San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Pope meets with Iraq’s top ayatollah; both urge peace
Iraq — First Pope Francis showed up at the modest residence of Iraq’s most reclusive, and powerful, Shiite religious cleric for a delicate and painstakingly negotiated summit. Hours later, he presided over a stage crowded with religious leaders on the windswept Plain of Ur, a vast and, now arid, expanse where the faithful believe God revealed himself to the Prophet Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.
Pope Francis on Saturday sought to protect his persecuted flock by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world, a mission that is a central theme of his papacy and of his historic trip to Iraq.
By meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini alSistani in the holy city of Najaf, Francis threaded a political needle, seeking an alliance with an extraordinarily influential Shiite cleric who, unlike his Iranian counterparts, believes that religion should not govern the state.
In Ur, his speech, within view of a 4,000-year-old
mud brick ziggurat with a temple dedicated to a moon god, added biblical and emotional resonance to the day.
The meetings, the church’s top officials said, were two parts of the same piece.
“Of course they go together,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, and second highest-ranking official after the pope, said in a brief interview.
“There is a direct link with what is happening here,” he said, gesturing at the stage in Ur, “and the meeting with al-Sistani.”
Parolin spoke as he finished a tour of the structure of what the faithful believe was Abraham’s home. ForUR,
mer Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had it reconstructed with new brick walls and arches.
Francis rode in from an airport in the provincial capital, Nasiriya, a center of ongoing anti-government protests, past miles of blast walls, Iraqi and Vatican flags hung from barbed wire fences, and pickups loaded with soldiers and mounted machine guns. He arrived to the stage surrounded by AstroTurf and red carpets, a hastily assembled bright spot in the desert plain.
“This blessed place brings us back to our origins,” Francis said, adding. “We seem to have returned home.”
Later
Saturday,
Francis delivered a sermon at the Chaldean Catholic cathedral in Baghdad, invoking similar themes of common good. “Love is our strength,” he told the crowded congregation, and as he walked out of the cathedral people chanted, “Viva, viva Papa!”
Cardinal Louis Raphael I Sako called the pope’s visit “a turning point in Christian-Muslim relations.”
As strong winds across the Ur Plains lifted the red carpets in the air and blew sand over a small crowd and several empty seats, Francis made an unadulterated cry for peace and brotherly love. In doing so, he realized a dream harbored by John Paul II, who had tried to come here 20 years ago and “wept,” Francis has said, when political tensions forced him to cancel.
Francis argued that “the greatest blasphemy is to profane” God’s name “by hating our brothers and sisters.”
“Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion,” he added. “We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion; indeed, we are called unambiguously to dispel all misunderstandings.”
WASHINGTON — As the Biden administration races to find shelter for a fast-growing migration surge along the Mexico border, they are handling the influx primarily as a capacity challenge. The measures they have taken are aimed accommodating the increase, not to contain it or change the upward trend.
The administration has quickly turned detention centers into rapid-processing hubs for families with young children, relaxed shelter capacity rules aimed at lessening the spread of the coronavirus, deployed hundreds of backup border agents to the busiest crossings and tried to mobilize the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with coronavirus testing and quarantining those who test positive. With bed space filling quickly, officials have drafted plans to put families in hotels in Texas and Arizona.
On several days this week, U.S. agents took more than 4,000 migrants into custody, nearly double the number in January. Roughly 350 teens and children have been crossing the U.S. border without their parents each day in recent weeks, four times as many as last fall, and many are stuck for days in dour detention cells waiting for shelter openings. While most adult migrants are turned away, unaccompanied minors are allowed to stay, as are some families with young children.
President Joe Biden will soon send top advisers to the border to assess the inflow and report back their findings, the White House said Friday. Although Department of Homeland Security officials have warned internally that the largest migration wave in more than two decades could arrive in the coming months, Biden officials have not said publicly what new legal or enforcement tactics they are considering, if any, to slow it.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, said the administration is treating the strain as a logistical and operational problem, “but whether they see it as a political problem is
a different question.”
“Biden ran on being the antiTrump,” she said. “He made clear that an emphasis on deterrence was not what he was going to do, and he got elected. So I think using enforcement as a primary means of managing what is happening at border is not what he wants to do.”
Biden ran for president on promises to repudiate his predecessor’s policies and make the United States more welcoming to immigrants again. Six weeks after taking office, he appears on a path to a crisis, despite months of warnings from veteran Homeland Security officials about the risks of abrupt policy moves during a pandemic and when millions of Mexicans, Central Americans and others are facing deteriorating and desperate conditions back home.
Border arrests and detentions were at their highest levels in years when Biden took office, and the pandemic has severely reduced the government’s detention and shelter capacity. Biden quickly ordered a halt to border wall construction, curtailed deportations and ended deterrent
measures such as President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that left thousands of asylum seekers stranded in dangerous border cities.
Republican leaders have accused Biden of triggering a crisis at the border, and they often highlight how the new president’s tone and tactics are less stern than those of the Obama administration. They have also seized on the border surge as a wedge issue for the 2022 midterm elections.
Biden and his top officials have publicly urged migrants not to make the journey north, but the message appears to be having little impact. The numbers of apprehensions at the border are approaching levels that overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and facilities with a record influx of families and children during fiscal 2019, when the authorities took nearly one million crossers into custody.
“Obviously, we’re going to have more kids crossing into the country since we’ve been letting more children stay and the last administration inhumanely kicked them out,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Friday,
when asked whether Biden accepted responsibility for the growing surge.
“We’re going to tread out own path forward, and that includes treating minors with humanity and respect,” Psaki said.
Less clear is what the administration will do if unauthorized crossings continue on a recordbreaking path. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show Mexican adults and children crossing at levels not recorded in years — a change from 2019 when Central American families made up the largest group of asylum seekers. Mexico’s economy contracted 8.5 percent last year, and many Mexican migrants appear to be fleeing states scarred by some of the country’s worst drug cartel violence.
Minors arriving without their parents are the one group not being returned to Mexico under Biden, and their fast-growing numbers have created the most immediate challenge. One agent in Arizona described grim conditions at a Border Patrol station where dozens of teens have been waiting for as long as six days for space to open up in shelters run by the Department
of Health and Human Services, despite U.S. laws mandating their transfer within 72 hours. Agents brought in soccer balls and sports equipment for the teens to play with in the garage area of the station. “As a parent with kids, it’s tough to see,” said the agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said federal shelters could temporarily expand to pre-pandemic full capacity so that they could house more minors, according to a memo obtained Friday by The Washington Post. The shelters have been operating at reduced capacity to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. But in the memo, the CDC noted children are less at risk of severe complications from the disease and said the shelters could limit transmission by continuing to test minors upon entry and quarantining those who are infected.
Ron Vitiello, a former Border Patrol chief and top ICE official under Trump, said he did not see anything on the horizon that would change the momentum of the influx. “This gets a lot worse before it gets better,” he said.
“You have thousands of people in custody at locations built for hundreds, but everyone has to be processed,” he said. “You can’t send kids to shelters if the kids haven’t been booked in. You can’t release families until they are booked in, so they can have their day in court.”
“It’s a physics problem — you only have so many agents and work stations, and those lines are going to get really long,” he added.
Adam Isacson, a border security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said he thinks the Biden administration does not want to return to the kind of “metering” system that Trump used to limit the number of people allowed to seek asylum along the border.
“I think the end goal is to be able to hear as quickly as possible the asylum claims of all those who need protection,” Isacson said. “But they’re not going to swing the gates open.”