Leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have been active in several cities and states across the U.S. intervening on behalf of Haitian immigrants affected by the Trump administration’s termination of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. Bishops in different states are collaborating with each other on this issue, as has occurred with the bishops of Florida and Ohio. One focus of their activity is to urge the U.S. Senate to pass bill S. 4814 which calls for extending TPS for three years until Jan. of 2029, giving Congress time to carry out meaningful immigration reform in the interim. A House version of that bill, cosponsored by Rhode Island’s two Democratic Senators, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, passed in April by a vote of 224-204, but passage in the Senate doesn’t look hopeful at this point.
[According to EWTN News Aug. 6,]( https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/florida-bishops-urge-senators-to-back-bill-extending-haitian-temporary-protected-status-to-2029) the previous day Florida’s eight bishops, representing Florida’s Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a letter to Florida’s two Republican Senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, urging them to back the Senate bill. The letter quotes Pope Leo XIV’s remarks from his July 5 video appearance at Villanova University on the 250th anniversary of the U.S.’s founding, in which he said that “those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character. To receive them into the nation with compassion and generosity is not an act of charity but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to everyhuman person.”
The Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, serving Florida’s 160,000 Haitians, said: “many people don’t know what’s been going on.” The day after TPS ended, July 29, he traveled to Washington to meet with Senators, urging them to pass bill S. 4814. He was accompanied by Haitian Cardinal Chibly Langlois of Les Cayes, an important city on Haiti’s southern peninsula, Cincinnati Archbishop Robert G. Casey and Bishop Jacques Fabre Jeune of Charleston, SC. In statements in Washington, Wenski described Haiti as “a house on fire.” It’s “a humanitarian disaster, a house on fire as I describe it. So to tell people to go walk into a house on fire is unconscionable,” [the Miami Herald reported him saying.](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article316716674.html
