Migration

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Spain Is an Example to the World

Aug. 11, 2025
Five migrants walking forward in a row, draped with red blankets.

Migrants on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria last year.Credit...Borja Suarez/Reuters

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By Omar G. Encarnación

Mr. Encarnación is an expert on Spanish politics.

Spain is having a moment bucking Western political trends. The country has recently recognized Palestine as a state, resisted President Trump’s demand that NATO members increase their defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product and doubled down on D.E.I. programs. But there’s no better example of Spain going its own way than immigration. At a time when many Western democracies are trying to keep immigrants out, Spain is boldly welcoming them in.

The details are striking. In May, new regulations went into effect that eased migrants’ ability to obtain residency and work permits, and the Spanish Parliament began debating a bill to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants. These reforms could open a path to Spanish citizenship to more than one million people. Most of them are part of a historic immigration surge that between 2021 and 2023 brought nearly three million people born outside the European Union to Spain.

Demand has something to do with it: Like many Western democracies, Spain needs more people. Last year the national birthrate was 1.4, the second lowest in the European Union and well below the 2.1 threshold needed to maintain the country’s population level of around 48 million people. Spain also has a big economy — the fourth largest in the E.U. — fueled by a travel and tourism industry that is brimming with jobs that most Spaniards do not want.

But unlike in other countries, backlash has been strikingly muted. That’s partly because some of these pro-migrant measures stem from society at large. The push for the undocumented immigrants’ amnesty did not originate with the government, tellingly, but with a popular petition that garnered 600,000 signatures and was endorsed by 900 nongovernmental organizations, business groups and even the Spanish Conference of Bishops. The government, in turn, has designed a humane and pragmatic approach, offering an example for other countries to emulate.

There are, to be sure, some very Spanish reasons for the exception. Because of its vast overseas empire, Spain was for centuries a mass exporter of people. During the Spanish Civil War and the four-decades-long dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, some two million people were forced to leave the country, fleeing famine, violence and political repression. Up until the 1970s, Spain provided migrant laborers to farms and factories across Europe. After the 2008 financial crisis, which sent unemployment soaring to 25 percent, thousands of professionals left Spain for jobs abroad.

This rich and complex history helps explain the relatively high level of tolerance for immigration among Spaniards. In 2019, a Pew survey found that Spain had by far the most positive attitude toward immigrants in Europe. This was no outlier. A 2021 study of polls going back about 30 years showed that “Spain has consistently maintained more open attitudes toward immigration than the European average, with less rejection and a greater appreciation of its contributions to society and the economy.”

Spain’s fragmented sense of national identity is another important factor. The strength of regional nationalism in places like Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia makes it harder for right-wing politicians to mobilize the public against immigration through nationalist appeals and xenophobic arguments. A Spanish version of “France for the French,” the doctrine of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, would be absurd in Spain. It took until 2019 for an explicitly anti-migrant party, the far-right Vox, to even enter the Spanish Parliament.

Ultimately, however, Spain’s immigration politics owe most to the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, one of the last exponents of social democracy in Europe. Although decidedly liberal, Mr. Sánchez’s approach is far from an experiment with open borders. Instead, it’s as pragmatic as it is deliberate. It’s true he has built-in advantages not shared by other European leaders. But by marrying practical solutions to an uplifting message, he has provided a case study in how to build support for progressive immigration policies.

For starters, the government smartly prioritized immigrants from Latin America, allowing them to apply for citizenship after just two years. Fluent in Spanish and overwhelmingly Catholic, Latin American immigrants blend with the local culture even in the least cosmopolitan parts of Spain. A case in point are Venezuelans, who are now barred from entering the United States, thanks to Mr. Trump. To enter Spain, they need only a plane ticket and a valid passport. In the first three months of the year, 25,000 took up the opportunity.

A lot of strategic thinking has gone into using immigration to alleviate some of Spain’s biggest problems. Labor shortages in technology, hospitality, agriculture and elderly care, for example, are being addressed by granting international students work permits. Immigrants have also been incentivized to settle in so-called Empty Spain, those parts of the country where the population has dried up. Some of the 200,000 Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Spain since 2022 have brought new life to villages and towns on the brink of extinction.

Most important, perhaps, Mr. Sánchez has excelled at framing the case for immigration. He has emphasized its economic benefits, including bringing younger workers into the social security system and filling jobs unwanted by Spaniards. An expanding economy is adding authority to these arguments. Since the pandemic, the Spanish economy has outperformed its European counterparts. Last year, while Germany, France and Italy experienced modest growth or even a contraction, Spain grew a healthy 3.2 percent.

Even so, Mr. Sánchez has not shied away from speaking in moral terms, drawing on Spain’s history as a nation of migrants and refugees. “We have to remember the odysseys of our mothers and fathers, our grandfathers and grandmothers in Latin America, in the Caribbean and Europe,” he told Parliament last year. “And understand that our duty now, especially now, is to be that welcoming, tolerant, supportive society that they would have liked to find.”

How long Spain will continue to extend the welcome mat is an open question. Polls show that concerns about immigration among Spaniards are rising, driven in part by the sensationalist coverage of the arrival of African refugees. Thousands have drowned in recent years attempting to reach Spain, and those who manage to enter the country are generally deported. Right-wing parties, especially Vox, are exploiting this humanitarian crisis. Should Vox manage to enter government after the next election, which must be held before August 2027, a turn against immigration will certainly follow.

For now, though, Spain is proving an important point: A generous immigration policy is not a threat to the nation or to a thriving economy. More than that, it is a resource for growth and renewal that Spain’s peers spurn at their cost.

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St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Unveil Mural Celebrating City’s Immigrants

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan’s art commission hits a hot button. “I thought they might say, ‘We don’t want to wade in these waters’ — and the opposite happened,” the painter said.

Video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/08/12/146 ... g_720p.mp4

The artist Adam Cvijanovic applies a finishing touch to his mural, “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding,” which depicts the arrival of immigrants to New York City in the 19th century and the present.

By Arthur LubowVisuals by George Etheredge
Published Aug. 14, 2025
Updated Aug. 15, 2025
At a time when immigration is a bitterly divisive issue, with the Trump administration ramping up arrests and deportations, St. Patrick’s Cathedral will unveil a huge mural next month depicting the arrival of immigrants to New York City in the 19th century and the present.

“It’s a celebration of a city that has been built by immigrants and where immigrants have been welcomed,” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who is also the archbishop of New York, said in an interview in his official residence adjoining St. Patrick’s. The first major art commission in the cathedral since bronze doors were installed at the Fifth Avenue entrance in 1949, it will be dedicated during a mass on Sept. 21.

Roughly 21 feet tall, the mural, of 12 large panels, was painted by the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic (pronounced svee-YAHN-o-vitch), who titled it (with a slight word adjustment) after a song popularized by Elvis Costello, “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding.” Along with immigration, he depicted a historic event dear to the cardinal’s heart: the Holy Apparition at Knock, in which 15 people in the Irish village of that name in 1879 reported seeing the Virgin Mary, two saints and the Lamb of God, a symbol of Jesus Christ, in a vision that lasted for about two hours on a wall of the parish church.

ImageA portrait of the artist Adam Cvijanovic, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard, looking toward the camera.

Adam Cvijanovic, who grew up in Cambridge, Mass., is known for his large-scale realistic murals.

Six artists competed for the commission in 2023. Dolan and a committee of art advisers and donors favored Cvijanovic’s proposal, which is in a realistic style. “The rest of them were a little too Picasso-like,” Dolan said. “I wanted something that people could look at and see the Holy Apparition at Knock, and not that you’d have to be on LSD to figure it out.”

Cvijanovic, 64, who is self-taught, grew up in Cambridge, Mass., where his Yugoslavian-born father taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has made a career out of creating large murals that commemorate historic events and real-life characters, with a romanticism that lies somewhere between 19th-century landscape painting and portraiture and 21st-century video games and commercial advertising.

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Mother Cabrini, with a halo around her head, and the Rev. Félix Varela behind her, in the midst of present-day immigrants to New York.

Mother Cabrini, whose halo indicates her sainthood, and the Rev. Félix Varela behind her, appear in the midst of present-day immigrants to New York.

Among his past works are a series completed in 2023, at the Major General Emmett J. Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, of floor-to-ceiling paintings of 17 unpeopled landscapes around the world where American soldiers have fought; and on an equally grand scale in 2008, a group of 16 ½ foot tall depictions of the Babylonian sets in D.W. Griffiths’ 1916 silent-film extravaganza, “Intolerance.”

The St. Patrick’s mural will be a lasting legacy for Dolan, who, when he turned 75 in February, submitted his resignation as cardinal and archbishop. (The Vatican has not named a successor.) A week before his birthday, he had strongly criticized an assertion by Vice President JD Vance that the Roman Catholic bishops were in favor of immigration because the church profited from resettlement funds. He called it “inaccurate,” “scurrilous” and “very nasty.” In fact, he said, the church loses money “hand over fist” in caring for immigrants.

Image
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan in a black suit, Roman collar and a silver necklace with a crucifix.

“It’s a celebration of a city that has been built by immigrants and where immigrants have been welcomed,” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan said of the mural, which is the first major art commission in the cathedral since bronze doors were installed at the Fifth Avenue entrance in 1949.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

As immigration became a hot-button topic, Cvijanovic worried that the archdiocese might revise its brief. “I thought they might say, ‘We don’t want to wade in these waters’ — and the opposite happened,” he recounted. “They said, ‘We want to go right ahead.’”

Like his patron, Cvijanovic felt that the mural at St. Patrick’s should be accessible. “Having the painting work for people who have no relation to the devotional activity is important,” he said, standing in front of the painted panels in the hangar-like studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where he had made them. “I want people to be able to see themselves in it. There’s a lot of great public art where that doesn’t happen.”

He brought up a controversial Cor-ten steel sculpture by Richard Serra that was installed in downtown Manhattan in 1981 but removed eight years later after a wave of protests from people who worked near the Federal plaza where it stood. “I love Richard Serra myself, but there was a relating problem with ‘Tilted Arc,’” Cvijanovic said. “This painting should be pretty accessible on a basic level.”

Image
Close-up of a hand dipping a brush into oil paint.

Cvijanovic dips a brush into oil paint.

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A sketch of two first responders in blue uniforms.

The artist initially sketched the mural (including the first responders) on Tyvek.

In addition to immigrants and the apparition, Cvijanovic portrayed five first responders in uniform, intended to stir memories of the World Trade Center disaster. “For the Irish and Italians who came here, usually fire and police departments is the first good job you could get,” Cvijanovic said. “There’s a long relationship between the church and the services.” Chins up, the first responders face forward jauntily, in a self-confident pose that feels very contemporary. “I wanted to make an American painting,” Cvijanovic said. “As much as I’m drawing from Caravaggio, I’m also drawing from posters for ‘X-Men.’”

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A replica of the cathedral and Rockefeller Center that the artist had constructed rest on a chair.

A replica of the cathedral and Rockefeller Center that the artist had constructed. In the mural, the model is held by an angel.

The theme of immigration wasn’t the initial focus of the mural. The cathedral was dedicated in the same year that the Apparition at Knock occurred. Looking for a way to add what he called some “snap, crackle and pop” to the entry vestibule, which is known in architectural terminology as the narthex, Dolan — who visited Knock on his first trip to Ireland in 1973 and has returned many times since — thought a picture of that legendary miracle might brighten the entrance’s “dull and somber dreariness.” When he brought the idea to the advisory committee, he was encouraged to broaden his vision. “They said, ‘Show the Apparition at Knock, but let’s go from there to the immigration that flows out of it,’” he explained.

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The mural will be installed in the narthex, just behind the last row of pews.

The cathedral, which is named for the patron saint of Ireland, moved uptown from its site in the NoLIta neighborhood (where the original building survives) at the tail end of the era of mass Irish immigration, which began during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. Newcomers from Ireland constituted the bulk of the archdiocese’s worshipers at that time. Dolan’s Irish-born predecessor, Archbishop John Hughes, led the drive to construct a magnificent cathedral.

“He was frustrated about raising money,” remarked Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’” Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”

To the right of the cathedral’s central door, large panels will depict a group of 19th-century Irish immigrants, dressed in the bonnets, pinafores and caps of the period, as they descend from a ship that still holds many yet to disembark. (One has the face of Dolan’s mother.)

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In his studio, the artist puts finishing touches on the section of the mural that depicts 19th-century Irish immigrants.

In his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Cvijanovic places his brush on the section of the mural that depicts 19th-century Irish immigrants. On the left are the first responders, and Pierre Toussaint, a formerly enslaved Haitian American who became a wealthy philanthropist, is visible on the extreme left.

“I wanted this to be cool and blue,” Cvijanovic said. “And I wanted it to evoke an old film. It’s also what they were wearing. This is before bright dyes. The colors were very muted.” Hovering above them are the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, the figures that were reported by the witnesses of the apparition.

Because the vision at Knock appeared in the pouring rain, Cvijanovic enlisted a gilder to apply lines of platinum and gold. On a realistic level, they represent precipitation. But he regards the gilding as more than that. “It’s talking to the Art Deco in Rockefeller Center across the street,” he said. “And it’s talking about the pipes of the organ that is across from the narthex. And I wanted it to be a representation of an abstract God. Because the gold is reacting with the light, it’s stronger than anything I can paint.”

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In the artist's studio are two icons and a wooden cross that belonged to his father.

The artist, who was raised in the Eastern Orthodox church, has two icons and a wooden cross that belonged to his father in the studio.

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The gold gilders’ work area at Adam Cvijanovic’s studio.

Modern-day immigrants — Hispanic, Asian, Black — are depicted to the left of the door. Seated on their luggage, staring in different directions, they seem, unlike their Irish counterparts, to be waiting. Above them is the Lamb of God on an altar. In their midst is the Italian-born Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, known as Mother Cabrini, who established orphanages and hospitals for immigrants in this country and was the first American to be canonized as a saint. Behind her is the Rev. Félix Varela, a Cuban patriot who fled to New York, where, beginning in the 1820s, he established churches that ministered to immigrant communities in Lower Manhattan.

Cabrini and Varela were on the archdiocese’s wish-list of figures for the murals, along with Dorothy Day, Archbishop Hughes, and Pierre Toussaint, a formerly enslaved Haitian American who became a wealthy hairdresser and philanthropist in New York in the early 19th century. Al Smith, a favorite of Dolan — who keeps the New York governor’s cigar humidor in his residence — also pops up in a mural, brandishing his trademark cigar.

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The five first responders on the right are in counterpoint to (from the left) Archbishop John Hughes, Kateri Tekakwitha, Al Smith, Dorothy Day and Pierre Toussaint.

At Cvijanovic’s suggestion, Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th-century Mohawk-Algonquin woman who converted to Catholicism and was the first Indigenous North American to be canonized, was added to the roster. “I figured if this is all about immigrants, you’ve got to have someone to represent the people who were here,” he said. “Because the land wasn’t empty.”

To render the figures, he assembled about 20 models at a time on the deck of a house in suburban Somerset County, N.J., near where his wife, Julia Carbonetta, grew up and her parents still reside. Many of the people in the painting are her high school friends and their children. It took him half a year to sketch the compositions on Tyvek, the polyethylene wrapping fabric that is typically used for housing insulation. He transferred those templates to canvas, much as his Renaissance predecessors “pounced” full-size sketches, known as cartoons, by pricking holes and pushing through charcoal. The painting took another nine months.

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A desk with brush pots filled with various paint brushes, paint rags and other art materials.


“One day, there was my wife posing and a photographer and someone pouncing the cartoon, and the gilders,” he recalled. “That night I said to my wife, ‘You just saw something amazing. You saw a Renaissance studio, with all these guys here to make a painting for the church.’”

As traditional as Cvijanovic’s painterly technique is the Roman Catholic’s commitment to immigrants in New York.“Something very special in the history of the New York Archdiocese is the compassion and support of immigrants that goes back to Hughes and the 19th century,” said James T. Fisher, professor emeritus at Fordham University and the author of “Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America” (2007). He noted that during the 1950s and early 1960s, Cardinal Francis Spellman enthusiastically welcomed the influx of Puerto Ricans to the city, urging priests to learn Spanish. “They really have this legacy they can point to,” he continued. “Institutionally, the mural is going to work very well.”

Cardinal Dolan, asked if he considered receding from the political controversy that may greet the unveiling of the mural, said he never wavered.

“There is a bit of timeliness with the controversy over immigrants,” he said. “If somebody says this speaks to the sacredness of the immigrants and to a cherished part of the legacy of the church, that’s all to the good. Immigration used to be a unifying principle. It was almost patriotic to be pro-immigrant. Now it’s a cause of division. I’m hoping this will help bring people together.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/arts ... dolan.html

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Immigrant Population in U.S. Drops for the First Time in Decades

An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population declined by nearly 1.5 million.


Aggressive enforcement has created a climate of fear in immigrant communities across the country. Above, Corona, Queens, in 2023.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times


For the first time in decades, more immigrants are leaving the United States than arriving, a new study finds, an early indication that President Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda is leading people to depart — whether through deportation or by choice.

An analysis of new census data released on Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population in the United States — both lawful and unlawful residents — declined by nearly 1.5 million. In June, the country was home to 51.9 million immigrants, down from 53.3 million six months earlier.

Officials from the Trump administration have applauded the net outflow, asserting that pressures on government services have eased and that job markets have rebounded. And some supporters of the immigration crackdown say it hasn’t gone far enough.

But experts predict looming negative economic and demographic consequences for the United States if the trend persists. Immigrants are a critical work force in many sectors, and the country’s reliance on them is growing as more baby boomers retire.

After campaigning on a promise of mass deportations, Mr. Trump has introduced sweeping measures to reduce immigration. His administration has restricted access to asylum at the southern border, tightened visa requirements for students and tech workers and deployed thousands of federal agents to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The crackdown has led immigrants to leave the country voluntarily and has discouraged others from coming.

Lillian Divina Leite, 46, chose to use the government’s new self-deportation program to return to Brazil. A housekeeper in Charlotte, N.C., Ms. Leite said that she had begun to panic when she saw immigrants being “hunted down like hardened criminals.”

“I got really scared,” said Ms. Leite, who had fallen out of legal status after overstaying a six-month tourist visa.

“I thought, I haven’t done anything wrong in my life,” she said, “and suddenly I could be imprisoned.”

Despite the study’s findings, Kevin Lynn, executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, which advocates for less immigration, said that foreign workers who enter lawfully continue to pour into the United States and undermine Americans.

“There has been no letup,” he said. “People coming here legally, whether on green cards or employment visas, are impacting American workers at all strata, whether low-skilled or high-skilled.”

Net migration — the difference between the number of immigrants arriving and departing — has turned negative, a shift that the chief Pew demographer, Jeffrey Passel, called a “demographic certainty” so far in 2025. His team’s analysis did not calculate a separate number for undocumented immigrants, who seem likely to represent the largest number of departures, because heightened enforcement probably diminished immigrants’ participation in the census survey that was used to make estimates, he said.

They may have been undercounted, which would suggest the drop is not as severe, or their low participation could mask an even more striking decline.

The United States experienced negative net immigration in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when between 400,000 and one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans left, many under coercive repatriation programs.

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Immigrants in handcuffs make their way through a crowd of demonstrators in Chicago. Immigration officials wearing masks and vests with patches reading “Police HSI” stand on either side and behind the immigrants.

The Trump administration has introduced sweeping measures to reduce immigration. Detainees were taken into custody in June in Chicago.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Jeremy Beck, co-president of NumbersUSA, a group that favors curbs on immigration, described a decline in the number of immigrants as “a good thing for workers who will benefit from a tighter labor market, and for communities whose infrastructure was overwhelmed during the border crisis.”

Whether negative net migration becomes a lasting phenomenon depends on how far the Trump administration goes to achieve its goals, experts say, but the Pew findings echo trends identified by other recent studies.

In July, the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute projected net migration in 2025 would be flat or would even drop and predicted that the Trump administration’s policies would continue to squeeze out low- and high-skilled foreign workers at least through 2026.

“A rapid decline in immigration is going to cause economic harm,” said Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report.

Political pushback and legal challenges could lead the Trump administration to ease its crackdown and, thus, soften the impact, she said. But legislation recently passed by the Republican-controlled Congress has significantly increased funding for immigration enforcement, suggesting that the restrictive approach could extend throughout Mr. Trump’s term.

If so, “we could go into a spiral of continued decline,” said Ms. Watson, which could undermine U.S. competitiveness for global talent.

“If things are really bad, we no longer are the place where people go to do science or tech, and that could have generational repercussions,” she said.

On Day 1 in office, Mr. Trump signed several immigration-related orders. Since then, his administration has intensified efforts to curb immigration, and the president recently celebrated the prospect of negative net migration.

As he wrote in a Truth Social post on Aug. 4: “Promises made. Promises kept. Negative net migration for the first time in 50 years!”

In addition to targeting undocumented migrants, the administration has introduced measures that have undermined legal immigration.

It has paused the refugee program, which offered green cards and a path to citizenship to people fleeing persecution. It has increased screening and vetting of visa applicants, which experts expect will reduce the numbers of foreign workers and students.

The Trump administration has ended several Biden-era programs that had allowed people from troubled countries such as Haiti to live and work temporarily in the United States. Thousands of immigrants are set to lose their protected status in coming months.

Migration across the southern border, which had begun to slow under asylum restrictions imposed late in the term of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has declined further since Mr. Trump returned to office.

Employment opportunities have long been the primary draw for immigrants, with migration typically slowing during economic downturns. During the Great Recession, more Mexicans without authorized status left the United States than arrived.

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Immigrant workers in red shirts, blue pants and red hats trim coffee trees on a verdant farm in Hawaii.

Agricultural enterprises, such as this coffee farm in Hawaii, often rely on immigrant workers. Farms, restaurants and assisted-living facilities are already grappling with a shortage of workers.Credit...Michelle Mishina Kunz for The New York Times

But the current decline is unfolding in response to stringent policies and at a time when the United States needs immigration to offset a falling birthrate and an aging population.

“We have more and more people over 65 and not in the work force,” said Dowell Myers, a demography professor at the University of Southern California. “A new baby won’t help us for 20 years, but a young immigrant helps us immediately.”

“If you take a sledgehammer to the labor force by cutting immigrant flows,” he said, “we are all going to be seeing the consequences in our everyday lives.”

Restaurants, farms and assisted-living facilities are already grappling with labor shortages that could become more pronounced, he said. Many of those roles are filled by undocumented immigrants, whose population reached 14 million in 2023, according to Pew, and who accounted for 4 percent of the total U.S. population and about a quarter of the foreign-born population.

California had the most unauthorized residents in 2023, at 2.3 million, followed closely by Texas, with 2.1 million. Florida had the largest increase, adding 700,000 for a total of 1.6 million.

Through mid-2024, the unauthorized population continued to grow at a fast clip, before starting to contract following policy changes in 2025, according to a preliminary Pew analysis.

About half of the 14 million undocumented immigrants in 2023 had been in the United States for more than a decade, and 4.6 million U.S.-born children have parents who are in the country without lawful status.

Pew’s estimates are based on an analysis of Census Bureau data, including the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said last week in a news release that a decline in the population of undocumented immigrants “is already being felt nationwide, from reduced strain on public services to a resurgence in local job markets.”

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding a record 60,000 immigrants in detention, and that number is expected to soar as planned facilities open. Confined immigrants often agree to be swiftly deported rather than languish in custody while awaiting court rulings on whether they can remain in the United States.

Aggressive enforcement has created a climate of fear, disrupting everyday life for immigrant families. Across the country, many are limiting outings. Reports that some deportees are being sent to third countries, including South Sudan, or to their broken home countries have led some to self-deport rather than risk being detained and deported.

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A Honduran immigrant wearing an orange shirt, black pants and brown sandals lies in a barren holding cell.

A Honduran immigrant who federal officials said had a criminal background was detained in May at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office near Miami.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Patrick Garcia, executive director of Embrace Carolinas, an advocacy group in Charlotte, N.C., is aware of at least 10 families who have self-deported to South and Central America.

“Something that was rare has become normal,” he said, adding that “my prediction is that departures will increase as Christmas and winter approach.”

“People are making as much money as they can to leave by the end of the year,” Mr. Garcia said.

Cratchit Aime, a Haitian immigrant in Springfield, Ohio, said he intended to return with his family to Brazil, where they had previously lived, to avoid being deported to his homeland.

“There’s no way we will go to Haiti — it’s under control of bandits,” he said, referring to gangs that control swaths of the country.

In Southern California, where arrests surged in June, some longtime undocumented immigrants are choosing to depart on their own terms.

“They’d rather leave with something after decades of work here, rather than be detained and deported with nothing,” said Luz Gallegos, executive director of TODEC, an immigrant services provider in Riverside County.

On May 18, Ms. Leite submitted information on the CBP Home app, the self-deportation app introduced by the Trump administration to encourage undocumented people to leave the country. By using it, she could be eligible for free airfare, two checked bags and $1,000 in cash after arriving in Brazil.

A few weeks later, she was notified by text message to call a number to work out logistics. She called repeatedly for a week, leaving voice mail messages that went unanswered.

Finally, on June 16, she received a call. Ms. Leite was booked on a United Airlines flight leaving on July 2 to São Paulo through Chicago. She landed in Brazil on July 3.

About two weeks later, she took delivery of $1,000 via Western Union.

“It’s a huge relief to be back home,” she said, adding that “police sirens still make me nervous.”

On social media, she has been busy offering tips for people who are eager to self-deport.

Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/i ... trump.html

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America’s Loss Could Be Central America’s Gain


Moises Castillo/Associated Press

By Anita Isaacs

Ms. Isaacs is a professor of political science at Haverford College. Her research focuses on the reintegration of return migrants in Mexico and Central America.

Once, I met a man in a rural community outside Guatemala City who had worked as a sushi chef in the United States, where he learned to speak English and even a bit of Japanese. After being arrested during a workplace raid and deported, he dreamed of opening his own restaurant in Guatemala. But his confidence had run up against a hard reality: Back home, there was no clear path to turn his newfound skills into a living. Instead, he was struggling to find work.

As a researcher of returnees to Mexico and Central America, I’ve talked to countless migrants who felt adrift once they got back home. They are often met with suspicion. Employers hesitate to hire them. Communities treat them as outsiders. Governments offer little support. For many struggling families, they represent one more mouth to feed. Gangs target them for extortion or abduction.

As part of the Trump administration’s intensified immigration enforcement, deportation flights now arrive almost daily in Guatemala City, at a military base next to La Aurora International Airport. Hundreds of migrants each week return to a country that, until recently, had no coordinated system in place to receive them. Nearly 23,000 Guatemalans were deported between January and July this year. Many had lived in the United States for much of their adult lives.

The sheer volume of people returning has quickly forced the government to reconsider its approach. The country’s Plan Retorno al Hogar, or Return Home Plan, which started in February, is now connecting deportees to jobs that take advantage of their language abilities and work experience, and providing identification documents and mental health support to help them cope with the trauma of deportation. It’s a step in the right direction.

As the United States shuts its doors to migrants, countries in Central America should embrace them. Returnees bring fluency in English and expertise in critical fields such as construction, hospitality, food service and landscaping, and many embody the resilient, can-do mentality that is a hallmark of the American ethos. With the right support, their drive, talent and knowledge can be harnessed to build up new industries and strengthen economies back home.

In Guatemala, sustainable tourism could offer one way forward. The country’s tourism sector represents only about 5 percent of G.D.P., compared with nearly 40 percent in Belize and about 9 percent in Costa Rica. And yet the country has everything its neighbors have to draw tourists in: Mayan ruins, colonial-era cities, majestic rainforests, smoking volcanoes and good surf. As the country seeks to attract more travelers, it has a chance to rethink how returning migrants might contribute to this expanding industry.

When I visited Guatemala in late January, the government was grappling with the sudden reset in U.S.-Guatemala relations and how to address the anticipated flood of returning migrants. A solution I proposed to government officials and others during that trip was to link migrant reintegration with the development of a sustainable-tourism industry.

The idea was met with enthusiasm: Business leaders saw it as a path to securing government investment in roads, bridges and airports. Indigenous leaders viewed it as an opportunity to showcase their entrepreneurship, share their culture and give young people a reason to stay. Immigrant advocates envisioned a chance to reduce the stigma faced by deportees.

Later, I interviewed Guatemalans living in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia about whether they would consider leaving the United States and what kind of work they might do if they did. They said they would relish the opportunity to return and use their know-how. One man told me, “I would return for sure, if I had the chance to build something real at home.” They talked about building eco-lodges, opening fusion restaurants and manicuring the lawns of newly opened hotels.

To be sure, Guatemala faces daunting challenges that go far beyond reintegrating returnees. The country’s infrastructure is crumbling. Poverty is widespread. Credit is hard to come by. Many people lack formal land titles, making it nearly impossible to develop their property. Organized crime remains a persistent threat. Hotels can’t fill rooms if tourists are too afraid to visit. Entrepreneurs can’t open restaurants if gangs are waiting outside to extort them.

For decades, migration to the United States served as a kind of escape valve from those problems, offering Guatemalans the safety and opportunity they couldn’t find at home. Now, as more people return, linking reintegration to sustainable tourism may stand out as one way to deliver both economic opportunity and basic security that Guatemalan citizens have long been denied.

If Guatemala succeeds, it could offer a model for the region. El Salvador and Honduras are also grappling with waves of return migration and have begun their own modest initiatives — job fairs in El Salvador, small-business grants in Honduras. Tourism already figures into both nations’ economic strategies: El Salvador is betting on surfing, Honduras on its Bay Islands. But none — including, so far, Guatemala — have formally integrated deportees into these efforts. Guatemala has a chance to lead, showing how returnees can help drive growth in a sector with real potential across Central America.

This is an idea Washington could get behind. Supporting effective ways for returning migrants to get meaningfully plugged into local growth industries will help tackle the drivers of migration at their source and create incentives for immigrants to go back voluntarily. The Trump administration has already promoted “self-deportation,” even offering free flights and stipends to encourage immigrants to leave. A coherent strategy for returnees in their home countries would achieve the same objective, but in a way that produces durable results, rather than quick fixes.

Deportation is America’s loss and Central America’s gain: By expelling the backbone of its labor force, the United States is giving others the chance to turn that strength into their own.

In Central America, return migration is a fact of life. Every flight that lands in Guatemala City, San Salvador or Tegucigalpa is bringing home not outsiders, but compatriots whose experience abroad has given them skills, vision and global connections. Central America can choose to waste them — or to harness their ambition and expertise to transform the region from a place people flee into a destination the world seeks out.

More on immigration

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July 26, 2025
Anita Isaacs is a professor of political science at Haverford College.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/opin ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops

A federal judge had ordered agents not to make indiscriminate stops relying on factors like a person’s ethnicity or that they speak Spanish.


Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — have set off protests and clashes in the area.Credit...Stella Kalinina for The New York Times

By Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington

Sept. 8, 2025

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area that challengers called “blatant racial profiling.”

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. It is not the last word in the case, which is pending before a federal appeals court and may again reach the justices.

The court’s three liberal members dissented.

“We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low wage job,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” Justice Sotomayor added, “I dissent.”

The court’s ruling for now allows what critics say are roving patrols of masked agents routinely violating the Fourth Amendment and what supporters say is a vigorous but lawful effort to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

The majority’s failure to provide an explanation for the ruling means that it is hard to say whether its reasoning applies nationwide or is limited to the Los Angeles area, where the administration has said that the problems flowing from illegal immigration are especially pronounced. But there is little doubt that the ruling will have the practical effect of further emboldening the administration’s uncompromising efforts to deport unauthorized immigrants around the country.

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said she expected the ruling to have sweeping consequences.

“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country,” she said in a statement.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the ruling was “a win for the safety of Californians and the rule of law,” adding that “D.H.S. law enforcement will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members and other criminal illegal aliens that Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor.”

Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — have become a flashpoint, setting off protests and clashes in the area.

Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested. They described the encounters in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

In response to the suit, Judge Maame E. Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, placed significant restrictions on President Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations.

Judge Frimpong ordered agents not to rely on several factors, alone or in combination, in deciding whom to stop and question in her judicial district, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

The factors were race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or accented English; presence at a particular location, such as a day-laborer or agricultural site; or performing a particular type of work.

In a lengthy concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the only member of the majority who offered an explanation for the court’s ruling, said demographic realities justified the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

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“About 10 percent of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States — meaning about two million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million,” he wrote.

Justice Kavanaugh said the four factors identified by Judge Frimpong can play a role in determining whom to stop. For instance, he wrote, unauthorized immigrants often work as day laborers in landscaping, agriculture or construction and “many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.”

Apparent ethnicity by itself is not a permissible reason to stop someone, he added, but it can be a relevant consideration in combination with other factors.

In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the administration and Justice Kavanaugh had “all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

Justice Sotomayor was also critical of Justice Kavanaugh’s defense of what he said were agents’ “brief stops for questioning.”

“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”

One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen born in East Los Angeles, was stopped by a masked agent while he was working on his car outside a tow yard. The encounter was captured on video.

The agent asked whether Mr. Gavidia was American, and he said he was.

The agent then asked what hospital Mr. Gavidia had been born in, and he said he did not know. According to the lawsuit, the agent and a colleague proceeded to slam Mr. Gavidia against a metal gate, twist his arm and seize his phone.

“Fearing for his life, Gavidia offered to show the agents his ID,” the lawsuit said. “The agents took the ID, and about 20 minutes later, returned Gavidia’s phone and set him free. They never returned his ID.”

In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that if agents use excessive force, victims may be able to sue.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to pause the order issued by Judge Frimpong, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court. In an emergency application, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that Judge Frimpong’s order had unlawfully hamstrung immigration enforcement in the nation’s most populous judicial district.

Mr. Sauer added that federal agents used judgment and discretion.

“Needless to say,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “no one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion. Nor does anyone suggest those are the only factors federal agents ever consider. But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States, above and beyond the 1-in-10 base line odds in the district.”

Mohammad Tajsar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a disappointment.

“Although this decision is a devastating setback for our plaintiffs and communities who, for months, have been subjected to immoral immigration stops, we will continue fighting the administration’s racist deportation scheme,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s order, Justice Sotomayor wrote, was “troubling for another reason: it is entirely unexplained.”

That has been commonplace in many of the roughly 20 rulings on emergency applications filed by the Trump administration.

“In the last eight months,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “this court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially. Its interest in explaining itself, unfortunately, has not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/p ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

U.S. Deports Planeload of Iranians After Deal With Tehran, Officials Say

The deportation flight to Iran is the most stark push yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants even to places with harsh human rights conditions.


Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump insisted that the United States would double down on efforts to deport masses of migrants. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Trump administration is deporting a planeload of around 100 Iranians back to Iran from the United States after a deal between the two governments, according to two senior Iranian officials involved in the negotiations and a U.S. official with knowledge of the plans.

Iranian officials said that the plane, a U.S.-chartered flight, took off from Louisiana on Monday night and was scheduled to arrive in Iran by way of Qatar sometime on Tuesday. And the U.S. official confirmed that plans for the flight were in the final stages. All the officials spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details publicly.

The deportation is one of the most stark efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants no matter the human rights conditions they might be sent into. Earlier this year, the U.S. deported a group of Iranians, many of them converts to Christianity who face persecution at home, to both Costa Rica and Panama. The expanding deportation campaign has sparked lawsuits by immigrant advocates who have criticized the flights

For decades, the United States had given shelter to Iranians fleeing their homeland, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world. Iran persecutes women’s rights activists, political dissidents, journalists and lawyers, religious minorities and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, among others.

The identities of the Iranians and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear. In the past several years, there has been an increase in Iranian migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border and crossing illegally, including many who have claimed fear of persecution back home for their political and religious beliefs.

The United States had long hesitated or had trouble deporting migrants to certain countries like Iran because of a lack of regularized diplomatic relations and an inability to get travel documents in a timely manner. That had forced American officials to either hold migrants in detention for long periods or release them into the United States. The United States deported just more than two dozen Iranians back to the country in 2024, the highest total for years, over the course of several commercial flights.

The two Iranian officials said the deportees included men and women, some of them couples. Some had volunteered to leave after being in detention centers for months, and some had not, they said. The officials said that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the people had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing.

The deportation is a rare moment of cooperation between the United States and the Iranian government, and was the culmination of months of discussions between the two countries, the Iranian officials said.

One of the officials said that Iran’s foreign ministry was coordinating the deportees’ return and that they had been given reassurances that they would be safe and would not face any problems. Still, he said, many were disappointed and some even frightened.

In addition to inflicting political oppression, Iran is in the throes of an economic and energy crisis with plunging currency, sky-high inflation, unemployment, and water and power cuts. The economic situation is bound to get even worse with the return of United Nations Security Council sanctions that went into effect on Saturday.

Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/worl ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

Trump Administration Is Said to Plan to Cut Refugee Admissions to a Record Low

Many of the slots would go to white South Africans and others facing “unjust discrimination,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.


The first group of Afrikaner refugees arrived in the United States in May, a remarkable turnaround given that families from other nations often wait years for their chance to be vetted and brought to the country.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration plans to slash refugee admissions to a record low level in the upcoming year, reserving a bulk of the limited slots for white Afrikaners from South Africa and others facing “unjust discrimination,” according to people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The New York Times.

President Trump is expected to lower the ceiling on refugee admissions to 7,500, a drastic decrease from the cap of 125,000 set by the Biden administration last year, according to a presidential determination dated Sept. 30 and signed by Mr. Trump.

The new limit would effectively shut the door to thousands of families waiting in camps around the world and refocus a program meant to provide sanctuary for those fleeing war and famine to support mostly white South Africans.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced plans for the refugee program, said the limit on admissions would be final only when the administration consulted with Congress, as the federal government is required by law to do each year. The official said the government shutdown was preventing that consultation from happening and claimed no refugees would be admitted into the country in the fiscal year that started on Oct. 1 until Democrats and Republicans reached a deal to fund the government.

Democrats in Congress said this week that Mr. Trump had already missed the deadline and called on him to consult with them.

“Despite repeated outreach from Democratic and Republican committee staff, the Trump administration has completely discarded its legal obligation, leaving Congress in the dark and refugees in limbo,” Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Alex Padilla of California said in a statement.

“The consequences are dire,” they said, adding that the virtual shutdown of the refugee program was “betraying the nation’s promise as a refuge for the oppressed.”

Mr. Trump took steps to effectively kill the refugee program when he signed an executive order on the first day of his second term suspending resettlement for most refugees. He has also effectively cut off migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border from seeking protection under another program known as asylum, part of a broader effort to restrict immigration to the United States.

Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, a Jewish resettlement agency, said the administration was eroding America’s global standing by turning its back on the most vulnerable.

“Such a low refugee ceiling would break America’s promise to people who played by the rules,” said Mr. Hetfield, whose organization has had to lay off more than half its staff since Mr. Trump gutted funding for the refugee program.

“Trump isn’t just putting the Afrikaners to the front of the line,” Mr. Hetfield said. “He is kicking years-long-waiting refugees out of the line.”

The new ceiling on refugee admissions would be half the previous record low of 15,000 slots that Mr. Trump set before leaving office in 2020.

In the 2024 fiscal year, the United States resettled roughly 100,000 refugees for the first time in more than a decade. That number has withered since Mr. Trump paused the program. Figures for refugee arrivals in the government database have not been updated since he returned to office, but officials working with refugee organizations say just scores of non-South African refugees have been processed into the United States.

When the administration froze the program in January, the White House argued that the nation did not have the resources to absorb refugees after a record number of migrants entered the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.

Migrants at the border, however, enter the nation through a program that is separate from the State Department’s roughly 40-year-old refugee program. Applicants for the refugee program must often wait years in camps overseas before coming to the United States. They must pass extensive background checks, interviews and medical exams before they are welcomed to the country.

The Trump administration has argued that the program needs to be upended to align with the national interests of the United States.

For Mr. Trump, that has appeared to mean refocusing the program on South African descendants of Dutch and French settlers who arrived there in the 17th century.

After he suspended refugee admissions in January, Mr. Trump signed an executive order stating his administration would create an exception for Afrikaners from South Africa, even as Congolese families in refugee camps and those hoping to flee civil war in Sudan remained cut off.

Mr. Trump has claimed that the South African minority faces racial persecution in its home country, a claim vigorously disputed by government officials there. Police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa.

The first group of Afrikaner refugees arrived on a chartered flight in May, a remarkably quick turnaround given that families from other nations often wait years for their chance to be vetted and brought to the United States. They were resettled in Alabama, New York and North Carolina, among other states. Dozens more have arrived since then, according to people familiar with their resettlement, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.

Meanwhile, thousands of other refugees who were in the process to be welcomed to the United States remain stuck overseas.

About 130,000 conditionally approved refugees and 14,000 Iranian religious minorities who registered to come to the United States remain in limbo. They had already met American standards for acceptance into the U.S. refugee program.

Twin Falls, a city of about 55,000 in southern Idaho, had been receiving hundreds of refugees annually, until Mr. Trump paused the program. The refugee families there had fled countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Sudan, and many had waited years for approval to travel to the United States, living precariously in camps or urban centers.

Some of the newly arrived Afrikaners have also encountered challenges in the United States, even after Mr. Trump said in March that they would enter with a “rapid pathway to Citizenship.”

In May, two Afrikaner families were resettled in Twin Falls. They represented nine out of the first group of 59 Afrikaners who arrived under the Trump relocation program.

The resettlement agency in Twin Falls offered the Afrikaner families the same assistance it gave other refugees, including case management, housing placement and cultural orientation for the first four months.

In June, one Afrikaner family, that of Willem Hartzenberg, was living in a duplex next door to a Sudanese refugee family in a development of tract homes.

He declined to speak with a reporter, and urged her to leave without answering questions. But his partner, Carmen, said they were waiting for their Social Security numbers to begin their job search.

Mr. Hartzenberg could not be reached for an update on his family’s circumstances.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.

Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/us/p ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

Historic Bangladesh-Saudi deal to boost skilled migration, protect workers’ rights

Bangladeshis working in Saudi since 1976, but this is the first formal agreement for recruiting general workers

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWjm9kX ... ews.net%2F

The governments of Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia have signed a formal agreement to facilitate the recruitment of skilled workers from Bangladesh across various professions in Saudi Arabia.

The deal also aims to ensure greater protection of the rights and interests of both workers and employers while strengthening the longstanding bilateral relations between the two nations.

The agreement was formally signed in Riyadh by Asif Nazrul, adviser to the Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare, on behalf of Bangladesh, and Eng Ahmad bin Sulaiman Al-Rajhi, minister of Human Resources and Social Development, on behalf of Saudi Arabia, reads a press release.

//
//Bangladesh to sign landmark labour deal with Saudi Arabia in 2-3 weeks: Adviser Asif Nazrul //https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/migr ... sif-nazrul

During the meeting, Adviser Asif raised several key issues, including ensuring transparency in recruitment contracts, making employers responsible for iqama renewal, and expediting exit visas for workers wishing to return home.

In response, Minister Al-Rajhi instructed relevant authorities to take effective measures to resolve these issues promptly and called upon Bangladesh to continue ensuring safe and orderly migration.

The two sides also held discussions on expanding cooperation in recruiting and training skilled workers from Bangladesh, as well as ensuring the welfare and protection of expatriate workers.

//
//Saudi-Bangladesh Chamber launches tomorrow to boost trade, investment https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/saudi-b ... nt-1253291

"The agreement should have been signed much earlier. There has long been tension with Saudi employers over the minimum salary for our workers. Besides, issues such as timely issuance of iqama, repatriation, and ensuring proper compensation and respectful return in case of injury or death must be properly safeguarded," Noman Chowdhury, former senior vice-president of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (Baira), told TBS.

//
//Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia discuss labour issues, seek solutions for Iqama renewal fees https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/bang ... es-1055406

"With this agreement, it will now be easier to secure workers' rights," he added.

Over the past five years, Saudi Arabia accounted for nearly 57% of the approximately 45 lakh (4.5 million) Bangladeshi workers sent abroad, according to Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) data.


Bangladesh's heavy Saudi dependence in manpower export continues as other markets shrink https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/banglad ... nk-1061291

However, this substantial outflow is predominantly concentrated in low-skilled jobs, with over 80% of workers employed in such roles.

Unofficial estimates suggest more than 30 lakh Bangladeshis currently work in Saudi Arabia, making it the largest single destination for Bangladeshi labour overseas.

Top News
Bangladesh / Saudi Arabia / agreement / labour rights / Skilled workers

https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/migr ... -safeguard

[kmaherali]

This Isn’t Crisis Response, It’s Crisis Construction



By Jason P. Houser

Mr. Houser is a former chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Oct. 11, 2025

Nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become the administration’s primary political weapon — not to solve problems, but to manufacture fear, provoke outrage and stage an illusion of control. This isn’t a crisis response. It’s crisis construction.

The president’s team vowed to target gang members, murderers and rapists, but we’re not just rounding up violent offenders. We’re arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens, to create made-for-TV crackdowns.

I served as chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Joe Biden and spent over a decade working in homeland security. I knew that national security requires focusing on threats — not turning law enforcement into a spectacle. Despite President Trump’s promises to go after the “worst of the worst,” in the past few months the administration has deported a preschooler who is a U.S. citizen and who has stage 4 kidney cancer and his family. A raid on a Hyundai plant where South Korean nationals were rounded up triggered an international incident and threatened future investment in Georgia. Those scenes appear to be part of a deliberate strategy of political theater.

Over the next three years, detention space will be multiplied. Due process will likely be further sidelined. The broken legal immigration system won’t be fixed — it will be abandoned.

The One Big Beautiful Bill signed in July will inject agencies at every level — federal, state and local — with funding for immigration enforcement. That will entrench removal as the singular goal of our law enforcement at every level of government, while focusing away from terrorism, transnational crime, cyberattacks and foreign adversaries.

Federal, state and local law enforcement are already being deputized to support ICE endeavors.

Nearly 14,500 law enforcement agents have been pulled off their investigations to do civil immigration work, including agents taken off the border. Nearly 3,000 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were reassigned to civil immigration enforcement, instead of focusing on their mission of national security and public safety. This is allowing fentanyl traffickers, child predators and foreign intelligence threats to operate with less scrutiny. Federal prosecutions for drug violations have dropped significantly.

In Chicago, a recent federal raid turned an apartment complex into a battlefield. A helicopter hovered overhead as agents stormed in, zip tying American children and parading them, in pajamas and crying, into the street. The result of that raid? Another neighborhood terrorized — another community pushed farther from trusting law enforcement. No cartel leader was arrested. No terrorist cell was disrupted.

When immigration enforcement is conducted this way it has consequences for all of law enforcement, and in turn, all public safety. This is where our national security dollars are going. This is how we’re choosing to spend our limited operational bandwidth. How does this make us safer?

Under President Trump, every raid, every news conference, every viral image is part of a larger operation — not of enforcement, but manipulation. The resistance these tactics create are useful for the administration and help justify escalation.

Federal agents, many of whom signed up to protect the nation, are essentially being used as props, and I worry that, as the political tides turn, political appointees will be able to scapegoat them and then discard them. The proud men and women who enforce our immigration laws saw this during the previous Trump administration — the posturing, the betrayal, the blame dumped on officers who were directed to carry out operations (like family separation) in a way that instills distrust in law enforcement.

We need immigration enforcement — but it must be humane, targeted and precise. This country deserves an approach that prioritizes national security, protects communities and upholds due process. ICE officers are capable of that mission. Placing the formidable power of ICE — with its vast authority and reach — in the hands of political opportunists who neither fully comprehend nor respect its mission is a volatile and dangerous combination, turning a critical national security tool into a blunt political weapon.

When law enforcement is forced into partisan roles, it stops serving the public. And when the public loses trust in law enforcement, the whole system begins to fail. The blueprint is: Create chaos. Blame the chaos. Then offer yourself as the cure.

This plan is already underway. The question now is if the rest of us will keep pretending this is law and order.

More on immigration detention and enforcement

Opinion | David Wallace-Wells
‘ICE Goes Masked for a Single Reason’ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/opin ... ation.html
Oct. 8, 2025

Opinion | Kseniia Petrova
I Came to Study Aging. Now I’m Trapped in ICE Detention. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/opin ... ntist.html
May 13, 2025

Opinion | Ana Raquel Minian
Immigrant Detention Should Have No Place in Our Society https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/opin ... rison.html
April 14, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/opin ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

Spain's radically different approach to African migration



Spain is kicking against the prevailing political mood among Western nations when it comes to migration and policies regarding the African continent.

At a time when the US, the UK, France and Germany are all cutting back their development aid budgets, Madrid remains committed to continued expansion, albeit from a lower starting point.

This week, the Spanish capital has been hosting an African Union-backed "world conference on people of African descent". AfroMadrid2025 will discuss restorative justice and the creation of a new development fund.

It is just the latest sign of how Spain's socialist-led government is seeking to deepen and diversify its engagement with the continent and near neighbour that lies just a few kilometres to the south, across the Straits of Gibraltar.

In July Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares launched a new advisory council of prominent intellectual, diplomatic and cultural figures, more than half of them African, to monitor the delivery of the detailed Spain-Africa strategy that his government published at the end of last year.

New embassies south of the Sahara, and partnerships in business and education are planned.

The contrast between Spain's approach and that of others in the West is not just in spending but in tone and mindset – and nowhere more so than in dealing with migration.

Similar to elsewhere in Europe, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is looking for ways to contain the influx of irregular arrivals.

Like other centre-left and centre-right leaders, he finds himself facing an electoral challenge from the radical right, largely driven by some voters' concern over migration, with the hardline Vox party well established in parliament and routinely ranking third in opinion polls.

In July, extra security forces had to be deployed against racist gangs roaming the streets of Torre Pacheco, in Murcia region – where many Africans work in the booming horticultural sector – after three Moroccans were accused of beating a pensioner.

While the opposition conservative People's Party remains favourable to some immigration, but for cultural reasons wants to prioritise Latin Americans rather than Africans, Vox has been more radical.

Responding to the Murcia incident Vox called for a crackdown on immigrants taking up less skilled jobs. The message largely targeted Africans working in fruit and vegetable production, now so crucial to the southern Spanish economy.

But for the government the migration presents challenges that are as much practical as political.

AFP via Getty Images A wooden canoe-style boat filled with people is on the sea, pulled up alongside a red coastguard's vessel.AFP via Getty Images

Thousands try to make the crossing to the Canary Islands on packed wooden boats

More than 45,000 people made the perilous sea crossing from Africa's west coast to the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands last year. Estimates of those who died while making the attempt range between 1,400 and a staggering 10,460.

Others make the shorter journey across the Gibraltar Straits or the Mediterranean to land on Andalusian beaches or try to scramble over the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclave towns on the North African coast.

The Spanish administration has to accommodate new arrivals, process their claims and manage their absorption into wider society, whether temporary or more long-lasting.

However, in language markedly different from the hostile messaging that emanates from many European capitals, the Sanchez government openly acknowledges the hard economic realities on the ground in West Africa that push people to risk their lives in the effort to reach Europe.

And it is trying to move beyond simply saying "no" to new arrivals. Instead, it is developing creative alternatives, with a promise to foster movements of people that are safe, orderly and regular and "mutually beneficial".

On his trip to Mauritania last year, Sanchez stressed the contribution that migrants make to the Spanish economy.

"For us, the migratory phenomenon is not only a question of moral principles, solidarity and dignity, but also one of rationality," the prime minister said.

The Spanish government funds training schemes for unemployed youth in countries such as Senegal, especially for irregular migrants who have been sent back, to help them develop viable new livelihoods back home.

And it has expanded a "circular migration" programme that gives West Africans short-term visas to come to Spain for limited periods of seasonal work, mainly in agriculture, and then return.

These issues were at the heart of the agenda when Sanchez visited Senegal, The Gambia and Mauritania in August last year.

A circular migration agreement with the former had been in place since 2021, but similar accords with the Mauritanian and Gambian governments have since followed.

The underlying case for this singular approach was set out in detail in the foreign ministry's Spain-Africa strategy. This argued that Europe and Africa "form part of the same geopolitical space".

But the management of migration is only one motive for the Spanish decision to place emphasis on building relations with Africa – and indeed support a much broader related social-cultural agenda.

AFP via Getty Images Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) meets with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani. They are sitting in armchairs - the flags of Mauritania, Spain and the EU can be seen behind them.AFP via Getty Images

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (R) met Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani (L) in Madrid last year

The fundamental premise underlying Madrid's outreach is that Spain, as the European country closest to the continent, has an essential self interest in Africa's progress towards inclusive and sustainable development, and peace and security.

That basic rationale might seem obvious.

Yet of course history had taken Spain down a quite different path.

Other than a few Maghreb footholds and a small tropical outpost – today's independent Equatorial Guinea – its colonial expansion in the 16th and 17th Centuries had mainly been directed across the Atlantic.

And over recent decades, European affairs and the Middle East had tended to dominate Madrid's foreign policy priorities, while the main beneficiaries of its development support were the countries of its vast former empire in Central and South America.

However, the past few years have seen the Sanchez government preside over a fundamental broadening of outlook.

Barely had Albares been installed as foreign minister in July 2021 than he launched a restructuring of his department, in part to strengthen its engagement not only with Latin America but also with the Sahel and North Africa.

Confirmation of the wider geographical emphasis came with a development co-operation plan for 2024-27, which for the first time, designated West Africa, including the Sahel, as one of three regions prioritised for assistance, alongside Central and South America.

Spain's Africa strategy lays heavy emphasis not just on economic sectors such as infrastructure, digitalisation and energy transition but also particularly on education and youth employment.

The cultural dimension includes not only promotion of the Spanish language, with an expanded presence of the Cervantes Institute, but also programmes to help the mobility of academic teachers and researchers.

Security co-operation, action on climate change, women's empowerment and an expanded diplomatic presence are unsurprising components in today's environment.

However, the strategy also lays very public stress it places on supporting democratic ideas, the African Union and, in particular, the West African regional organisation Ecowas.

This will be welcome public encouragement for the latter, which is currently under severe pressure after seeing its 50th anniversary year marred by the walk-out of the Sahelian states – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – whose ruling military juntas have refused to comply with its protocol on democracy and good governance.

Meanwhile, in a message targeted as much at Madrid's domestic audience as its sub-Saharan partners, the foreign ministry said "supporting the African diaspora and the fight against racism and xenophobia are also key priorities".

Fine words of course are only a first step. But in today's sour international climate such language really does stand out.

Paul Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.

You may also be interested in:

- Spain looks to immigrants to drive economy https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm28vp8rvko
- 'Try or die' - one man's determination to get to the Canary Islands https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g957x3g49o
- 'I found out on social media that my son had died' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce38ypjyy52o

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn409ld50kvo

[kmaherali]

Saudi Arabia deports 14,039 illegal residents

Saudi Arabia intensifies crackdown on illegal residents

Last updated: October 25, 2025 | 23:11
Huda Ata, Special to Gulf News
1 MIN READ

Security forces carried out joint inspection campaigns in coordination with multiple government agencies between October 16 and October 22, resulting in the deportations

Dubai: Saudi Arabia deported 14,039 illegal residents last week as part of a nationwide campaign to curb violations of residency, labour, and border security laws, the Ministry of Interior announced on Saturday.

According to the ministry, security forces carried out joint inspection campaigns in coordination with multiple government agencies between October 16 and October 22, resulting in the arrest of 22,613 individuals found in violation of Saudi law.

Of those arrested, 13,652 were charged with violating residency regulations, 4,394 with breaching border security laws, and 4,567 with labor law violations.

The ministry said 23,021 individuals were referred to their respective diplomatic missions to obtain travel documents, while 3,939 were referred to complete travel arrangements.

Authorities also reported that 1,699 people were apprehended while attempting to illegally cross into the Kingdom, most of them Ethiopian (54 per cent) and Yemeni (45 per cent) nationals.

Another 35 individuals were arrested while trying to leave the country illegally, and 23 people were detained for providing transportation, shelter, or employment to violators.

The statement added that 31,374 expatriates, including 29,814 men and 1,560 women, are currently undergoing legal procedures.

The Ministry of Interior reiterated its warning that anyone found facilitating illegal entry, providing shelter, or employing violators could face up to 15 years in prison and fines reaching SR1 million. Authorities may also confiscate vehicles or properties used in such activities.

The ministry urged the public to report violations by calling 911 in Mecca, Riyadh, and the Eastern Province, or 999 and 996 in other regions of the Kingdom.

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In Some Parts of Scotland, ‘The Only Thing We Need Is People’

Bucking the anti-immigration trend in British politics, remote areas of Scotland would like to attract foreign workers to offset declining local populations.

By Stephen Castle
Reporting from Kyle of Lochalsh and South Uist in northwest Scotland

Nov. 4, 2025
Late into the evening, five men were busy in a shellfish processing facility in northwest Scotland, sorting live langoustines and packing them into polystyrene boxes to be trucked to France, Italy or Spain.

At busy times of the year, Scot West Seafoods could employ twice as many staff at the facility, if only the company could recruit them, its operations manager said.

“We know that we are in a faraway place,” said Xohan Dios, the manager reflecting on the location of Kyle of Lochalsh, a village nestled in a remote region of imposing hills and scenic lakes. “The only thing we need is people.”

Because of the lack of workers, Scot West Seafoods has stopped processing prawns at the facility, in far northwest Scotland, which lies close to a bridge leading to the Isle of Skye. It has also considered moving its packing operations to Glasgow, a four-hour drive south, where workers would be easier to recruit.

In Britain, as in many western countries, anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise. Reform U.K., the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, has surged ahead of the governing Labour Party in opinion polls and has said it would deport 600,000 undocumented immigrants if it wins power. Alarmed by Reform’s advances, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a series of measures to curb the number of legal and illegal migrants arriving in Britain.

Scotland’s population is rising overall, but in some regions, a labor shortage is crippling companies and leaving communities without essential workers, while rural schools are being forced to close as residents leave. The contradiction between the British government’s desire to cut overall immigration by hundreds of thousands of people a year, and the scarcity of workers in some rural areas, has created a dilemma for Scotland’s lawmakers.

Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, warned in May that the British government’s restrictive approach to immigration posed “a significant economic threat” to Scottish prosperity, adding that the system of care for the elderly and other vulnerable people was at risk. One Scottish lawmaker from Britain’s governing Labour Party, Torcuil Crichton, has called for a new system of work visas for migrants employed in remote areas.

ImageA man in a plaid shirt sits at a large desk, facing a computer screen.

Xohan Dios, manager of Scot West Seafoods. “We know that we are in a faraway place,” he said. Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Mr. Dios said several factors were behind the recruitment problems, including a lack of affordable housing for workers; the impact of Brexit, which ended the automatic right to recruit freely from the European Union; and the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted many migrants with the right to work in Britain to return home.

“Everybody is looking for employees,” he said. “You talk to the hotel owners or to the managers of restaurants or coffee shops or the fishing boats — everybody’s in the same situation.”

A surge in legal immigration to Britain from outside the E.U. in the years after Brexit led to arrivals exceeding 900,000 in a 12-month period ending June 2023. But the then-Conservative government took steps to cut the numbers, which fell to around 430,000 in the 12 months of 2024.

“The whole of rural Scotland faces a depopulation crisis,” said Mr. Crichton, the lawmaker, who represents Na h-Eileanan an Iar, or the Western Isles. Some factories in his constituency struggle to recruit, he said, and some restaurants open only from Thursday to Sunday because of a lack of staff. “We need to counter — with Labour values — this myth that Britain is somehow full up,” he said. “The economy in some sectors is running at half speed because of the lack of a labor force.”

Mr. Crichton blamed housing scarcity, poor transportation links and limited health care provision for the exodus of younger people from his area. At 26,200, the population of the Western Isles is 5.5 percent lower than it was in 2011.

Depopulation is increasing as families struggle to find child care, prompting more to move away. Since 2007, 147 rural schools have closed, according to the Scottish government, which last year published a strategy to tackle the issue.

Image
Houses are scattered on rolling green hills in rural Scotland. The sea is in the background.

A village in Eriskay, an island south of South Uist. Rural Scotland is facing a depopulation crisis, with the population of the Western Isles dropping by 5.5 percent since 2011.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Scottish government, which is based in Edinburgh and has power over issues like health care, transportation and some elements of taxation, would like to have control over immigration in its territory, too.

That is currently determined in London where the government controls migration policy for the whole of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Swinney’s governing Scottish National Party, which supports independence for Scotland from the U.K., has proposed a special visa for migrants wanting to work there. This could include a rural visa pilot program which, for the first four years, would restrict the place of employment to a specific area, and a Scottish graduate visa, allowing students to live and work in Scotland for two years after concluding their studies.

But with Reform U.K. consistently ahead in the polls, there is little appetite in London for any of these initiatives. When asked in a parliamentary debate last year about Mr. Crichton’s proposals for work visas restricting migrants to rural areas of Scotland, Seema Malhotra, then a minister in the Home Office, said there was “currently no legal basis to do so, even if we wanted to.” And while Mr. Farage once faced a hostile reception in Scotland, Reform U.K. is now supported by around a fifth of Scottish voters according to some recent polls.

On the island of South Uist, one of the Western Isles, Sheila Peteranna, manager of the Borrodale Hotel, said she struggled to recruit young workers in a remote location with an unreliable ferry link to the mainland. “They don’t want to live on the island because they want to get away to attend a concert, to see a show, to go to the football — what normal people do,” she said. “They want to be the same, and you don’t blame them at that age.” Her two adult children, she added, plan to move to the mainland.

Image
Three people sit in seats inside a ferry; two look asleep.

A ferry from Uig to Lochmaddy, in June. Ms. Peteranna said she struggled to recruit young workers in such a remote location with only a ferry linking it to the mainland.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Like other parts of Scotland, South Uist has long been influenced by migration. Ms. Peteranna’s own family descended from a migrant who was shipwrecked there, probably in the 18th century.

The area in which she lives has also struggled to find highly educated professionals such as medical staff. Last year, it recruited five family doctors but had to offer an annual salary package worth 150,000 pounds to 160,000 pounds (about $198,000 to $210,000), tens of thousands more than the standard pay for that role in Scotland.

At Scot West Seafoods, one of the employees, Andrew Powrie, 40, said a shortage of housing was the biggest local problem. “It’s nigh on impossible for anyone to own their own house because it’s so expensive,” he said.

He noted that on the scenic Isle of Skye, where he lives, landlords get much better returns by renting to tourists. “On the whole for locals, it’s just a nightmare,” he said. Most young people, he added, “seem to want to go to college and then straight down to Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen, because there’s not a lot of opportunities for them here.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/worl ... e9677ea768

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Hundreds of Migrants Missing Off Malaysia’s Coast

A boat said to be carrying people from the Rohingya ethnic minority capsized, and another was missing. At least seven bodies were recovered

Video
Rescuers recovered several bodies near the site of a capsized boat carrying members of the Rohingya ethnic minority, which faces persecution in Myanmar. Another boat carrying hundreds more people was missing, too.CreditCredit...Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, via Reuters

By Zunaira Saieed and Ashley Ahn
Zunaira Saieed reported from Sabah, Malaysia.

Published Nov. 9, 2025
Updated Nov. 10, 2025, 11:37 a.m. ET
The authorities in Malaysia said on Monday that hundreds of migrants were missing at sea, including dozens who were on a boat that capsized over the weekend carrying members of the Rohingya ethnic minority.

The details of the capsizing and the missing migrants were reported by Malaysia’s Coast Guard and confirmed by two officials in the Malaysian border state of Kedah.

One of the officials, First Admiral Romli Mustafa of the Coast Guard, said the boat is believed to have capsized with about 70 people on Saturday near Langkawi, an island off Malaysia’s west coast near the border with Thailand.

The migrants had set off for Malaysia from western Myanmar about two weeks ago in a wooden boat carrying about 300 people, the Langkawi District Police said in a statement.

On Thursday, the passengers were transferred to two other boats, the police said. One of them, carrying about 70 people, capsized on Saturday. The other boat, carrying about 230 others, was still missing as of Monday.

The police said seven bodies had been recovered from waters near the site of the capsizing, including six women from Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the world. Thirteen survivors were detained, including 11 Rohingya people and two others from Bangladesh.

More than a million Rohingya have been expelled from western Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh in recent years. Some of them have attempted boat crossings to Malaysia from Myanmar, where they face ethnic persecution, or from Bangladesh, where they live in refugee camps.

Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations Refugee Agency, said that U.N. officials were working to verify details of the capsizing and the missing boats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/worl ... e9677ea768

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Second Migrant Child Dies on ‘Reverse Migration’ Boat Route

A 3-year-old from Colombia died when a boat carrying migrants back to South America capsized off Panama’s Caribbean Coast, an official said. Another child drowned on the same migrant route in February.


A boat full of migrants heading from Panama to Colombia in May on a reverse migration route.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times


By Annie Correal
Annie Correal has been covering “reverse migration” in Latin America since President Trump took office this year. She rode a migrant boat this spring.

Published Nov. 9, 2025
Updated Nov. 10, 2025, 11:11 a.m. ET
Leer en español
A 3-year-old child died after a boat carrying migrants toward Colombia capsized off Panama’s Caribbean Coast, Panamanian officials confirmed on Sunday.

The boat capsized off the coast of Colón Province and was carrying 21 people, who were pulled from the sea “thanks to the opportune intervention of a private vessel,” Panamanian officials said in a statement. They said the authorities then responded to help in rescue efforts.

The child, who officials said was originally from Colombia, was given CPR but could not be revived.

A Panamanian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide information, confirmed that the migrants’ boat had been traveling not northward toward the United States, but in the direction of Colombia.

This is the second known case in which a child drowned on a new migrant route that sprouted up early this year to help shuttle people back toward their home countries in South America after the Trump administration virtually sealed the U.S. border to migrants. It warned those who had crossed into the United States and lacked legal status to “self-deport” or be hunted down.

In February, an 8-year-old from Venezuela drowned when the family’s boat capsized in rough seas.

As of late September, Panamanian officials say, more than 14,000 migrants this year have ridden on small boats along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts in an attempt to skirt the fearsome roadless jungle pass between Panama and Colombia known as the Darien Gap. The authorities have all but sealed that passageway in an effort, alongside American officials, to stop a multiyear surge in northbound migration.

The so-called reverse migration route is run by small operations staffed by fishermen and captains of pleasure craft, and advertised on TikTok. These take migrants as far as the Panamanian border, where they board other boats to reach Colombia.

The route is sought out by migrants who lack passports or funds to pay for flights, according to many migrants interviewed by The New York Times earlier this year. A majority are Venezuelan.

Many travel overland — often from Mexico, occasionally all the way from the United States — and then pay around $300 per person for a seat on small boats with outboard motors. The Panamanian authorities have been allowing the boats to proceed after they stop at a checkpoint where migration officials can count those on board.

The journey from the small ports around the city of Colón to the Colombian border can take as long as 10 hours, depending on conditions at sea. Migrants, including children, generally wear life jackets but receive no safety training.

On Sunday, the Panamanian authorities said the boat that capsized had been operated by a Colombian national who was licensed as a fisherman and whose outfit “did not meet the conditions for the transport of passengers.” The boat, which had departed from an unauthorized port, the authorities said, had been carrying 18 adults and three minors.

It was not immediately clear whether other passengers were injured or hospitalized.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/worl ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

Born to Unwed Mothers, These Children Are Trapped in Saudi Arabia


A Kenyan mother, Esther, and her newborn son, Abudy, were living on the street in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times


Nov. 10, 2025

If you do not look closely, it is easy to miss the children.

They come and go during the day, a handful of boys and girls seeking refuge from the 110-degree heat. But at night, they are always there, their bodies curled up on the median near a gas station in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

The girl in the red dress is Dalia, a bubbly 8-year-old who learned English from YouTube videos. The baby whimpering for milk is Abudy, born 17 days earlier. Nearby is a wide-eyed toddler, still learning to look both ways before crossing the road.

Their mothers, lying beside them, are Kenyan housekeepers and nannies. Their government encouraged workers like them to find jobs in Saudi Arabia and send their savings back to Kenya. They cleaned the houses and cared for the children of Saudi families.

Like so many other Kenyans employed in Saudi homes, they faced abuse, exploitation and neglect. But other women, when they are desperate, can go home.

These women cannot. They had children outside of marriage. And now they are trapped.

In this conservative Islamic kingdom, where an unmarried mother can be jailed for an “illegal pregnancy,” it is as if their children do not exist. Without identification documents, they are banished to the fringes of society. Yet they cannot leave the country, either.

Police officers, shelter workers and diplomats turned the mothers away. Finally, they came to the gas station. It made no sense, but rumor had it that this was the one place where single mothers could be deported with their children.

“I tried to leave,” says Fanice, 32, Dalia’s mother. “But it’s been impossible.”

ImageA mother and her daughter, in a red dress, crossing a street next to a median strip.

Fanice and her daughter, Dalia, crossing the road in a red dress, live on the median strip near a gas station. Fanice followed a rumor that unmarried mothers could be deported here.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Video


Passers-by bring food, water and clothing. That is how Dalia got her red dress.

Image
An unwed mother and her daughter.

Unwed immigrant mothers like Fanice, right, can be jailed in Saudi Arabia, and their children are usually denied birth certificates, medical care and education, in violation of Saudi and international law.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Despite a decade of social transformation in Saudi Arabia, unwed pregnancy remains a taboo that exists in a legal gray area. The children of unmarried immigrants face unique perils. They are routinely deprived of birth certificates, medical care and education, in violation of Saudi and international law, a New York Times investigation found.

Kenyan women and children suffer in particular, The Times found, because officials at the Kenyan Embassy berate them, stonewall them or saddle them with years of paperwork to return home. Hundreds of children, and potentially many more, have been left in the lurch — recognized by neither Saudi Arabia nor Kenya.

These children are the victims of an exploitative industry that recruits African women to Saudi Arabia — a pipeline from which Kenyan government officials personally profit through financial interests in staffing agencies. Hundreds of Kenyan women have been killed, and reports of rapes and beatings are common.

For those women who become pregnant, whether from an assault or a relationship, birthing a baby into legal limbo is a final cruelty.

With no path forward, some contemplate giving up their children. At least as wards of the state, they would receive identity documents and an education.

A WhatsApp group for single mothers is filled with anguished pleas:

“Hi guys. If anyone knows the mother of this child, please tell me,” read one message, accompanied by a photograph of a toddler in pink shorts. “She has been abandoned by the road.”

Another woman posted recently, “Anyone here need a new born baby?”

Other mothers stay in Saudi Arabia indefinitely, raising their children in a country where they struggle to access schooling and routine vaccinations.

“This life is no good,” says Dalia, who passes her days playing with dolls that her mother collects from the trash.

All of this flies in the face of a Saudi law that codifies the rights of children — unequivocally, regardless of their immigration status or lineage — to identification documents, medical care and education.

“The law deems a child born to a non-Saudi mother in an irregular or undocumented manner to be affiliated with the mother and to bear her nationality, and a birth certificate is issued for such child accordingly,” the Saudi government’s Center for International Communication said in a statement to The Times.

But the government offers no public pathway for unmarried mothers to register their births. The kingdom has no birthright citizenship, and a top official at a major maternity hospital in Riyadh said that he was unsure how a single mother could get a birth certificate, but that the process would involve the police.

Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

This account is based on interviews with 25 East African women who became pregnant or gave birth in Saudi Arabia, as well as diplomats, educators, human rights activists and Saudi and Kenyan officials. Mothers still in Saudi Arabia are being identified only by first names to protect them from retaliation in the country.

When these women have nowhere else to go, their final harbor is the gas station. Their numbers vary, but usually three or four children are here, darting around or clinging to their mothers.

The newest arrival is Esther, 39, the mother of the newborn Abudy. He was conceived during Esther’s relationship with an Egyptian driver, and she was briefly jailed after giving birth.

Caressing her son’s tiny hands, Esther says she cannot understand why he has to face the consequences of her actions.

“This baby is innocent,” she says. “He knows nothing.”

Image
A woman sits among blankets and bundles on a roadway median.

Children without birth certificates are banished to the fringes of Saudi society, unable to attend formal schools. But without documents, they cannot leave the country, either.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Video


Esther was briefly jailed and questioned after giving birth. She said she was turned away from her employer and a shelter because she had a baby.

Image
A mother touching a baby’s hand that pokes out from a colorful checked blanket.

Esther touching Abudy’s hand.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Children spend weeks away from their mothers in unlicensed day cares.

Inside a beige apartment building, the laughs and cries of a dozen children can be heard past the curtain hung over their playroom door.

A 4-year-old boy bounces off the walls. A plump baby sits on a caretaker’s lap. And a 3-year-old girl sits to fasten her gold Mary Janes, wrestling them onto the wrong feet. Her name is Precious.

This unlicensed day care in Riyadh is one of many that have sprung up to meet the needs of Kenyan single mothers. Children play and sleep here for weeks on end while their mothers work as live-in cleaners, cooks and nannies, returning to see them on their days off.

Licensed schools and nurseries require a birth certificate or another form of identification to enroll a child. Most of these children have none.

Precious’s mother, Penina Wanjiru Kihiu, came to Saudi Arabia in 2019. That year, with Kenya’s unemployment rising, its parliamentary labor committee urged the government to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”

//Read Our Earlier Investigation
//Hundreds of Kenyan workers have been killed in Saudi Arabia. The government officials and politicians who could help them instead profit from their labor.

//''Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/worl ... women.html
March 16, 2025

//When Kenyan Maids Sought Help Overseas, Diplomats Demanded Sex https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/worl ... abuse.html
April 4, 2025

Ms. Kihiu, now 32, worked for an abusive employer for nine months, she said. When he finally let her quit, she said, he abandoned her, nearly broke, at the airport. Another Kenyan offered shelter and helped her find work as a freelance housekeeper.

Most mothers interviewed by The Times were working freelance when they became pregnant. Leaving their employers violates Saudi labor and immigration regulations, which human rights groups say are a form of “modern day slavery” — but it is also common.

Employers and Saudi officials call the vast work force of women like Ms. Kihiu “runaways.” Kenyan freelancers call themselves by another name: kemboi. The term is inspired by the Kenyan Olympian Ezekiel Kemboi, whose sport is steeplechase racing, in which athletes leap over hurdles.

As a new kemboi, Ms. Kihiu relied on a Nepali taxi driver to ferry her around Riyadh. They began dating, and soon, she said, she missed her period.

Most mothers interviewed by The Times conceived their children during a relationship with another immigrant. Four said that they had been raped. Two said they had not realized they were pregnant when they arrived in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, their mandatory medical exams hadn’t detected their early pregnancies.

Ms. Kihiu’s friends urged her to get an abortion. So did the father, who later told her he had left the country, she said.

Saudi Arabia permits abortions only in limited circumstances. Ms. Kihiu feared that an underground abortion would kill her. She also wanted the baby. She was elated when she found out she was having a girl.

Pregnant women are entitled to medical care, regardless of their paperwork, the Saudi government center said. But when an unmarried woman gives birth, the hospital must notify the police of an “illegal pregnancy,” said Dr. Mufareh Asiri, the medical director of the women’s health hospital at King Saud Medical City.

Image
A young child wearing a blue shirt standing in front of a dark curtain with a lighter, patterned border.

Precious plays at an informal day care, one of many that cater to Kenyan mothers who leave their children there for days or weeks as they work as live-in cleaners and nannies.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

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Florence, 30, with her daughter Lucy. She said that when she arrived at a public hospital after her water broke, security guards turned her away for lack of documentation. After sleeping in a park, Florence found a private doctor willing to see her.

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A woman sitting on a bed while holding a baby wearing a pink dress.

Many unmarried mothers face obstacles to medical care in Saudi Arabia. So they give birth at home with unlicensed midwives. It’s risky. “I thought I would lose my life,” said Rita, a 32-year-old domestic worker from Burundi whose daughter, Dorcas, was born at home this year.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

So, like many single mothers, Ms. Kihiu gave birth at home. After eight hours of labor, Precious arrived on May 17, 2022.

Precious’s day care was run by a matronly proprietor named Agatha, who decorated the walls with handmade posters, including an illustration of the Kenyan flag. Ms. Kihiu would spend days or weeks working and then visit her daughter when she returned. While she was gone, Agatha became Precious’s surrogate mother.

Despite such hardships, many mothers choose to stay in Saudi Arabia, fearing worse prospects back home. Depending on their resources and luck, some build decent lives. They pay inflated fees for private medical care and send their children to informal schools.

The same WhatsApp group that has grim messages about abandoned children is also peppered with joyful ones, including invitations to a baby shower — “Dress code — all white.”

Ms. Kihiu hoped to be so lucky.

Though she was a kemboi and her daughter was born outside of marriage, she felt no need to hide. She and Precious often saw police officers at a park. They never bothered her. An officer once gave them money to buy milk, she said.

One day in March, she finished a job and bought diapers for Precious, planning to visit her the next day.

That evening, the police raided Ms. Kihiu’s housing complex.

She was arrested along with other East African residents, she said, in what she assumes was an immigration crackdown.

“Fate just catches up with you,” she said.

Precious was still at the day care.

Ms. Kihiu said she begged the officers to deport her daughter along with her.

“I banged on the prison doors,” she said.

The authorities agreed to let Agatha bring Precious to the detention center, Ms. Kihiu recalled. But Agatha, fearing arrest — she, too, is a kemboi — said she could not.

On March 28, Ms. Kihiu was deported to Kenya, alone.

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Pink and blue charts with letters and numbers hanging on a wall.

The day care is now the closest thing that Precious, 3, has to a home.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

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Penina Wanjiru Kihiu browsing photos of Precious, on her phone at her home in Nakuru County, Kenya, in October. Kenya’s foreign ministry has suggested arranging DNA tests for her and Precious. But no one has told her when that will happen.

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A woman in a black sweatshirt with blue and white writing stares straight ahead.

While working in Saudi Arabia as a kemboi, or freelance domestic, Penina Wanjiru Kihiu said her biggest fear was being separated from her child. While her daughter was at day care, the police raided Ms. Kihiu’s building and deported her, alone, to Kenya. Credit...Brian Otieno for The New York Times

The Saudi government did not respond to questions about her case, but said that separating a mother and child was not allowed “under any circumstance.”

Even if Agatha had brought Precious, the little girl would not have been able to leave the country without documents. Several women said that the authorities had denied their pleas to self-deport with their children.

In the end, the mothers can leave. Their children cannot.

For Precious, the day care is home now. On a video call with her mother in August, she no longer spoke. “She just looks at you,” Ms. Kihiu said.

Without a birth certificate, leaving the country becomes nearly impossible.

Religious police officers used to stalk the streets of Saudi Arabia searching for unmarried couples. Gender segregation was so strict that men courted women by tossing slips of paper with their phone numbers at them.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi ruler, has loosened social restrictions dramatically over the past decade. Today, people flirt openly in low-lit restaurants and dry nightclubs.

But because the kingdom has no written penal code, the boundaries of permissible behavior are fuzzy. Two unmarried mothers interviewed by The Times said that they had been briefly jailed. Others, including several who gave birth in hospitals, said they had faced no repercussions.

The snag came when they tried to register their children.

On paper, all children in Saudi Arabia are entitled to birth certificates, and parents are obligated to report home births to the authorities, the Saudi government center said.

In reality, single mothers fall into a bureaucratic abyss. When foreign parents apply for birth certificates, the authorities are supposed to “verify that the marital relationship exists.” An absent or uncooperative father can hinder a child’s registration.

Asked how unmarried women could obtain birth certificates at his hospital, Dr. Asiri said it was a “complicated process” involving social workers and the police.

“By the end, she can get it,” he said. “But I’m not sure how.”

Facing a dead end, many mothers turn to their embassies for help.

Countries like the Philippines operate shelters for destitute mothers in Saudi Arabia, guide them through the process of obtaining birth certificates and exit permits for their children, and buy them plane tickets.

Not Kenya.

Several mothers said that workers at the Kenyan Embassy called them prostitutes or accused them of seducing men. Purity Marangu, 37, said that when she arrived, pregnant, at the embassy in 2021 and told staff members there she had been raped, they scolded her for not reporting the incident to them sooner.

After repeated embassy visits yielded no help getting home, she surrendered to the police and asked to be deported.

The police, she said, told her to go to the embassy.

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An adult and two children in a room with a television hanging on a wall,

Joy, center, is nearly 2, and lived at the gas station for months with her mother. International Recruitment Company, the Saudi firm that brought her mother to the kingdom, said it had tried repeatedly to work with the Kenyan Embassy to help her, but faced “legal and documentation barriers.”Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

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A woman looks through a partially open door.

Purity Marangu in Meru County in eastern Kenya, in August. She and her son, Baraka, were able to return to Kenya in January after hearing a rumor on WhatsApp that women in the Saudi coastal city of Dammam could be deported with their children. No one seemed to know why. Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

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A woman picking greens in a field, trailed by a child in a yellow and white hoodie and striped knit hat.

Pauline Muthoni Kariuki said her Saudi employer and his friend raped her. Terrified of having a child in Saudi Arabia, she returned to her family’s home in central Kenya and gave birth the day she arrived. She named her son George, but the local children call him Abdullah because of his light complexion.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Some mothers received Kenyan birth certificates at the embassy, but could not say why they succeeded. Others could not get them, and similarly had no idea why.

“Our government, I think they don’t care,” said Rose Namusasi, a Kenyan woman who works at a school in Riyadh and has assumed an unofficial role lobbying Kenyan officials on behalf of the mothers.

In recent years, the embassy has required DNA maternity tests before women can go home with their children. But the embassy offered them only once, in 2023, mothers and activists said.

In the United States, court-ordered tests typically take a few weeks. While some women received their results, Ms. Marangu and other mothers have been waiting for years. “It’s like they threw it all away,” she said.

Kenya’s foreign minister, Musalia Mudavadi, told Parliament in April that he knew of 388 children born to Kenyan mothers in Saudi Arabia. He said the embassy had collected hundreds of DNA samples, as a way to protect the children.

Some mothers told The Times they had tried to send their children home with friends or strangers so they could stay and keep working.

“There is a worry that some people may be involved in child trafficking,” he said.

He did not explain why many DNA test results never arrived. Diplomats from several other embassies said that they confirm maternity through other methods, including interviews and observation.

After The Times submitted questions to the Kenyan government, several mothers said there was suddenly renewed activity around their cases, with the government promising new DNA tests soon.

In the end, there is a gas station.

None of the mothers seemed to know who had arrived there first, or when.

Their paths there had differed. Beatrice Nasimiyu could not make ends meet on her meager salary while caring for twins.

Fanice and her daughter, Dalia, took DNA tests but never got the results.

For Dorcas, the last straw was when another Kenyan woman she was staying with tried to coerce her into sex work, then kicked her out when she refused.

In distress, all had been guided by someone who told the same story: If you have a child, and want to be deported, go to the gas station in the southern Riyadh neighborhood of Manfooha.

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A mother and two young children in a mud hut.

Beatrice Nasimiyu and her twin sons, Aboody and Amoody. She met their Pakistani father in Saudi Arabia and lived at the gas station in Riyadh for nearly a year. To keep the boys safe while she searched the city for odd jobs, Ms. Nasimiyu tied them to a tree. They returned home to Kenya in May after DNA tests confirmed she was the boys’ mother and activists helped purchase their plane tickets.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

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A child playing with a doll.

Dalia playing with one of her dolls, which her mother collects from the trash.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

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A child walking on a raised platform in a mud hut as an adult looks on.

Fanice and Dalia inside an abandoned mud brick structure across the street from the gas station.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Esther arrived in September, weak and confused after giving birth to Abudy.

She had been legally employed as a maid-for-hire by Maharah Human Resources, a Saudi corporation with a market capitalization of more than $650 million and major American shareholders, through index funds, that include BlackRock and Morgan Stanley. (Both declined to comment.)

Working in a small town north of Riyadh, Esther formed a relationship with an Egyptian driver. She became pregnant and gave birth in Maharah staff housing. When a supervisor found them, she took them to a hospital, Esther said.

There, the police detained her and transferred her to Riyadh, she said, where officers questioned her about her pregnancy. They released her and told her to call a friend, she said.

Esther knew no one in Riyadh. She spent days sleeping outside with Abudy, struggling to produce breast milk because of hunger, while pleading for help from every authority she could find.

She visited one of her employer’s offices but was turned away and sent to the Kenyan Embassy, she said, where the staff said DNA tests could not be offered for at least a month.

So Esther turned up at a shelter for female migrant workers awaiting deportation. But the staff said she could not enter with a baby. The shelter regularly denies entrance to women with children, several mothers said.

Saudi Logistic Services Company, which runs the shelter, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did her employer, Maharah.

“You are the people who are supposed to help me,” Esther remembers thinking. “What do you expect me to do?”

A taxi driver told her about the gas station.

The other mothers had set up a small encampment on a tree-lined median. When Esther arrived, Fanice befriended her and Dorcas gave her diapers.

The cashier at the station’s minimart charges their phones for free. Passers-by sometimes bring food, water and clothing. That is how Dalia got her red dress.

The story about getting deported from the gas station turned out to be a myth. Fanice flagged down police cars, pleading to be arrested, she said.

“‘Did you come here to work or to give birth?’” Ms. Nasimiyu remembers one officer asking her. “‘Stay there and let the sun burn you.’”

After The Times inquired about Esther’s case, a Maharah employee called her, asked where she was and promised to send a driver. She and Abudy could come to staff housing.

As she packed her things, Esther felt a mixture of relief and worry. She had no idea how they would get home to Kenya.

But at least they would have somewhere to sleep that night.

When she finished packing, she waited on a stained mattress. Trucks rumbled past.

“Go to sleep,” Esther urged her baby. She laid Abudy over her knees and smoothed his black hair. Heat rash was spreading across his back.

The driver did not come. Abudy did not sleep. Exhausted, she lay back and cradled him against her chest, jiggling him gently.

Finally, her ride arrived. The driver was confused. He had gone to the location he was sent, but he figured he was in the wrong place.

Why would a woman and a baby be at a gas station?

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A woman holding a baby opposite a gas station.

Esther and Abudy outside the gas station in Riyadh.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for The Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He covers a broad range of issues including geopolitics, business, society and arts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/worl ... thers.html

[kmaherali]

Catholic Bishops Rebuke U.S. ‘Mass Deportation’ of Immigrants

In a rare statement, the bishops framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms. “We feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity,” they said.


At their annual meeting, Catholic bishops were largely united in their statement about the federal crackdown on illegal immigration.Credit...Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press

Elizabeth Dias
By Elizabeth Dias
Elizabeth Dias reported from Baltimore, where the Catholic bishops held their annual fall meeting.

Nov. 12, 2025
America’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement that framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms.

The statement, passed at the bishops’ annual conference in Baltimore, did not call out President Trump by name, but the context was clear. The bishops said they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity,” the statement said. “For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”

The bishops, who were often divided by American politics in the Pope Francis era, showed a united front in standing behind Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, who has spoken out for immigrants and urged U.S. bishops to do the same.

The statement, called a special message, is a rare pastoral document that the bishops can issue only at their annual meeting, in order to address pressing circumstances of the day.

The last time they issued one was in 2013, in opposition to the contraceptive coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama.

For months, Catholic bishops have pushed back against the federal actions. Prelates have accompanied migrants to courthouses and protested Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill in Congress. But this action sends a particularly strong message not only to the administration, which includes many high-profile Catholics, but also to the millions of the church’s immigrant families.

The statement outlined a litany of concerns, which many bishops see as more pastoral than political.

“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” it said. “We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.

“We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”

The statement overwhelmingly passed, with 216 anonymous votes in favor. Five bishops voted no, and three abstained.

Also on Wednesday, the bishops formalized a separate guidance document for Catholic hospitals, which says that they must not provide “interventions that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex.”

Before the vote on the statement on immigration, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City, the newly elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the room, “I am strongly in support of it.”

Pope Leo expressed a specific desire for the bishops to give a united statement on the issue last month, when Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso hand-delivered some 100 letters to him from immigrants.

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A man in black priest clothes, a white clerical collar and a large cross necklace.

Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso met with Pope Leo at the Vatican last month.Credit...Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press

After a full day of public meetings in Baltimore on Tuesday, bishops huddled privately and discussed what to include in the statement for five hours. Some worried that a statement could create backlash from the White House, on issues like religious worker visas, that the bishops are trying to address.

But unlike some previous annual gatherings, this year, on this issue, the bishops presented a largely united public front.

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, where federal agents have conducted immigration raids for weeks, praised the statement’s near-unanimous support.

On the floor, he had suggested an amendment to make explicit that the bishops opposed the indiscriminate, mass deportation of people. It was quickly approved.

“This is a time of really reflecting on what’s happening, and to not be afraid to respond to the need to defend the dignity of people,” he said in an interview.

Some prelates, like Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose, Calif., wished the statement was even stronger.

But the amendment from Cardinal Cupich “really gave the document gravitas,” said Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami, who had strongly criticized the immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz. This summer, he drove there on a Harley-Davidson with the Knights on Bikes, a motorcycle ministry, to pray the rosary at its entrance.

On Wednesday afternoon, as the bishops discussed the final amendments to the statement, Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado came to a microphone on the floor.

As a new bishop, this was his first bishops conference, he told the room. He asked that the statement speak not only to migrant families but also to immigrant priests like him.

“As a migrant person coming from Mexico to the United States, for me and my whole family, thank you for this,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/b ... e9677ea768