PHILADELPHIA (OSV News) – Recent migrants bused to Philadelphia by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are being welcomed to the “city of brotherly love” with a simple greeting by a Catholic advocate for immigrants.
“Our answer is yes,” Peter Pedemonti, co-director and founding member of the nonprofit New Sanctuary Movement, an interfaith immigrant justice organization founded in 2007 and based in Philadelphia’s impoverished Kensington neighborhood, told OSV News. “And then we figure out the details.”
Since Nov. 16, a total of 74 asylum seekers in two buses have been sent from Texas to Philadelphia by Abbott, with the second bus arriving Nov. 21. Additional buses of migrants are expected in the coming weeks.
Since the spring, Texas has sent some 13,000 migrants to Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago. Philadelphia was the latest destination, a move Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney condemned as a “purposefully cruel policy” aimed at migrants who are allowed to remain temporarily in the U.S. on humanitarian parole.
Abbott, however, said in a Nov. 15 statement his efforts aimed to bring “much-needed relief” to border communities in Texas “overwhelmed by the historic influx of migrants caused by President Biden’s reckless open border policies.” Both the Texas governor and the U.S. president are Catholic.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s most recent data, migrant illegal crossings at the nation’s southwest border are at record levels, with CBP stopping individuals more than 2.76 million times during the 12 months ending Sept. 30.
The agency’s data suggest the spike is due to a surge in arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, with migrants fleeing varying combinations of economic hardship, violence and repression.
Pedemonti, whose office is across the street from his parish, Visitation B.V.M. Church, roots his focus as a Catholic advocate for immigrants in what Jesus Christ calls his followers to do. He draws on his faith to “welcome (these) folks with love, solidarity, and support as children of God.”
“Real love is hard,” Pedemonti said. “That’s the part when the rubber hits the road: to answer that call for Christ.”
Philadelphia city agencies partnered with a number of immigrant nonprofits such as New Sanctuary Movement to provide the arrivals – many of whom hail from Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Nicaragua – with food, water, shelter, health care, legal aid and social services.
The migrants then typically travel to stay with family or friends already in the U.S. while awaiting immigration proceedings. Wait time for such cases in 2021 averaged almost four years, according to the Biden administration.
New Sanctuary Movement co-director Blanca Pacheco accompanied one young passenger on the Nov. 16 bus — a dehydrated, feverish 10-year-old girl — to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for treatment.
Pacheco told OSV News the girl’s mother feared “her child would be taken away” from her. She added the remaining passengers were also “afraid they were actually going to be arrested, tricked and sent somewhere else.”
Pedemonti said busing migrants all over the U.S. is “not the answer” for addressing the issues posed by the increasing number of people arriving at the U.S. border. He emphasized migrants, as people, should not be used as a means to the end of making “political points.”
At the same time, Pedemonti acknowledged “there is nuance” regarding immigration at the southwest border.
“If agencies and groups down on the border are overwhelmed, that is something that (requires) all of us coming together as a country to support them,” said Pedemonti, the son of Italian and English immigrants to the U.S. and a married father of two who has been active in social justice movements for more than two decades.
The Catholic faith “helps to ground us in the values of welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbor and really seeing each other as brothers and sisters,” he said.
Pedemonti called for the U.S. to “invest in the infrastructure needed to be able to accept this shift in migration,” adding “as a country, we can do this” given an “abundance” of resources.
But the greatest resources needed are ultimately spiritual, Pedemonti said. He noted in particular the challenge of changing hearts and minds through loving and praying for those who do not love migrants that have arrived in their state.
“I have seen, time after time, that in the spiritual tools we have … there is something that works,” he said. “I have seen opponents who are dead set against us change.”
Pedemonti relies on prayer, fasting and the Eucharist to sustain his outreach – with faith and works each strengthening the other.
“For me, Mass is made deeper and more profound by the work I do during the week,” he said. “I think this work feeds my faith, and on the flip side, faith nurtures and challenges me in this work. It’s the well that keeps me able to do this.”
Gina Christian is a National Reporter for OSV News.
