SILVER SPRING, Maryland – The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, or CLINIC — the nation’s largest network of nonprofit immigration legal services organizations — released this statement as Catholics across the world celebrate the season of renewal ushered in by Holy Week and Easter:

“The United States can and must welcome people seeking asylum because it is the law, because it is right, and because we can.

CLINIC, which represents the largest network of nonprofit immigration legal services organizations in the United States, knows that the amount of resources available to care for and provide legal services to asylum seekers is a decision that belongs to the Biden administration. It is simply wrong to say that we cannot welcome because we are stretched too thin or because there is not enough to go around. The decision against providing adequate resources to welcome those in need of protection is a policy choice.

When God calls us to welcome the stranger, God calls us to action. Welcome means to offer food, shelter, clothing, education, health care and other services, which are all human rights. It is the responsibility of the U.S. government and the responsibility of all of us to act accordingly. In a nation with the wealth of the United States, the failure to do so is unconscionable.

For Catholics, Easter is a season of renewal, of light, of hope. It is a time when we reflect on all that is possible. CLINIC knows that what is possible is a United States that upholds the rights and dignity of asylum seekers and puts in place systems, laws, and policies that truly and actively welcome.

Title 42 was never about public health, it is about racism, xenophobia, and the politicization of human life, and there is no place for Title 42 in a moral and just nation.

As Texas Governor Greg Abbott, members of Congress and others attempt to stoke fear around the end of Title 42, CLINIC renews our call on the Biden administration to end this deadly and devastating policy immediately and to do everything in its power to ensure such a travesty of human rights and morality never happens again.

Let us emerge together from this Easter season recommitted and renewed to the values that led the United States to create the asylum system in the first place — a commitment to welcome.”