VATICAN (SE): “With immense sadness, the Holy Father has seen the images of the father and his baby daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande River while trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States,” interim Director of the Holy See Press Office, Alessandro Gisotti, told reporters on June 26, Vatican News reported.
 

EL PASO (CNS): Bishops from Texas and Mexico called for solidarity with migrants as a Catholic response to the national emergency declared at the border of the United States (US) and Mexico by the president, Donald Trump, to free up funds for building a border wall.
 
The bishops also questioned if the emergency was as urgent as attending to the waves of migrants seeking asylum in the United States, but who are forced to wait months to make their claims.
 

DHAKA (UCAN): An international seminar held in Bangladesh, organised by the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), focused on migrants, refugees, displaced persons, human trafficking and renewable energy options in Asia.
 
The February 11 to 17 conference drew about 50 participants including Patrick Cardinal D’Rozario of Dhaka, nine archbishops and bishops, 14 priests, nuns and laypeople from 11 Asian countries.
 

WASHINGTON (Agencies): Even as the caravan of refugees and migrants encountered a rough reception in Tijuana, Mexico, and continued on to the reinforced border of the United States of America (US), district judge, Jon Tigar, of the Northern District of California, placed the clamps—at least temporarily—on the Trump administration’s new rules limiting asylum for undocumented immigrants, the Catholic News Agency reported.
 

ROME (CNS): Some 180 migrants, most from Eritrea, arrived at Mondo Migliore, a Catholic-run centre near Rome late on August 28 after officials from the Italian Bishops’ Conference negotiated their release from the Italian coast guard ship, Ubaldo Diciotti. 
 
They had been on the vessel for 11 days.
 

BEIRUT (CNS): “We appeal to the international community to shoulder its responsibility and strive to put an end to the ongoing conflicts and wars and to ensure the dignified return of the Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrians, Iraqis and others to their country,” Bechara Cardinal Rai, patriarch of Antoich and head of the Maronite Church said, as Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim religious leaders, met with the president of Switzerland, Alain Berset.
 

ROME (CNS/Agencies): “The path to saving our very humanity from vulgarity and barbarism passes through a commitment to safeguarding life. Every life. Beginning with that which is most exposed, humiliated and trampled upon,” the Italian Bishops’ Conference said in a July 19 statement after a woman survivor and two bodies were recovered from the wreck of a migrant boat in the Mediterranean Sea.
 

ROME (CNS): Tweeting with hashtags that translate as “Closed ports” and “Open hearts,” Matteo Salvini, the interior minister of Italy, disputed claims that the Italian government was complicit in leaving a migrant to die in the Mediterranean Sea as she clung to a board from a destroyed fishing boat.
 
Salvini strongly supported Italy’s policy of having the Libyan coast guard patrol its own shores, pushing back refugee boats or taking the migrants and refugees back to camps in Libya.