law, and share in the democratic community have privileges that outsiders do not. A welfare state cannot serve the world. Strong societies depend on shared norms, and unrestricted access to rights may erode them.
But human rights are different. They are not earned by joining a political community: they belong to everyone made in the image of God. All have the right to life, to freedom of religion and expression, to due process, to freedom from torture or degrading treatment. Citizens can vote for border control, but they cannot justify violating human rights. A state can detain, process, and deport — but it cannot extinguish fundamental rights.
This is the line that the American bishops are now trying to draw, and the line that the UK must take care not to blur. In reform of immigration laws and procedures, as the US bishops say, human dignity and national security must not be put in conflict. Ms Mahmood’s loosening of the obligations of the European Convention on Human Rights — or scrapping it, as Reform and the Tories demand — must not be a euphemism for the disregard of basic human rights. That would not be a moral mission, but a moral mistake.
