Miami Archdiocese: Border officials ‘wrongfully detained’ foreign-born priest

Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami intervened with a federal judge Tuesday after a parish priest was detained upon trying to reenter the US after a trip overseas, according to a statement from the Archdiocese.

Father Gustavo Santos is “a priest of the Archdiocese of Miami in good standing and with a valid R-1 religious worker visa through November 2025,” the statement said. Fr. Santos “was unexpectedly and wrongfully denied admission into the United States upon his return from an overseas trip via London” Aug. 19.

“Through the swift intervention of Archbishop Thomas Wenski and the efforts of immigration counsel from Catholic Legal Services Pro bono council Mary Kramer and Jose W. Alvarez, the matter was brought before a federal judge,” the statement explained. “As a result, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reconsidered the case, and Father Santos has since been released and allowed to reenter the country.”

Fr. Santos was born in Venezuela and first came to the US in 2012, according to the Florida Catholic. He attended seminary in the US and was ordained at St. Mary Cathedral in Miami in May 2023.

The news of the priest’s detainment comes amid bipartisan efforts in Congress to address a crisis affecting religious workers, stemming from a 2023 policy change that led to a massive backlog in processing their immigration applications.

As CatholicVote reported in May: “In 2023, the US government changed the way it processes green card petitions for religious workers, merging them with applications from vulnerable immigrant children without raising the annual visa cap.”

The change “created a severe backlog, extending wait times for visas from roughly one year to more than a decade,” CatholicVote’s report explained. “As a result, many clergy have been forced to leave the US once their R-1 visas expire, severing ties with the congregations they serve.”

Catholic leaders have been sounding the alarm over the threat to foreign-born clergy and other religious workers ever since, with the issue taking on greater urgency as more and more visas approach their expiration dates.

The Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, sued the State Department under the Biden administration in August 2024, arguing the visa rule change would force clergy out of the communities they minister to unless it can be reversed.

Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee issued a similar warning in November.

A bipartisan effort is underway to safeguard foreign-born religious workers ministering in the US. The Religious Workforce Protection Act has been introduced in both the House and the Senate, and is backed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“In a letter to Congress,” CatholicVote reported in May, “Archbishop Timothy Broglio and Bishop Mark Seitz of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) warned that the current situation endangers access to the sacraments.”

“An increasing number of American families will be unable to practice the basic tenets of their faith if this situation is not addressed,” the bishops wrote. “Likewise, hospitals will go without chaplains, schools will go without teachers, and seminaries will go without instructors.”

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