- Lawsuit alleges clergy visits are limited to a four-hour Monday window at Saint Genevieve County Jail
WASHINGTON, – The Catholic Archdiocese of St. The suit alleges ICE is not enforcing its own policy. The detainees are part of a broad immigration crackdown and deportation drive by the Trump administration that has been condemned by human rights groups alleging widespread rights abuses, which ICE has denied.
The majority of the roughly 150 immigration detainees held at the facility are Hispanic Catholics, the diocese said.
On its website, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says clergy may visit detainees at any time as long as they notify the sheriff’s office. “As a bishop I am responsible for every soul in my archdiocese, and that includes those who are in the prisons,” St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski told Reuters. Rozanski said the lack of privacy prevents priests from carrying out their ministering duties. “They cannot hear confessions, they cannot celebrate Mass, they cannot give the anointing of the sick to any of the detainees,” he said, effectively “robbing the detainees of their rights to have access to these sacraments. When the priests asked to be able to see detainees to give them communion, the jail proposed that priests place the consecrated hosts in a container and a guard pass the container to the detainee, a proposal Rozanski called “sacrilegious.”
Louis filed a lawsuit against the federal government on Monday, alleging that detainees at an immigration detention facility in Missouri are being deprived of their right to speak privately with priests or receive sacraments like communion and confession.
