Walking out of Catholic mass at St. John XXIII parish in Evanston Thursday morning, Lois Farley Shuford expressed alarm that the parish’s two priests, who both came to the United States with a mission to serve the poor, might be forced to leave the country.
The possibility of losing the immigrant priests intensifies the worry for people in the parish, where about half the congregants are immigrants from Mexico. They’re facing heightened fears as they see news reports about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seizing immigrants on the streets.
The priests, Rev. Koudjo K. Jean-Philippe Lokpo, of the west African nation of Togo, and Rev. José Manuel Ortiz, of Mexico, are here on R1 religious worker visas that permit them to serve in the United States. But the federal government is so backed up in processing paperwork that Rev. Lokpo might be forced to leave in October, and only an attorney’s intervention saved Rev. Ortiz from having to leave the country by the end of July.
That has upset parishioners, who say the two men have devoted their lives to serving others, and have done tremendous good for the people in the parish.
“We were scared,” Lois Farley Shuford said after leaving the church service. “I mean, in this [President Donald Trump] administration, we’re scared about everything.”
“We’re scared for many of our parishioners,” added Bob Shuford. About half of the St. John XXIII’s parishioners are Hispanic in the multilingual parish, which offers mass in English, Spanish and French Creole.
“We’re aware of what’s happening with our priests,” Bob Shuford said. “It’s a part of a larger concern that we have, and we’ve all been through training on how we can best support our fellow parishioners.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago consolidated the parishes of St. Nicholas and St. Mary to form St. John XXIII parish in early 2022. By the end of that year, Lokpo led the parish as its pastor, assisted by Ortiz as the parish’s associate pastor.
“The core of this place, particularly at St. Nick, but the core of the whole parish has been that all are welcome. That’s a critical thing here in this parish home, and so I think that has been extended to Jose and Jean-Philippe as well,” Lois Farley Shuford said.
Ortiz remains philosophical about the possibility of being forced to leave St. John XXIII and return to Mexico.
“It is what it is,” Ortiz said. What really matters to him is his connection to the members of his parish, he added.
“You try to do what’s best for the parish and for the people.”
In an April letter to the parish, Lokpo wrote his initial concerns that his and Ortiz’s green card application for continued residency had yet to be processed by the federal government, despite submitting his required documents to the government in 2022.
At the time, he anticipated that Ortiz’s visa would expire in July, which would require him to return to Mexico; however, immigration lawyers were able to obtain a 240-day extension on Ortiz’s visa due to the time lost because of the pandemic.
Lokpo is now seeking the same extension, according to Ortiz. Lokpo’s visa is set to expire at the end of October.
“I ask for your prayers and your understanding as we navigate this challenge. I am concerned about the disruption this will cause for our St. John XXIII Parish, yet I trust in God’s hand in this and in His care for our faith community,” Lokpo wrote.
St. John XXIII is administered by an international Catholic organization called Comboni Missionaries, according to Comboni’s Senior Communications Specialist Lindsay Braud.
Comboni ministers to the “world’s poorest and most abandoned people,” according to its website.
Comboni has 3,500 missionaries worldwide and operates in 41 countries, according to its website.
Comboni’s priests in North American parishes are selected by the Provincial Superior Rev. Ruffino Ezama.
“We are an international religious order,” Ezama said. “Wherever there is need, we don’t look at if someone is an immigrant or not, because we go there to serve the church.”
Despite the mission serving in 41 countries, Ezama said the United States has the most rigorous requirements for religious workers.
Comboni priests take vows of poverty, which prevents them from being paid for their work, chastity and obedience, which beholds them to orders from their superiors at Comboni.
Lokpo did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Shelley Benson and Tom Lenz, the chair and vice-chair of the Parish Pastoral Council, respectively, responded on Lokpo’s behalf, asking Pioneer Press to speak to the Archdiocese of Chicago.
The Archdiocese commented, “While we hope the federal government recognizes the special status of religious workers, we do not discuss personnel matters.”
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Majority of priests under 50 are immigrants
The archdiocese, like many others in the United States, is facing a shortage of priests as fewer men choose that vocation. Some Chicagoland parishes rely on immigrant priests to fill the gap.
Nearly 60% of younger diocesan priests — under the age of 50 — who serve in the Archdiocese of Chicago are immigrants, according to a 2023 report. The number is a considerable contrast with priests over the age of 50, of whom 81% were born in the U.S. The average age of a priest in 2023 was 64.
Prior to 2023, it would typically take 12 months for the government to process for a green card. That’s well within the five-year time frame that an R1 visa gives a religious worker, according to immigration lawyer Tahreem Kalam, with Minsky, McCormick and Hallagan.
But that changed drastically after a 2023 decision from the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration.
That created a significant backlog, according to Kalam, who said the five years might run out for some R1 visa holders. She said they’re in an “impossible” situation.
A workaround that some attorneys try for their clients is to have them apply for an H-1B visa, Kalam said, but that won’t work for most religious since they take vows of poverty.
“It’s a huge problem in the community,” she said.
“Especially an institution like the Catholic Church — It’s a global [institution] — They send people to different countries all the time.”
She represents a large group of Catholic nuns, and “they’ve all just kind of come to terms now that they have to leave [the country],” she remarked.
At the national level, some dioceses are taking their demands to government. Last year, the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, and five of its priests sued the federal government over its backlog of green card approvals.
Steps are being taken in the U.S. House and Senate to bring a resolution for religious workers’ status, according to the Associated Press.
“I think the only way for changes in their visas is if some of these bigger religious organizations were to lobby and show Congress how much they are being affected by losing their religious leaders,” Kalam said.
‘Don’t take our priests’
On a warm summer evening on the grounds of St. Nicholas Church, one of the two churches that make up St. John XXIII parish, attorney William Quiceno volunteers his time to give immigrants free legal consultations every other month. He has been doing so for the past 10 to 12 years.
On this particular July evening, he had eight new clients. Of those, he really only had a path forward for three, he said.
“People have more fear, for sure,” Quiceno said. “They’re worried more about their future, their kids, the lives they’ve established here. They’re looking for any kind of way they can fix their status.”
“A lot of them have known they haven’t had any options, but they’re hoping that one day, there would be an option. Now that kind of hope disappears.”
“Their hope kind of disappears,” he repeated to himself.
Inside the makeshift waiting room, Teresa Infante and Mireya Terrazaz take names on a sign-up sheet and usher clients into the lawyer’s temporary office.
In the wake of promises from the Trump administration to crack down on immigration enforcement in Chicago, Infante and Terrazaz confirmed the renewed tensions felt in the immigrant community. In the months since Trump’s return to the Oval Office, as many as 22 people signed up for free consultations one evening, creating the need for the lawyer to stay one hour later than he usually volunteers.
What the two didn’t count on, after decades of volunteer work for the parish, is that their own priests would be in danger of not being allowed to stay in the country.
“It was very sad,” Infante said of Ortiz’s situation. A group of parishioners had met over the weeks to pray for Ortiz to stay in the country. “Please, don’t take our priests away,” Terrazas said.
Now they wait to see whether Lokpo’s visa will be extended past October.
“We have to pray,” said Infante. “A lot.”