DeSantis adds archbishop to list of enemies

I last saw the Rev. Thomas Wenski a decade ago at a demonstration outside the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, a familiar rallying place for locals displeased with politicians and their policies. The priest was railing against the Obama administration’s “unprecedented intrusion into religious groups and consciences of religious people.” A banner demanded, “Stop socialist Obamacare.”

Without the archconservative archbishop present, the protest might have been mistaken for just another flag-waving Tea Party ado.

But the chief cleric of the Archdiocese of Miami, which provides spiritual guidance for a half-million Catholic parishioners in Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, lent the protest special gravitas. His presence also brought news coverage. About 200 demonstrators attended. The event might as well have been scripted by a Republican political strategist.

Yet, a decade later, our governor has essentially canceled Archbishop Wenski in another sign that Trump nativists have utterly hijacked the Republican Party. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who controls the state party with all the subtlety of Tony Soprano, has anointed himself Florida’s nativist-in-chief. Tallahassee’s Trump-in-waiting has built his toughguy persona by exacerbating (or outright manufacturing) divisive controversies over race, vaccines, masks, sexuality, and to the archbishop’s chagrin, immigration.

The headline over Wenski’s column in the January edition of Florida Catholic asked, “Why is the governor going after children?” The archbishop criticized executive orders by the governor (apparently issued without input from a constitutional scholar) that barred federal immigration authorities from transporting unaccompanied minors to Florida. “Dumping people illegally,” DeSantis called it.

“Anybody who is facilitating this can potentially face restitution,” DeSantis warned, which Wenski interpreted as a threat, given that Miami’s Catholic Charities runs an 80-bed shelter in Cutler Bay for kids detained at the Texas border. The Legislature piled on, passing a bill (SB 1808) that prohibits state and local agencies from doing business with federal contractors who transport “unauthorized aliens” to Florida. Lawmakers also allocated $12 million to hire contractors to haul undocumented immigrants out of Florida.

Wenski’s other sin was to compare these unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant children, most from Central America, to the 14,000 unaccompanied youngsters airlifted from Cuba six decades ago when the church oversaw Operation Pedro Pan. Wenski wrote that these newer child immigrants “are not much different from those Cuban children of 60 years ago. The desperation that has led the parents of today’s unaccompanied minors is not unlike the desperation that motivated Cuban parents 60 years ago.”

Social media and Miami’s right-wing Spanish radio went berserk. Wenski’s column had ignored the caste system that has long divided South Florida immigrant groups (a perception reinforced by the bizarre “wet-foot, dry-foot” federal policy, ended in 2017, that granted legal residency and exclusive benefits for Cuban immigrants. The archbishop had the temerity to compare Pedro Pan child exiles from Communist Cuba with ragamuffin economic refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

DeSantis, who relishes a nasty political brawl the way other governors would welcome a photo op with a star athlete, flew to Miami to rough up Wenski on the archbishop’s home turf. DeSantis headlined a February “roundtable” on immigration with Pedro Pan alums at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, where his squabble over border policy paired nicely with Miami’s some-immigrants-are-better-than-others chauvinism.

DeSantis rejected Wenski’s comparison of Florida immigrant kids, circa 1960, with 2022’s young Texas border detainees.

“There’s a lot of bad analogies that get made in modern political discourse, but to equate what’s going on with the southern border with mass trafficking of humans, illegal entry, drugs, all this other stuff — with Operation Pedro Pan — quite frankly is disgusting,” DeSantis said.

“Disgusting” was a jarring rebuke, coming from a practicing Catholic who attended the recent Red Mass of the Holy Spirit (a well-attended event for judges, lawmakers and government executives) in Tallahassee. Archbishop Wenski himself had presided.

Wenski dismissed the DeSantis roundtable as “political theater” and lamented, “The lack of solidarity of this group of former unaccompanied minors from Cuba with similarly situated children today was disappointing. Even while recognizing the good care afforded them by Catholic Charities 60 years ago, they begrudge that same care being extended to migrant children today.”

Wenski, 71, a famously blunt, cigar-smoking, Harley-riding priest, established the state’s first Creole-language parish 40 years ago in Miami, where the treatment of Haitians as a less worthy class of immigrants must have influenced his defense of border kids.

One thing’s for sure: DeSantis won’t be asking for spiritual advice as he contemplates Florida immigration policy. Not unless a certain other higher power conducts his own Red Mass at Mar-a-Lago.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred