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pnwmom

(109,995 posts)
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 07:08 PM Jul 19

Unlike in the US, most of the US detainees and deportees born in Central, S. America, and the Caribbean

are Catholic.

In the US, only 39% are Catholic. Why isn't the media covering the fact that most of the people being deported are Catholic? If they were deporting mostly Muslims or Jews, wouldn't that be reported widely? I have seen reports of Muslims being deported, but rarely, if ever, see any mention of a Catholic deportee's religion. And yet, most of these detainees and deportees come from largely Catholic countries.

From Wikipedia:

Region Total population Catholic % Catholic
Caribbean 24,364,622 19,062,198 78.23%
Central America 42,883,849 32,317,384 75.36%
North America 448,587,847 173,212,640 38.61%
South America 371,363,897 299,570,011 80.66%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_by_country

9 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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SickOfTheOnePct

(8,178 posts)
1. Because the religion of a deportee...
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 07:11 PM
Jul 19

...would only be relevant if religious belief was the basis for the deportation. Correlation v. causation.

pnwmom

(109,995 posts)
2. You are assuming that anti-Catholic bigotry doesn't exist. I know it does.
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 07:12 PM
Jul 19

So why should I assume that their non-WASP religion isn't one of the factors that led to their being scapegoated?

SickOfTheOnePct

(8,178 posts)
3. I know it does too...
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 07:16 PM
Jul 19

...I see it here all the time.

But what makes you believe that Catholic bigotry is behind the deportations? Seems to me that if they were looking specifically for Catholics to deport, they would hang around the outside of Catholic churches and grab parishioners as they left Mass.

Prairie Gates

(5,727 posts)
5. Catholic parishes in the US are also massively segregated
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 08:12 PM
Jul 19

IN part, this is just a function of parishes being associated with geographical neighborhoods which are themselves segregated. So, you could be Catholic in some parts of say, Queens NY and be in church almost exclusively with white European-heritage Catholics from Italian, Croatian, and Irish backgrounds, whereas a parish in another neighborhood would be almost entirely made up of Central American-heritage parishioners and people of Dominican-Puerto Rican origin. This is true throughout the country. Obviously, there are some parishes that are more "mixed" than others demographically, and this is more the case as the church shrinks and closes/combines parishes. But by and large, the Catholic Church in the US is affected and marked by the segregation and demographic isolation that prevails commonly in US society.

pnwmom

(109,995 posts)
8. They aren't where I live. But there are individual masses said in languages other than English,
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 11:18 PM
Jul 19

and that draws people from the same background together. But the Parish itself has a broad mix of people.

The situation you describe does sound like what my parents' experience was, growing up, but it changed as Catholics became more assimilated. We don't have an Irish neighborhood, a Polish neighborhood, etc, with corresponding parishes. We have cities with varying numbers of Catholic churches, which tend to draw whatever Catholics live in the surrounding neighborhood.

Morbius

(590 posts)
7. These people aren't being deported because they're Catholic.
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 08:20 PM
Jul 19

They're being deported because they're brown.

pnwmom

(109,995 posts)
9. It's the combination that appeals to lots of MAGA. They wouldn't be as eager to deport
Sat Jul 19, 2025, 11:21 PM
Jul 19

these brown people if they were all Southern Baptists.

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