WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Pope Leo XIV expressed solidarity with the immigrant community in the U.S. and urged the church to be a united voice on their behalf in an October 8 private audience with immigration advocates.

Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, told OSV News that in the brief meeting with the pontiff, they were able to tell him about “our present situation and get his advice and hopefully his words of support, which I think we did.”

Bishop Seitz, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, said Pope Leo “encouraged a conference of bishops to speak together and presumably individually as well, about this issue.”

“We want to stay as much as we can above the political fray,” he said. “We want to speak to the Gospel and we want to continue our work as leaders in the church, and he was very much, I think, in agreement with that, that we stay rooted in the Gospel, and the teachings of the church.”

In a post on X, Bishop Seitz said it was a “great honor” for his group from El Paso to meet with the pope “and be able to bring with us the stories and fears of our immigrant sisters and brothers from across our country.”

Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a group that works to apply the perspective of Catholic social teaching in policy and practice to the U.S.-Mexico border region, told OSV News, “We found the Holy Father very attentive to the message that we had brought to him from the immigrant community, particularly the Catholic immigrant community in the Catholic Church in the United States, from across the country.”

“We brought in messages from California, from Texas, from Iowa, from New Jersey, from New York, from Florida, communities across the country,” Corbett said. “The majority of the messages that were given to the Holy Father were from people who were undocumented or people who were in mixed families, and so they conveyed concerns and anxieties about their situation, given that we’re in a moment of mass deportations.”

Corbett said Pope Leo’s comments to them were “very clear.”

“He said that the church cannot remain in silence. He called what’s happening with respect to the campaign of deportations an injustice, and he said that the church cannot remain silent,” he said.

“Today,” Corbett said in his own X post, “we met with Pope Leo to share the pain, fear, and hopes of the immigrant community in the US at a time of mass deportation. ‘You stand with me,’ the pope said. ‘And I stand with you.'”

Bishop Seitz told OSV News that Pope Leo “was so moved by the whole experience, but he spoke again, very movingly about all he’s learned from immigrants, about what they’ve taught him and the impact that they’ve had upon his life.”

“So, Pope Leo did assure us of his continued willingness to speak to this issue, his concern about what’s happening, particularly in the United States.”

Catholic social teaching on immigration balances three interrelated principles — the right of persons to migrate in order to sustain their lives and those of their families, the right of a country to regulate its borders and control immigration, and a nation’s duty to regulate its borders with justice and mercy.