Bishop Michael Pham prays with a couple in the parking lot of Holy Family Catholic Church in San Diego on August 9. Photo / Sandy Huffaker, The Washington Post
When Bishop Michael Pham walks the halls of an immigration court, he sees migrants facing the most intense United States deportation campaign in decades, and glimpses moments of his own life.
Pham says he remembers being 8 years old on a packed cargo boat floating off the coast of Vietnam for days without food or water, eventually realising the bodies across the deck weren’t asleep.
And at 14, arriving in America without his parents.
He recalls his eight siblings, a few years later, in a tiny, overloaded house in East San Diego, scurrying to hide when the landlord appeared.
That boy is now the new leader of a 1.5-million-member diocese, a diverse region filled with migrants from around the world, major military installations and a 225km border with Mexico.
He is the first US bishop named by the first US pope – Pope Leo – who, mirroring his predecessor, Pope Francis, has named migration first among the key challenges facing the world.
And so Pham, the first Vietnamese American to lead a US diocese, headed one recent morning to the fourth floor of a federal courthouse where he planned to watch immigration hearings.
He wore his clerical garb and a huge silver cross necklace, serving as a silent reminder of human dignity that he hoped would be comforting to migrants and thought-provoking to masked agents, government lawyers, judges and, eventually, the world.
“The more we speak out, the more people will understand what we’re facing,” Pham said as he entered the building.
What it means to bring the teachings of Jesus to an American immigration court isn’t clear.
The Catholic Church – like many religious institutions – has lost influence over the last few decades.
Its congregations are divided on the issue of immigration, and even how involved the church should be in the debate.
Church leaders like Pham are attempting to thread a needle: providing visible support to migrants without becoming entangled in partisan politics.
“The kingdom of heaven is” at stake in the church’s efforts to bring more dignity to migrants facing potential deportation, Pham said.
Before Pham was installed in July, he led clergy members from a cathedral Mass to immigration court, where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents lining the hallways scattered, witnesses say.
Pham, other clergy members and faith-motivated volunteers have since expanded the effort into what are now daily vigils to offer support to migrants during their immigration hearings.
They want to be a visible witness of God and, Pham said, restore dignity to the experience of migrants in a country and church that are full of migrants.
Several bishops across the country are following suit.
One marched with a group of protesters to ICE headquarters in Detroit.
Another prayed outside the new immigration detention centre in the Florida Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz.
The diocese in Orange County, California, has launched its own programme to send witnesses to immigration hearings.
While some bishops have long been vocal on migrants’ rights, recently more conservative members of the clergy leadership have begun expressing alarm over a deportation campaign that they say sweeps up undocumented people with no criminal record and who have worked and lived in the US for decades.
Their activism represents the new face of the church led by Pope Leo – outspoken, but “not looking for a fight”, said Christopher White, author of Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy.
White said Leo believes, as did Francis, in prioritising empathy for migrants. But where Francis was “spontaneous and unscripted”, he said, Leo is detail-oriented and less confrontational.
According to Catholic teachings, nations have a clear right to control their borders and to protect their citizens. The teachings also say humans have the right to migrate.
Efforts by Pham and other bishops to convey their message come at a challenging time for the church.
The San Diego Diocese is in bankruptcy proceedings – as are multiple other dioceses – because of mostly decades-old clergy abuse lawsuits.
The Trump Administration has dramatically reduced government funding for church programmes, including those serving refugees or feeding the poor.
And Catholics are divided about the role they want the church to play in immigration.
In a survey released last year by the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a Georgetown University-based research group, 43% of US Catholics said that levels of immigration should be decreased, while 23% said they should be increased.
Nineteen per cent said their faith “very much” informs their opinion on immigration, while 46% said it informs them “only a little” or “not very much”.
Glenn Graczyk, a devout Catholic who spent 30 years in the San Diego branch of the US Border Patrol, said he believes in defending the dignity of migrants but that the church’s role should be limited.
“In my view, and in the views of most of my friends,” he said, “the government has its job and church has its job. Each should stay out of the other’s.”
For years, his work involved responding to chaotic scenes in downtown San Diego when hundreds of migrants were released from detention each night and told to return to court later for a hearing.
The current deportation effort is more humane, Graczyk said, than watching children cross the border alone. “When I support the dignity of an illegal alien, it’s to keep them safe from danger and from mistreatment in the workplace,” he said.
Pham’s visit to the courthouse in early August ended quickly when he learned the in-person hearings for the morning were over. A few days later, a priest in Pham’s diocese hustled past half a dozen immigration officers with masks, guns and protective vests, and into courtroom four.
A lawyer for a woman whom the government was attempting to quickly deport had requested that a priest attend her hearing. So the Rev Hung Nguyen, who came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam, took a seat on one of the wooden benches in the courtroom and alternately bent his head in prayer and jotted notes.
The woman’s lawyer told the judge that she was ill and that the government hadn’t informed them about the expedited deportation.
The judge set a new court date for three weeks later. Nguyen stood to escort the woman out of the courtroom. She smiled weakly at him.
When the door opened, masked ICE officers quickly surrounded and detained her.
Immigrants’ rights advocates drew closer with iPhone cameras recording. The tense cluster of people moved down the hallway to the lift. The woman appeared in shock as Nguyen and a second priest stood to the side, but in her line of sight.
The priests said that they want to be visible to frightened people leaving court and hoped that she would look at them rather than the ICE officers, even if for a few seconds. They wanted to “let her know she is not alone in that moment”, Nguyen said.
As they waited for the lift door to open, a masked officer ordered an advocate who was recording the interaction to move away. The advocate responded that it was the officer who should move.
“Stand back!” the officer said. “I’ve got a gun!”
As the lift doors opened, the activist yelled to the officers guiding the women away: “Repent!”
Outside the courthouse, Nguyen said he was disappointed that the woman was detained but hoped that his presence would help build compassion and ultimately lead to policy change.
“In a sense that’s what we set out to do. We can’t change the results. We can’t change the system,” he said.
God intends life to be a journey, Pham said, and his has had ups and downs.
Before coming to the US, his family went on the run multiple times within their native Vietnam as the Communist Party slowly took over the country and conflict led to bombings and other violence.
Eventually, Pham and two siblings made their way to a Malaysian refugee camp without their parents. A Lutheran refugee resettlement group placed them on a dairy farm in Minnesota in 1981.
After two years, his entire family was reunited in Minnesota. They soon relocated to a tiny rental house in San Diego.
Back then, Americans were more welcoming “and the values of the country were much more kind and compassionate”, Pham said. “The climate was totally different.”
Pham was interested in maths growing up and earned a degree in aeronautical engineering – a proper, well-paying path for their eldest boy, his parents believed.
To satisfy a general education requirement, he took a philosophy class called “Human Nature” that made him think in new ways about the meaning of life. He looked at the multigenerational struggles of his family, and he saw God’s blessings.
He became a priest in 1999 and has spent his entire career in the San Diego Diocese, serving in large, prominent parishes and quickly rising into bigger jobs.
As a young priest, Pham said, he learned that he needed to master Spanish to minister to his diverse parishioners, many of whom were migrants. He began studying, sometimes spending weeks at a time at an immersion school in Mexico.
As the diocese’s first vicar for ethnic and intercultural communities, he launched the Pentecost Mass for All Peoples, a large annual gathering. He commissioned a large wooden sculpture of Mary that stands in the diocese’s hilltop headquarters, with her cloak open, sheltering more than a dozen saints and children of different races and continents.
Pham’s belief in celebrating diversity is rooted, he said, in the Book of Exodus, where God leads a “mixed multitude” out of Egypt toward the creation of the promised land.
On a recent day Pham stopped at one of his former parishes, Good Shepherd, which sits in the working-middle-class neighbourhood of Mira Mesa and serves 6000 families with Masses each weekend in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
He and the pastor, the Rev Elmer Mandac, who is from the Philippines, talked about all the ways the immigration crackdown is impacting their parish and themselves.
Pham is careful when speaking about his own experience as a migrant, not wanting to take the spotlight.
But it comes up often when they hear confessions, both said. People talk about their lives and relationships being “shattered”, Pham said.
Mandac said local police offered to deliver a presentation to migrants about their rights, but congregants were too afraid to attend. A session by immigration lawyers was poorly attended for the same reason, he said.
“To experience [poor treatment] in your own homeland and then to see it here and experience it here is very painful,” Pham said, as Mandac nodded.
Pham said he hopes efforts like his court programme will impact government policy eventually, but he demurs when asked about what policies he would like to see changed.
Asked if his family might have come to the US without proper documentation, Pham said he thinks about his father, trying to protect his family of 11.
“I’d say that we would have tried to find a way in every way we could.”