Michael Pham, a Vietnamese refugee who survived a perilous boat crossing as a teenager, is now bishop of San Diego and leads a faith-based effort to accompany immigrants at federal court. He helped launch Faith (Faithful Accompaniment in Trust and Hope), which has trained roughly 500 volunteers from 17 faith traditions to provide presence, prayer and practical support. Volunteers say their visibility can comfort families and appears to have disrupted some ICE arrest patterns, even as agents move some detentions out of public view. Pham is also confronting his diocese’s history of clergy sexual-abuse claims while urging compassionate, nonjudgmental dialogue among polarized Catholics.
From Refugee To Bishop: Michael Pham’s Faith-Led Effort To Protect Immigrants
Bishop Michael Pham and other religious leaders at a federal courthouse in San Diego, where deportation hearings are held, in June.Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
Nearly five decades ago, a 13-year-old Michael Pham climbed aboard a cramped fishing boat in communist Vietnam with more than a hundred other people, determined only to leave. The vessel drifted for three days and four nights across the Pacific, surviving violent storms, towering waves and an encounter with a pirating ship. Without food or water for much of the crossing, the teenager ultimately survived, spent time in a Malaysian refugee camp and later received asylum in the United States.
Decades later, on a recent December afternoon, Pham—now 58 and serving as bishop of San Diego—recounted that harrowing journey in a quiet room inside the diocesan offices. "It's overwhelming," he said. "I never thought I would be in this position."
Accompanying Immigrants At Court
Pham’s experience as a refugee helps explain why he has taken an unusually visible role for a senior church leader: he has begun accompanying immigrants when they arrive at the federal courthouse in San Diego for hearings or ICE check-ins. Across the country this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have become more visible inside court buildings and have frequently detained immigrants immediately after court appearances. Local watchdog groups report that the San Diego immigration court saw at least 170 arrests during a three-month stretch this past summer.
Pham and other clergy say their presence provides emotional and spiritual support to immigrants and can change the atmosphere for ICE officers and judges. "There’s a general sense of ‘humanness’ that’s being lost in all of this," Pham said. "There are people in court who have lived here for 10, 20, 30, 40 years without criminal records. And just imagine: they have family, children, grandchildren, businesses — now being torn apart."
Launching Faith: A New Ministry
After his first courthouse visit in June, Pham organized other clergy and volunteers into a ministry called Faith (Faithful Accompaniment in Trust and Hope). Officially launched in August, Faith has trained roughly 500 volunteers from 17 faith traditions to offer presence, prayer and accompaniment at the courthouse.
"Doing this work, we’re uniting people from all different traditions to come together, because we see this as important," Pham said. "This is a common good." Volunteers typically gather early, check dockets and spread through the building to introduce themselves to attendees and offer accompaniment or prayer. The grassroots group Detention Resistance also documents detentions and notifies relatives when people are taken into custody.
Tactical Shifts And The Limits Of Presence
Volunteers often describe their work as an expression of solidarity that can feel small in the face of systemic power. "We just felt so powerless. We wanted to do something," one volunteer said. "But even this work is powerless, like it’s an exercise in powerlessness," Father Scott Santarosa said. "You show up and there’s really very little we can do except accompany people, pray with people, sit with people."
Still, Santarosa and others observe changes in ICE’s tactics since spring: agents who once waited openly in courtroom hallways and arrested people as they exited now frequently detain people in private rooms used for ICE check-ins — areas volunteers cannot observe. Santarosa described that floor as "the danger area." He believes Faith’s visibility has disrupted the agency’s routine and slowed some arrests, even as ICE adapts its procedures.
The ministry’s work also affects individual cases. Santarosa is writing character references and attending hearings, for example, for a father from Guerrero, Mexico, who has lived in the U.S. for more than two decades and whose family— including a five-year-old daughter—has lived in fear amid heightened enforcement. "Esperemos en Dios y puedan mejorar," the man texted: "Let’s hope in God that [these situations] can get better."
Context: Arrests And The Diocese’s Past
When asked about courthouse arrests and private check-in room detentions, a Department of Homeland Security official pointed to sanctuary policies in California as contributing to enforcement actions. But new data show that nearly 60% of people arrested by ICE in San Diego and Imperial counties had no criminal histories.
Pham also stepped into a diocese still reckoning with a painful history of clergy sexual abuse. After California temporarily lifted the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse claims in 2019, 457 new allegations were filed against the Diocese of San Diego; the diocese says roughly 60% of those claims allege abuse that occurred more than 50 years ago. In 2007 the diocese agreed to pay nearly $200 million to settle 144 claims, and the diocese filed for bankruptcy last year for the second time to address these claims.
Pham said he did not initially grasp the scale of the crisis when the first claims surfaced and has since met victims in mediation. "People, I believe, recognize what’s right and what’s wrong in their conscience, and they see the church has that moral compass: that’s when the church speaks. But on the human side of that, that’s where we failed. And we have to deal with that," he said.
Calling For Compassionate Dialogue
Immigration is a polarizing issue inside the Catholic community: about half of Catholic voters support former President Trump’s immigration policies, reflecting broader societal divisions. Pham and church leaders are trying to navigate this polarization while emphasizing pastoral care. "We live in a society now, particularly in our country, where we are so polarized," Pham said. "And we see that polarization in the church, because you have both sides sitting in the pews."
Santarosa frames the issue as distinctly Gospel-centered rather than partisan. "Jesus, in the Gospels, always sides with the poor, the outcast, the stranger, the leper, the woman. We can’t water that down," he said. Last month, hundreds of U.S. bishops issued a message opposing "indiscriminate mass deportation" and lamenting the vilification of immigrants.
Pham urged openness and listening across divisions: "Anyone is invited to share wherever they might be in life, without judgment and without condemning anything." He cited the late Pope Francis’s emphasis on listening as a way to foster dialogue and transformation of heart.
