In 2025, 173 years after Frederick Douglass gave his 1852 Independence Day speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” we can update his famous question and ask another question: What to the Migrant is the Fourth of July?

This year, Independence Day is again a day that “reveals more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty” of racial profiling that makes a brown face “just cause” to presume that someone is here illegally and has an irregular immigration status.

The festive atmosphere seems “empty and heartless” when places associated with Latinos – farms, factories, carwashes, churches – are the locus of dread and foreboding due to the ongoing raids. In the words of the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, “The situation is far from the communion of life and love to which this nation of immigrants should strive.”

The celebration of liberty is “a sham” to families who are afraid to go to school, to work, or to church due to the threat of abduction by hidden accusers, authorized or not, and of possible deportation, warranted or not, without due process. “I really don’t believe fear adequately describes it,” said El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz: “It’s terror.”

Masked agents refuse to identify themselves, migrants are tricked to show up in court by promises that their cases will be dismissed, then they are arrested when they arrive. Deportees are sent to countries with which they have no history, Hispanic workers are forced to line up at their work sites to prove that they are lawfully present. Countless barriers to legal residence or lawful status are erected.

Is it any wonder that, amid the apparent rejection of their adoptive nation, immigrants take refuge under the mantle of their native flags?

The RINGBOLT

We can formulate our answer to Frederick Douglass’s question guided by the pronouncements of the Holy Fathers, including the first American pontiff Pope Leo XIV and his “beloved predecessor,” the son of Italian immigrants who was born in Latin America, Pope Francis. We can also include the pope of the late 19th century, Blessed Pius IX, who promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

First, we must begin where Douglass began, who, despite the slavery that was regnant in 1852, conceded his admiration for the Declaration of Independence commemorated on the 4th. Douglass called the Declaration “the RINGBOLT of the chain of your nation’s destiny” (all caps, his). “The principles contained in that instrument,” he said, “are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

In his September 24, 2015, address to a joint session of Congress, Pope Francis reminded us of those saving principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Accordingly, said the Pontiff, in a nation so conceived and so dedicated, “All political activity mut serve and promote the good of the human person and be based on respect for his or her dignity.”

Rather than being discouraged by the jarring discord between the lofty words and the disappointing actions of our government, we must recognize the words of the Declaration as the RINGBOLT of the chain of our destiny and the standard by which we must hold the government to account.

Indeed, immigrants are deeply implicated and therefore invested stakeholders in the promises of the Declaration. Pope Francis made the point to Congress: “I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.”

Recently, Pope Leo underlined the same point: “My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate. All of us, in the course of our lives, can find ourselves healthy or sick, employed or unemployed, living in our native land or in a foreign country, yet our dignity always remains unchanged: it is the dignity of a creature willed and loved by God.”

Guided by Faith

Second, people of faith must have faith. The immigrant communities subjected to the offenses and challenges of the present hour are by-and-by people of faith. But faith looks to a superior power and not necessarily to mere mortals, who are impaired by worldliness, confused by human passions, and are fallen.

Two years after Douglass gave his speech, on December 8, 1854, Blessed Pope Pius IX issued his apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus, infallibly proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is the Patroness of the United States.

But while the Church proclaims that Mary was conceived without sin, we know that our country was not. Even though the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the equality of all men, the country came into being with slavery in place and, as Pope Francis recognized in his address to Congress, “Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected.” In fact, “Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent.”

But immigrants who are Catholic and their Catholic supporters can read with hope the words of Ineffabilis Deus that describe Mary as our “sweet Mother of mercy,” who, because she has “in her care the work of our salvation, she is solicitous about the whole human race” (Emphasis added).

In other words, the will of heaven is in agreement with the saving words of the Declaration of Independence: the Virgin Mother of God “is solicitous about the whole human race” because “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator” with dignity and rights.

In the Catholic context, this fact is confirmed by the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception as the Patroness of the United States. The same Mary who is venerated in Mexico as Our Lady of Guadalupe and who appeared to St. Juan Diego as an Aztec princess speaking in Nahuatl is venerated here with a feast day (December 8) four days before the commemoration of apparition on Tepeyac Hill (December 12). The proclamation by the US bishops in 1846 was affirmed by Pius IX on July 2, 1847.

More recently, on June 20, 2020, Cardinal Robert Sarah, then Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, promulgated the decision of Pope Francis to add three Marian titles to the Litany of Loreto, which catalogs the titles of the Blessed Virgin. The new invocations are: “Mother of mercy,” “Mother of Hope,” and “Solace of migrants.”

As such, migrants are assured that this nation has been consecrated in a manner that secures divine protection over those who seek material protection here.

The Church Must Act

Third and finally, the gauntlet put down by Frederick Douglass challenging believers to act righteously recovers an urgent relevance today. Christian leaders who vocally support the current administration’s actions on issues like abortion, religious freedom, gender theory and matters of sexual mores, as well as their preferred view of ordered freedom, but who remain silent on the unjust treatment of migrants, are not only “indifferent to the wrongs,” but “actually take sides with the oppressors,” in Douglass’s words.

The Church must choose wisely. On one hand are the ideals of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”), in harmony with both this nation’s consecration to Mary and the counsel of the popes. On the other hand are expedient readings of immigration law designed to exclude and discriminate against the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee, the asylum seeker, and the marginalized poor. When religious leaders uphold and defend a government seeking to enforce such inhumane policies, we can apply Douglass’s censure: “These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion.”

In particular, Christians’ praise of “religious liberty” rings hollow, Douglass said, when the moral obligations implicated by our religion are ignored. “At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience,” Douglass lamented, “they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness.”

The Church must fulfill its calling in the hour at hand. “The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now,” Douglass affirmed, quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life: “Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.”

What can the Fourth of July mean to the excluded community of immigrants? For many people today, this celebration is a broken promise. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For people of faith, it is a promise worth redeeming, worth celebrating and, finally, worth fulfilling.

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Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Public domain.