Social Justice Tag: Immigration

September 2025

Articles from Mercy:

• Mercy sisters call for urgent defense of immigrants (Ryan W Roberts, OLF; Institute Justice Team)
• Social extractivism (Ana Siufi, RSM; Institute Justice Team)
• Critical Considerations: What is Posse Comitatus all about? (Karen Donahue, RSM)
• Everyday pilgrimages: the Earth is the Lord’s (Rose Marie Tresp, RSM; Institute Justice Team)

Local Justice News & Upcoming Mercy Events:

Justice Resources & Links

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Mercy sisters call for urgent defense of immigrants

Ryan W Roberts, OLF

Over the summer, Sisters Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch co-authored an essay urging their readers to stand up against government cruelty against our immigrant neighbors. Published on the Sisters of Mercy website shortly after Sister Pat’s death, the essay provides details of their journey into immigration activism over 40 years ago. They recount stories of listening and building compassionate relationships with asylum seekers, immigration officials, and elected leaders. Most importantly, they declare a reason to continue in hope: while our risk tolerance might be different from these sisters’, “we all can do something”. The gospel empowers and calls us each to actions of solidarity and accompaniment with our migrant siblings before it’s too late. Read their essay by clicking here.

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Social extractivism

Ana Siufi, RSM; Institute Justice Team

Extractivism is a core activity of the capitalist and colonial system that, throughout the centuries, has facilitated the transfer of natural goods from colonies to the colonizers’ countries of the wealthy global minority (a.k.a. the Global North). This legacy is perpetuated today by huge transnational corporations.

This economic model that benefits only the few deprives the majority of the world’s population of their traditional ways of subsistence and care for local ecosystems. This causes local and/or national impoverishment, the violation of human and natural rights, and increasing dependency on dominant powers. Its effects are nearly all irreversible, and they spread mainly across the countries of the colonized global majority (a.k.a. the Global South), condemning them to be mere providers of raw materials and cheap labor while destroying biodiversity, hindering production and industrialization, and preventing intergenerational justice.

Extractivism has many faces. It doesn’t only comprise the exploitation of natural resources and the disruption of local economies, but it’s also an expansive extractivism that causes harm in cultural, epistemological, axiological, social, and spiritual ways.We can speak of multi-extractivism that legalizes the creation of sacrifice zones and sacrificial human beings and cultures, treating their lives as less valuable than others’.

Emptying territories of their legitimate and ancestral inhabitants can be a tactic prior to implementing extractive projects, or it can be a concurrent or subsequent effect of such projects. In any case, this violence aims to facilitate the actions of extractive companies by suppressing local resistance or weakening it, dividing communities or depriving them of their youth, who feel pressured by circumstances to leave their lands and move elsewhere with the illusion of a more dignified and promising life. Extreme cases of this policy lead directly to the complete destruction of nations.

Governments can contribute to this migration of mostly rural populations by failing to implement policies or changing legislation to promote and facilitate extractivism. This can include decreasing or eliminating taxes on businesses, providing subsidies to corporations, rendering labor exploitation invisible, and either failing to fight or even joining organized crime.

Sadly, in a racist global system that imposes a hierarchy of human lives, it’s profitable to deprive populations of healthcare, water, food, traditional ways of life tied to their land, and force them to migrate or face persecution. Repression and death are normalized, rendered invisible, or counted as collateral damage of no importance to the market and technocracy.  An extreme example of social extractivism is what Israel has been practicing against the Palestinian people, with a plan of ethnic cleansing and extermination that serves the theft of territory and natural goods. Therefore, armed forces are used as instruments of the system.

Media also play their part. Oppression demands the manipulation and concealment of the truth, as well as the shameless dissemination of disinformation so that the public doesn’t know what’s really happening in the world, such as the causes of wars and genocides, the roots of impoverishment of the global majority and regional conflicts, and those responsible for climate change. This manipulation of communication that blocks information, reflection, and personal and community action accompanies and facilitates all forms of extractivism.

In conclusion, we must fight to uproot this extractivist system that kills millions of human beings and makes the planet uninhabitable. We must build paths of social and environmental justice to preserve the rights of people and of nature and to achieve peace and the defense of life. Likewise, it’s necessary to demand that the dominating global minority pay its enormous ecological debt to the global majority, an amount that far exceeds the financial debts drowning these numerous, marginalized countries. As the episcopal conferences of the Global South have committed in advance of the COP30 climate talks, we must “promote economies based on solidarity, the ‘happy sobriety’ of Laudato Si’ and the ‘Buen Vivir’ (‘Good Living’) of ancestral wisdom”.

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Critical Considerations

What is Posse Comitatus all about?

Karen Donahue, RSM

The Trump administration’s decision to send federal military personnel and National Guard troops to U.S. cities has sparked renewed debate about the role of the military in civilian law enforcement and focused attention on a 147-year-old law known as the Posse Comitatus Act.

The literal meaning of the term posse comitatus is power of the county. It has been used since medieval times to refer to a group of people (usually able-bodied men) who are deputized by a sheriff (a county official) to engage in local law enforcement. The posses of the old Western movies would be an example of a posse comitatus.

The current law, enacted in 1878, grew out of the political conflicts of the post–Civil War era. From 1865 to 1877, federal troops occupied the states of the Confederacy (Reconstruction) to assure that the rights of formerly enslaved African Americans were protected. The contentious election of 1876 led to a crisis that resulted in the Compromise of 1877. The Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes would assume the presidency, but in exchange, Reconstruction would end with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, thus paving the way for Jim Crow and the ongoing subjugation of Black Americans.

Southern Democratic politicians returning to Washington were determined to assure that the federal government would not be able to interfere in their internal affairs. The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 as an amendment to the Army’s annual appropriations bill. According to the historical record of the legislation, it is clear that the goal of the bill’s sponsors was to prevent the federal military from protecting the civil rights of African Americans.

While Posse Comitatus is very clear that the military services (Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines) have no role in civilian law enforcement, the situation is murkier with regard to the National Guard, and especially the D.C. National Guard which is directly under the command of the president rather than a governor.

The following articles provide more in-depth information about Posse Comitatus and the role of the National Guard:

• • The Posse Comitatus Act Explained
• • Limiting the Military’s Role in Law Enforcement
• • The Thin Blue Line Between Soldiers and Police: Understanding the Posse Comitatus Act

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Everyday pilgrimages: the Earth is the Lord’s

Rose Marie Tresp, RSM; Institute Justice Team

During the Season of Creation, from September 1 to October 4, many pilgrimages are occurring across the United States. Making a pilgrimage to a holy place is an ancient practice in many religions that endures to this day. During this pivotal year, marking both the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures and the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s groundbreaking encyclical Laudato Si’, the Laudato Si Movement – North America has invited us to join in a Pilgrimage of Hope for Creation to rediscover the beauty of God’s creation through prayer, reflection, and action. You can learn more at the Pilgrims of Hope for Creation web page about what pilgrimages are occurring and how to plan one.

But pilgrimages could happen every day if we remembered the passage in Psalm 24:1: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” Scripture is filled with references to nature, as in Job 12: 7–8: “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.”

There are places of spectacular natural beauty such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon which must be visited in person to appreciate them fully. But daily, we can take time to truly listen to God’s spectacular everyday Creation. Be quiet, listen to the sounds, smell the air, look at the colors, touch the leaves, put your finger in the dirt, immerse yourself attentively in this small place and time. Notice too and feel sorrow about the places of destruction, trash left behind, damaged landscapes. Feel yourself in the presence of God, the Creator. As you are outside, consider what in nature you complain about, the squirrel that ate the tomato you carefully cultivated, the mosquito that bit you. What are these living beings teaching you? Give thanks for how the natural world sustains you: the plants producing oxygen, the plants producing food, and the animals we eat. These too are God’s creation. Pay attention to how the natural world struggles to live: the plant that grows in the cracks in the sidewalk; the ants that keep rebuilding their nests.

So go outside, silence your phone, empty your mind as much as possible and “ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” If you wish, journal. If you can, go on a pilgrimage with a group to gain hope and support from fellow pilgrims and share our hope and love for creation. Or take a friend to walk in silence with you. Afterwards, share your reflections. Or in nature alone with God’s creation, be a pilgrim every day.

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