Faith leaders hope bill will stop the loss of thousands of clergy from abroad serving US communities
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
'Unless there is a change to current practice, our community is slowly being strangled,' said the Rev. Aaron Wessman, vicar general and director of formation for the Glenmary Home Missioners, a small Catholic order ministering in rural America.
Advertisement
'I will weep with joy if this legislation passes,' he said. 'It means the world for our members who are living in the middle of uncertainty and for the people they'll be able to help.'
Two thirds of Glenmary's priests and brothers under 50 years old are foreign-born — mostly from Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Uganda — and they are affected by the current immigration snag, Wessman added.
So are thousands of others who serve the variety of faiths present in the United States, from Islam to Hinduism to evangelical Christianity, providing both pastoral care and social services.
Advertisement
No exact numbers exist, but it is estimated that there are thousands of religious workers who are now backlogged in the green card system and/or haven't been able to apply yet.
Congregations bring to the United States religious workers under temporary visas called R-1, which allow them to work for up to five years. That used to be enough time for the congregations to petition for green cards under a special category called EB-4, which would allow the clergy to become permanent residents.
Congress sets a quota of green cards available per year divided in categories, almost all based on types of employment or family relationships to US citizens. In most categories, the demand exceeds the annual quota.
Citizens of countries with especially high demand get put in separate, often longer 'lines' — for several years, the most backlogged category has been that of married Mexican children of US citizens, where only applications filed more than 24 years ago are being processed.
Also in a separate line were migrant children with 'Special Immigrant Juvenile Status' — neglected or abused minors —
In March 2023, the State Department suddenly started adding the minors to the general green card queue with the clergy. That has created such a bottleneck that in April, only halfway through the current fiscal year, those green cards became unavailable.
Advertisement
And when they will become available in the new fiscal year starting in October, they are likely to be stuck in the six-year backlog they faced earlier this year — meaning religious workers with a pending application won't get their green cards before their five-year visas expire and they must leave the country.
In a report released Thursday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services blamed the EB-4 backlogs on the surge in applications by minors from Central America, and said the agency found widespread fraud in that program.
The Senate and House bills would allow the Department of Homeland Security to extend religious workers' visas as long as their green card application is pending. They would also prevent small job changes — such as moving up from associate to senior pastor, or being assigned to another parish in the same diocese — from invalidating the pending application.
'Even as immigration issues are controversial and sometimes they run afoul of partisan politics, we think this fix is narrow enough, and the stakeholder group we have is significant enough, that we're hoping we can get this done,' said Democratic
Two of the last three priests there were foreign-born, he said, and earlier this month he was approached by a sister with the Comboni missionaries worried about her expiring visa. Kaine's two Republican cosponsors, Senators
'It adds to their quality of life. And there's no reason they shouldn't have the ability to have this,' Risch said. 'Religious beliefs spread way beyond borders, and it is helpful to have these people who … want to come here and want to associate with Americans of the same faith. And so anything we can do to make that easier, is what we want to do.'
Advertisement
Republican Representative Mike Carey of Ohio, with Republican and Democratic colleagues, introduced an identical bill in the House. Both bills are still in the respective judiciary committees.
'To be frank, I don't know what objections people could have,' said Lance Conklin, adding that the bill doesn't require more green cards, just a time extension on existing visas. Conklin cochairs the religious workers group of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and often represents evangelical pastors.
Faith denominations from Buddhism to Judaism recruit foreign-born clergy who can minister to growing non-English-speaking congregations and often were educated at foreign institutions steeped in a religion's history. For many, it is also a necessity because of clergy shortages.
The number of Catholic priests in the United States has declined by more than 40 percent since 1970, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University. Some dioceses, however, are experiencing
Last summer, the Diocese of Paterson — serving 400,000 Catholics and 107 parishes in three New Jersey counties — and five of its affected priests sued the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Advertisement
Expecting some action on the legislative front, the parties agreed to stay the lawsuit, said Raymond Lahoud, the diocese's attorney.
But because the bills weren't included in the nearly-900-page
'We just can't wait anymore,' he said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Jasmine Crockett unleashes on Ghislaine Maxwell talking to Trump DOJ before Congress: ‘Out of jail for free'
Rep. Jasmime Crockett wants Ghislaine Maxwell — who is serving a 20-year sentence for aiding sex trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein — to testify before Congress before she speaks under oath to the Trump Justice Department. US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, will meet with Maxwell on Thursday in Florida, where she is serving out her two-decade sentence for scheming with the late pedophile power-player to sexually exploit and abuse young women and girls. The meeting comes just a day after the House Oversight Committee, on which Crockett sits, voted to subpoena Maxwell. On Wednesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer issued a subpoena and set Maxwell's deposition date for Aug. 11. 'I don't know that we'll get anywhere, but I know if there's anybody that I want to talk to her, it is us — and not the administration — because at least if she comes before the committee, even if it's behind closed doors, it will be bipartisan,' Crockett, a frequent Trump antagonist, told The Independent. 'It won't just be one side able to ask questions, it'd be both sides, whereas the administration, they're a bunch of thugs,' she railed. 'And frankly, if it means that she can engage in a coverup, he'll most likely let her out of jail free. He's let people out of jail for far less.' This comes after the Department of Justice released a two-page memo on July 6 saying that Epstein, the convicted pedophile, had no 'client list' and died of suicide in his New York City jail cell, where he was found hanged by bed sheets. But Crockett, who spoke to The Independent before Comer issued his subpoena, also cautioned that she did not know if they would actually hear testimony from the once high-flying former socialite Maxwell. 'I don't know if she has appeals that are pending, and I'm sure that her attorneys will have some issues, some questions surrounding so it's more complicated than just subpoenaing her,' the Democrat said. 'We can subpoena all we want to. We have had a number of transcribed interviews as well as depositions over the last two weeks, and frankly, a lot of them ended with nothing because people invoked privilege and things like that.' Crockett has become a fundraising dynamo because of her combative style of questioning on the Oversight Committee and her willingness to joust with Republicans in the majority. But she recently lost her bid to replace the late Gerry Connolly (D-VA) as the top Democrat on the committee to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA). Garcia told The Independent that subpoenaing Maxwell does not mean the committee trusts her to be truthful. 'She's a documented liar, she's obviously done an enormous amount to harm young girls and and and has an interest, of course, in, in being free,' Garcia said. 'We should still want to have her come testify in front of oversight in the Congress, but, but we should just be very we should understand that this is a very complex witness and someone that has caused great harm and not a good person to a lot of people.' The House of Representatives broke a day early after the House Rules Committee ground itself to a halt because Democrats continued offering amendments to release files related to Epstein. In an attempt to mollify Democrats and some conservatives, Republicans proposed a non-binding House resolution to get the Department of Justice to release files. In addition, Rep. Thomas (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have a discharge petition, which would force a vote and circumvent Speaker Mike Johnson, to release files related to Epstein. Massie, a critic of Trump, accused Johnson of covering for the president. 'He doesn't want a paper-thin sliver of daylight between him and the president, and so that's why he's avoided taking even the symbolic vote on the non-binding resolution,' Massie told The Independent. Trump, a friend of Epstein's for many years before a falling out that appears to have come before it was publicly known the financier was being investigated over his sex trafficking, has criticized his supporters and others for focusing on the Epstein case. He also vehemently denied a story in The Wall Street Journal that he sent Epstein a note for the disgraced financier and predator's 50th birthday party and also filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the newspaper and its owners News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, among others.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ghislaine Maxwell could dodge congressional subpoena for her testimony in Epstein investigation, lawyer says
Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is unsure whether she will comply with a recent congressional subpoena to testify about his abuse of girls and whether others were involved, amid continued pressure for the government to disclose more about the case. 'We have to make a decision about whether she will do that or not,' her attorney David Oscar Markus told Politico. 'That's been scheduled for the week of August 11th and we haven't gotten back to them on whether we'll do that.' Maxwell could invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying, while Congress could offer the former British socialite immunity. Maxwell is currently in a Florida federal prison serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors, which she has sought to overturn in the Supreme Court. Her lawyer said, Maxwell is hoping Donald Trump pardons her. A bipartisan group on the House Oversight Committee voted Tuesday to subpoena Maxwell amid renewed interest into the Epstein scandal. Maxwell sat with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in recent days for an in-depth interview in Florida. The interview featured Maxwell answering questions about '100 different people,' her lawyer said. DOJ officials spoke to her as fallout from the president's handling of releasing information in the Epstein case continues to mount. Democrats have criticized Maxwell's conversations with the DOJ, arguing they are a conflict of interest given the political pressure the Trump administration is facing to disclose more about the Epstein case and Trump's personal relationship with the disgraced investor. 'Under no circumstances should anyone from Trump's DOJ be allowed to privately interview Ghislaine Maxwell,' Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X of the interview. 'The conflict of interest is glaring. It stinks of high corruption.' The battle over Epstein info has played out beyond just Congress, which House Speaker Mike Johnson broke early for an August recess as legislators pressured the administration to disclose the full Epstein files. Last week, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal's parent companies News Corp and Dow Jones, after the paper reported that Trump sent a 'bawdy' birthday letter to Epstein. The president has denied the letter is valid. The Epstein saga has created a rare wedge between Trump and members of his base and party. Trump and his allies campaigned on releasing more information about Epstein, and initially, the White House made steps toward fulfilling that promise, releasing what it called 'Phase 1' of the Epstein files to a group of conservative commentators and online personalities in February. However, most of it was redacted or already disclosed. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced there was no 'Epstein client list' despite speculation, and that no more disclosures would be made about the case, infuriating parts of the MAGA base. The president has chastised his own supporters for their intrigue over Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, calling the scandal a Democrat-led 'scam' and 'con job.' The president, who has previously denied being mentioned in the Epstein files, was in fact told by the Justice Department he was one of numerous high-profile figures mentioned in the course of investigations into Epstein, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court Has Hit Rock Bottom
The Supreme Court's most recent term may be over, but its work on behalf of President Donald Trump continues. The justices announced on Wednesday evening in Trump v. Boyle that they would stay a lower court order that had blocked Trump from firing the three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission. As usual, the court's action took place on the shadow docket, where it handles emergency appeals and motions. This time, the court's conservative majority greatly expanded that docket's power to decide legal and constitutional questions. In theory, shadow-docket actions are procedural or administrative in nature and shouldn't be seen as a decision on the actual merits of a case. That understanding no longer holds weight. Trump's dismissals violated a federal statute passed by Congress that only allows the president to fire CPSC commissioners for cause. The Supreme Court previously ruled in the 1934 case Humphrey's Executor v. United States that Congress could lawfully extend for-cause removal protections to the heads of certain agencies. Congress has not repealed the law in question. The Supreme Court also has not overturned Humphrey's Executor outright. Except, well, now it effectively has. 'Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases,' the court wrote in its unsigned order. 'The stay we issued in [Trump v.] Wilcox reflected 'our judgment that the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.'' You morons, the court might as well have said to lower court judges. Why are you applying our precedents to these cases? Why aren't you telepathically discerning the law of the land from these unsigned orders where we barely explain ourselves? Why aren't you treating our procedural moves as equivalent to a fully briefed decision on the merits? Don't you know we want Humphrey's Executor dead and buried? Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for his part, was the only member of the majority with a somewhat intellectually consistent position on how to handle this case. He argued in a concurring opinion that, in addition to issuing a stay, the court should have simultaneously agreed to take up the case on the merits because the case centered on whether one of the high court's precedents should be overturned. 'In those unusual circumstances, if we grant a stay but do not also grant certiorari before judgment, we may leave the lower courts and affected parties with extended uncertainty and confusion about the status of the precedent in question,' he argued. (Certiorari before judgment is a rarely used procedure where the court reviews a district court's ruling without waiting for an appeals court to weigh in.) He noted that waiting for the issue to 'percolate' in the lower courts made no sense because lower courts, by definition, cannot overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Justice Elena Kagan noted in a short but stern dissent that the conservatives had wrought major changes to the structure of the federal government with only a cursory explanation. 'The majority's sole professed basis for today's stay order is its prior stay order in Wilcox,' she wrote, referring to the court's prior decision in May to allow Trump to dismiss members of the National Labor Relations Board. 'But Wilcox itself was minimally (and, as I have previously shown, poorly) explained.' The three-sentence explanation the court gave in Wilcox, Kagan argued, was insufficient to justify Wednesday's order. 'So only another under-reasoned emergency order undergirds today's,' she continued. 'Next time, though, the majority will have two (if still under-reasoned) orders to cite.' At that point, Kagan noted, the court's reasoning would be 'turtles all the way down.' (Kagan also wrote the dissent in the Wilcox case; she appears to be the liberal justices' point person on this issue.) The immediate impact of Wednesday's order is that Trump will be able to dismantle the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which will, in turn, make it easier for companies to keep unsafe and dangerous products on the market. This is not a good thing for Americans, of course, but it is a great boon to those companies that want Americans to keep buying their unsafe and dangerous products. In the longer term, Wednesday's ruling is a further sign of how the Supreme Court is getting worse during Trump's second term: more lawless, more arbitrary, less judicial, and less respectable. Here is how the federal government has generally worked within living memory. Congress generally passes laws to provide the scaffolding for federal agencies to regulate the national economy. In theory, Congress could pass a new law every time it wants to approve a cancer drug, or ban a pesticide, or do any of the other mundane but vital tasks that come with governing a modern industrialized economy. Instead, it created agencies to regulate these things within the bounds that Congress authorizes. Most of these agencies operate directly under the president. Starting in the early twentieth century, Congress also began to create agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to tackle more complex economic issues, investing them with a greater degree of power and autonomy. Presidents have the power to appoint the heads of these agencies, as the Constitution requires, but Congress set limits on when and how they can fire them to give those agencies a measure of independence. The first real legal test of these limits came in 1933 when the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt fired William Humphrey, one of the FTC commissioners appointed by Calvin Coolidge, over his qualms about the New Deal. Humphrey died of a stroke in early 1934, and the executor of his estate sued the federal government over his salary. If Humphrey's firing was illegal, the estate would have a claim on the money that the government owed to him. The Supreme Court unanimously sided with Humphrey's estate—a striking result given the court's later divides over the constitutionality of the New Deal. The court limited Myers v. United States, a 1927 ruling where then–Chief Justice William Howard Taft suggested a much broader removal power for the president, and held that because the FTC and similar agencies exercised 'quasi-legislative' and 'quasi-judicial' powers, Congress could limit the executive branch's power over them. This worked out pretty well for the United States, which enjoyed a high standard of living and unprecedented economic prosperity throughout the twentieth century. You would not know this if you only listened to the conservative legal movement, which often describes these agencies and their powers in ominous and near-apocalyptic terms. In a 2020 case, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed in a concurring opinion that 'the decision in Humphrey's Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.' Humphrey's Executor was 85 years old at that point, and the republic somehow managed to survive until then. It would be more accurate to say that the precedent was a threat to corporate interests since it preserved the independence of their regulators from political interference. (The court often gets these things confused.) Selia Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the case in which Thomas wrote that concurring opinion, narrowed Humphrey's Executor by allowing Trump to fire the CFPB's director. That decision, in turn, paved the way for the Trump administration to dismantle the agency altogether when it retook power earlier this year. At the center of the court's approach to these agencies is a fundamental misunderstanding about the separation of powers and the early republic. In his majority opinion in Selia Law, Roberts explained the Framers' mindset through his own hyper-presidentialism. He sketched a vision of the Constitution where Congress was a potential fount of despotism and the presidency was the bulwark of American democracy. 'The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that 'differences of opinion' and the 'jarrings of parties' would 'promote deliberation and circumspection' and 'check excesses in the majority,'' he wrote, quoting from the Federalist Papers. 'By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities. As Madison put it, while 'the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be … divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.'' 'The Framers deemed an energetic executive essential to 'the protection of the community against foreign attacks,' 'the steady administration of the laws,' 'the protection of property,' and 'the security of liberty,'' Roberts continued, quoting again from various parts of the Federalist Papers. 'Accordingly, they chose not to bog the Executive down with the 'habitual feebleness and dilatoriness' that comes with a 'diversity of views and opinions.' Instead, they gave the Executive the '[d]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch' that 'characterise the proceedings of one man.'' I do not doubt that the Framers intended the presidency to be a potent and vital branch of government. But Roberts's understanding of the founding era is impossible to square with even a modicum of historical context. The Framers did not write the Constitution in a vacuum; they gathered for the express purpose of fixing the flaws in the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, there was no president and no national system of courts, and its legislature had few powers that could only be exercised unanimously. The Constitution, by its very nature, created a far more powerful executive and judiciary than what existed under the Articles. Something is always infinitely greater than nothing. Far from weakening the legislative branch, the Framers made it a substantially more powerful institution than its predecessor under the Articles or the revolutionary-era Continental Congress. They imbued it with the power to tax and regulate interstate commerce. They transferred to it the states' powers over trade, copyright, naturalization, and diplomacy with Native American nations. It has the power to create and destroy any federal court other than the Supreme Court, and it can limit even the high court's jurisdiction to a significant degree. Congress can remove any executive or judicial officer from power with a majority vote in one chamber and a two-thirds vote in the other, while the president and the courts cannot remove a single senator or representative from their duly elected office for any reason whatsoever. It can disband and defund the president's armies and agencies at will. It could add a hundred justices to the Supreme Court on a whim. All of these powers are just the explicit, undisputed ones at its command. If the Framers actually thought the legislative branch was a 'unique threat to individual liberty,' they didn't show it when they actually wrote the Constitution. I digress slightly. Even against this backdrop, Roberts refused to kill Humphrey's Executor altogether. He distinguished between the CFPB, which had a single director, and agencies like the FTC or the SEC that had a single multimember commission. Whether that conclusion is consistent with historical practice is debatable, as Kagan noted in her dissent in that case, but at least it is an intelligible legal and constitutional argument. Now the court has abandoned such things. Its apparent goal is to destroy (or, as in these particular cases, make it easier for other constitutional actors to destroy) federal regulatory agencies as they have existed for nearly every American's lifetime. It does not care that Congress has created them or that presidents signed them into law; it refuses to even acknowledge the elected branches' real interests here. In Wednesday's order, as I mentioned earlier, the majority explained that it thought 'the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.' Kagan noted in her Wilcox dissent that this framing got the issue exactly and deliberately wrong. 'On the latter side, the relevant interest is not the 'wrongfully removed officers,' but rather Congress's and, more broadly, the public's,' she explained, referring to the two fired NLRB appointees. 'What matters, in other words, is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms, protected from a president's desire to substitute his political allies.' Nothing sums up how hackish and unjudicial the court's approach has been more than its Federal Reserve exception in Wilcox. Many court-watchers had thought, especially after Selia Law, that the Supreme Court's current roster would not overturn Humphrey's Executor in its entirety, in large part because there would be no way to logically maintain the for-cause protection for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors if it did. Few things could more fundamentally disrupt and weaken American capital markets—and, by extension, the American economy—than giving a president direct control over the Fed's monetary levers. Imagine if Trump could set interest rates like he sets tariff rates. The NLRB members warned as much in their filings in the Wilcox case. So the conservative majority squared the circle by declaring, almost by fiat, that its implied overruling of Humphrey's Executor did not apply to the Federal Reserve. 'The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,' the court's unsigned order said without further elaboration. Its sole legal citation for this point was a footnote in Selia Law where the court had assumed, purely for the sake of argument in response to a dissent, that the Fed could claim a 'special historical status.' This is one step above simply writing, 'Why? Because the court said so, that's why.' Kagan could barely contain her disgust in her Wilcox dissent. 'And so an assumption made to humor a dissent gets turned into some kind of holding,' she wrote. 'Because one way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey's) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception). If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler—and more judicial—approach would have been to deny the President's application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey's.' All of this represents a fundamental shift in how the Supreme Court operates. The court could have allowed the CPSC and NLRB officials to stay in office to preserve the status quo during litigation, heard their cases on an accelerated briefing schedule, and overturned Humphrey's Executor while ruling against them on the merits. The court's critics could have disagreed with the court's ultimate reasoning, but they could have found no fault in how it operated to get there. Instead, the conservative justices simply did what they wanted to do because they could. What a dizzying sensation that will be for any American raised in our civic faith. Covering the court for the last six months feels less like covering a court of law steeped in the Anglo-American legal tradition and more like covering the Soviet Union's politburo or Iran's Guardian Council from afar. The Supreme Court's most impactful work this year has not been to decide actual cases and controversies on the merits, or to fairly balance the equities on shadow-docket questions, but to enforce a certain ideological vision upon the American constitutional order as quickly, as bluntly, and as hackishly as it can. I do not write lightly that the central theme coming from the Supreme Court as of late is that Trump's own vision for the country supersedes the laws that Congress has actually written—to provide for-cause removal protections, to create a Department of Education, to provide anti-torture protections for prospective deportees, and so on. As Humphrey's Executor's fate shows, that vision might even outrank the decisions of the high court itself when the justices agree with it. That raises an unsettling question: If the justices don't respect their own precedents or procedures, why should anyone else?
