Following USAID cuts, a network of Catholic university-based advocacy groups, staffed by USCCB and Biden-admin alumni, enables the bishops to continue advancing porous border initiatives.
By Anne Hendershott
Crisis Magazine
January 28, 2026
For decades, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops played an unmistakably political role in national immigration debates, issuing forceful policy statements, lobbying Congress, running public relations trips to the U.S.-Mexican border for bishops, and positioning its Migration and Refugee Services office as a progressive, often strident voice on immigration in Washington. Those days are over. Last February the bishops' conference cut 50 positions-about one‑third of the staff in its migration and refugee services office-after federal reimbursements for contracted refugee and migrant resettlement work were suspended.
Today, the USCCB appears to be attempting to rebrand itself as a less‑political actor, emphasizing humanitarian service and pastoral care rather than policy confrontation. Whether the USCCB will be successful in its effort to recast itself remains to be seen.
The career trajectory of onetime key USCCB Migration policy figures such as Ashley Feasley underscores this shift. Feasley's advocacy work, both within the USCCB and later as Director for Transborder Security for the Biden Administration, makes this shift especially visible. Feasley served as the USCCB's Director of Policy and Public Affairs for Migration and Refugee Services from the start of President Trump's first administration in 2016 until 2020.
During those years at the USCCB, she became one of the most persistent-and sometimes vitriolic-critics of the Trump Administration's border and asylum policies, directing much of the USCCB's public advocacy toward challenging the Trump administration's approach. Speaking for the bishops, Feasley made the Trump Administration's border and asylum policies a central focus of her opposition, driving some of the most aggressive public pushback the USCCB has ever mounted against a presidential administration.
During her tenure at the USCCB, Feasley's Curriculum Vitae reveals that she "drafted over 90 statements on behalf of the USCCB President and the Chair of the USCCB Committee on Migration, including 40 from January 2019-August 2020." Her attacks on President Trump's immigration polices escalated in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Between 2016-2020, Feasley "drafted 18 Congressional testimonies on behalf of Bishops...for Senate and House Committees," testified before Congress on behalf of the bishops on migration, and published 10 articles "on various aspects of migration policy ranging from unaccompanied children, the Migrant Protection Protocol, to Refugee Resettlement."
In addition, Feasley led trips on what she called in her CV "advocacy trips" on migration issues. In this capacity, she organized public relations trips for the bishops to the Northern Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, claiming that the bishops were attempting to document "country conditions for Temporary Protected Status." All of this was especially helpful to the Biden administration's open borders policy.
Feasley also organized the bishops' delegation to the border to examine the border patrol processing facilities and shelters during what she called the "family separation crisis" in 2018. At the conclusion of the Trump presidency in 2020, after years of high‑profile advocacy at the USCCB, Feasley was elevated into senior immigration leadership roles within the new Biden Administration, where she worked on what she referred to as border security and related policy areas. Most of us recall the kind of border security the country endured during Feasley's tenure as director of Biden's Border Security.
A distinct shift in the USCCB's direction appears to have taken hold within the conference Migration office, with a new-and apparently less oppositional-operational posture now shaping its approach to immigration. Under the leadership of longtime humanitarian executive Bill Canny, who spent several years at the controversial Catholic Relief Services, the USCCB's migration work is being redefined by practical responsibilities such as resettlement logistics, diocesan coordination, and federal contract management rather than ideological advocacy.
While this pastoral immigration approach at the USCCB is long overdue-and welcomed by many Catholics who had been dismayed by the bishops' radical and oppositional posture on border issues during the first Trump administration-no one should assume the bishops have moved beyond their long‑standing advocacy framework on "welcoming the stranger." There is considerable evidence that the conference has simply shifted its policy influence rather than abandoned it, effectively "outsourcing" immigration advocacy and public‑policy formation to progressive Catholic university research and advocacy centers led by many of the same figures whose careers in the USCCB and Democratic politics unfolded within the federal policymaking sphere. This externalization of influence provides the backdrop for understanding the new centers of Catholic immigration leadership that now operate outside the bishops' conference.
What emerges from this shift is the emergence of a network of Catholic institutions now shaping the immigration agenda more forcefully than the USCCB itself. After her federal service as President Biden's Director of Border Security, Feasley was appointed for the Spring of 2026 to become a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, positioning her within one of the most influential progressive Catholic platforms in Washington. Feasley also serves as the Legal Expert in Residence at the Immigration Law and Policy Initiative at The Catholic University of America, a role that allows her to translate her years of federal policymaking into academic programming, student formation, and public commentary. These appointments signal how figures shaped by the progressive executive‑branch immigration policy of the Biden administration and the USCCB have become central voices in the progressive Catholic intellectual and advocacy landscape.
At Georgetown, Feasley joins another USCCB alum, John Carr, who spent more than two decades shaping the USCCB's broad public-policy portfolio, including its positions on immigration. In that role-like Feasley-Carr directed the bishops' advocacy efforts on immigration in Washington. After leaving the USCCB, Carr cofounded Georgetown's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, where he continues to shape Catholic engagement with policy on immigration. Even after retiring from formal leadership of the Georgetown Initiative at the end of 2025, he remains publicly associated with the Initiative as its founder, continuing to influence how Catholic institutions frame questions of justice and immigration.
Taken together, these developments reveal not a retreat from political engagement by the U.S. bishops but a redistribution of influence-away from the conference's formal structures and into a network of progressive Catholic institutions and media shops that now shape the immigration narrative with far greater freedom and far less episcopal oversight. The USCCB's new pastoral posture may soften its public profile, but the policy ambitions that once defined its Washington presence have hardly disappeared; they have simply migrated to university initiatives, advocacy centers, progressive Catholic media outlets, and policy networks staffed by the very figures who once drove the USCCB's political agenda from within. In this new landscape, the future of Catholic immigration advocacy will be written not in the bishops' chancery offices but in the seminar rooms, policy labs, and public‑facing platforms of progressive Catholic institutions.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.