Welcome to Wednesday. Under the Trump administration, refugee resettlement programs have been continuously slashed, but there is hope that will change under President-elect Joe Biden. A new report says that deaths of infants in Ireland's religious-run mother and baby homes during parts of the 1930s and 1940s were twice that of the national average.
Less than a week after Joe Biden's election victory, Rachel Pollock began receiving emails and phone calls from Catholic refugee resettlement officers across the country asking how soon it would be before they could get back to work.
During the last four years, Pollock, director of resettlement services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has seen program after program shutter due to the continual slash in refugee admissions by the Trump administration.
"In 2016, we had 71 offices throughout the U.S., and we're currently operating 40," she told NCR. Now, Pollock and her collaborators are hoping that Biden's pledge to increase the annual admission target to 125,000 refugees, up from Trump's cap of 15,000 individuals, will open doors for new arrivals that will help restore their programming efforts.
"What the past few years have meant for us and other resettlement agencies across the U.S. has meant we've lost a lot of capacity to do this work," said Pollock, who contracts with local Catholic Charities agencies throughout the country who resettle refugees in local communities.
You can read more of the story here.
More background:
- The urgency to care for displaced persons hasn't diminished in the past five years, writes Sen. Tim Kaine in an NCR commentary, but our government's capacity to welcome them in a Christ-like manner regrettably has.
- "A Biden-Harris administration will restore America's historic role in protecting the vulnerable and defending the rights of refugees everywhere," said President-elect Joe Biden about raising the annual refugee admission target to 125,000.
- A federal circuit court said a Trump administration executive order to allow state and local government officials to reject refugees in their jurisdiction violated long-standing resettlement practices.
An Irish government investigation has found that death rates among "illegitimate" infants in southern Ireland's religious-run mother and baby homes during parts of the 1930s and 1940s were twice that of the national average.
The report, released Jan. 12, says the frequently Catholic-run homes "did not save the lives of 'illegitimate' children and appear instead to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival."
The quasi-judicial probe also found that the proportion of unmarried mothers admitted to the homes during the last century was probably the highest in the world.
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was sparked by the discovery of a mass grave on the former campus of a home. It says the country's residential institutions for single moms and their babies saw admissions peak about 50 years ago.
You can read more of the story here.
This week, we continue our series, Building a Common Future, in which we asked Catholic politicians, activists and scholars to offer advice to President-elect Joe Biden.
"Building our common future: It's what the United States, indeed, the entire world needs right now," we wrote in an editorial introducing the series.
Today's commentary comes from Richard Trumka, president of AFL-CIO, and focuses labor union organizing. "Runaway economic inequality and economic insecurity have led our country to the brink of disaster," Trumka writes. "In place of solidarity and dignity we have greed, racism and hate. The only path away from this abyss involves recognizing and respecting the collective power of workers demanding better pay and safer working conditions."
You can read Monday's commentary on rural poverty by Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky here. Tuesday's commentary by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) on income inequality and the widening wealth gap can be found here.
Read the rest of Trumka's commentary here.
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Final thoughts
Now in the second week of our Building a Common Future series, we will begin hosting weekly Facebook Live events with some of the writers of those commentaries. Join us at 1:30 p.m. Central time tomorrow as NCR opinion editor Olga Segura and NCR executive editor Heidi Schlumpf chat with Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky to kick things off. The event will also be streaming live on our YouTube page.
Until Thursday,
Stephanie Yeagle
NCR Managing Editor
[email protected]
Twitter: @ncrSLY
