Trump-Loathing Billionaire Teams With Miami Archbishop Wenski to Fight Deportations, by Mike Smith

By Mike Smith, Bloomberg, (Complicit Clergy), August 20, 2025

In immigrant-heavy Miami, Cuban-born businessman Mike Fernandez and Archbishop Thomas Wenski are leading a backlash to ICE sweeps.

For nearly 50 years, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski has ministered to immigrants who fear being forced to leave the US. But the unease in his community now, as President Donald Trump presses for the biggest deportation effort in US history, is unlike anything he has ever seen before.

Miami, home to large numbers of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela, among other countries, is a prime target of Trump’s dragnet. Thousands of people in the region could face deportation as the administration seeks to end protections for migrants from countries roiled by war or disasters.

“There certainly are people living in fear in this community,” Wenski said in an interview. “They’re living in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night.”

When federal agents are rumored to be conducting raids in the area, attendance at mass declines, Wenski said. The Miami office of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has logged 15,000 arrests since Trump took office in January, more than any other of the agency’s regional locations, according to federal data compiled by the University of California at Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project.

Wenski, 74, has taken an active role — with help from a Trump-loathing local billionaire — in trying to protect and provide comfort to immigrants who fear being caught up in ICE’s sweeps. He helped expand a Church program that provides free legal advice to immigrants facing deportation. And he pressed Florida to allow clergy access to “Alligator Alcatraz,” the state-run immigration detainment facility in the Everglades.

Continue reading at Bloomberg

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