By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami

MIAMI | A few days after meeting with Florida’s bishops in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis visited Miami to conduct a “roundtable” on immigration.

Neither the Feb. 7, 2022 visit nor its optics sat well with Archbishop Thomas Wenski.

The governor chose to hold the roundtable at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, where he was surrounded by Pedro Pans — adults who had come to the U.S. in the early 1960s as unaccompanied minors, to be cared for by the Catholic Church until they could be reunited with their parents — amid an exhibit that tells the story of their journey.

Last March, the museum hosted Havana Nights, the annual fundraiser for Catholic Charities’ Unaccompanied Minors Program and its Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh Children’s Village — the very program their own unaccompanied minor experience had birthed, and one of the shelters for unaccompanied minors the governor wants to shut down.

This group of Pedro Pans — unlike others who spoke out earlier and afterward — made it clear that they supported the governor’s efforts. Maximo Alvarez, an Operation Pedro Pan Inc. trustee, was quoted as saying “we are going to die supporting” DeSantis.

The PedroPan.org website states the following as part of their mission statement: “To sponsor, aid, assist and promote programs that benefit children in need. This includes children without parents (unaccompanied minors) and the needy, regardless of race, creed, color or religion.”

Yet this group clearly agreed with the governor’s statement: “There’s a lot of bad analogies that get made in modern political discourse, but to equate what’s going on with the southern border... with Operation Pedro Pan, quite frankly is disgusting.”

While DeSantis invited Alvarez to share his opinion, it is not one held by all Pedro Pans. Elena Muller Garcia is a former Pedro Pan who retired after 25 years working for Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Palm Beach. At a press conference hosted by the Archdiocese of Miami a few days later, she said despite the different circumstances of her coming from Cuba 62 years ago, she welcomes today’s unaccompanied minors, and hoped the governor would do the same.

“I feel the angst of the parents who today are compelled to send their children to safety thousands of miles away from home. I feel the homesickness that the children must feel today, arriving alone as I did then. As a Floridian, as a Cuban, as a Catholic, and as a Pedro Pan, I extend to these children my welcome,” she said. “Although their circumstances are different, they have the same needs, or maybe more needs, than I did 62 years ago. Gov. DeSantis, welcome these children, Do not close the doors of this great state of Florida on them.”

Archbishop Wenski described the “roundtable” at the Diaspora Museum as “political theater” and “a new low in the zero-sum politics of our divisive times.”

In a statement drafted for a Feb. 10 press conference where other Pedro Pans expressed their opposition to the governor’s stance (see accompanying story), the archbishop excoriated the governor’s choice of words.

“Children are children — and no child should be deemed ‘disgusting’ — especially by a public servant,” he said.

His statement continued:

“The lack of solidarity of this group of former unaccompanied minors from Cuba with similarly situated children today was disappointing. Even while recognizing the good care afforded them by Catholic Charities 60 years ago, they begrudge that same care being extended to migrant children today. Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh, the revered ‘father’ of the Operation Pedro Pan children, is rolling over in his grave.”

In an interview a few days earlier, the archbishop surmised that DeSantis’ Miami visit, coming so soon after being asked by Florida’s bishops to reconsider his actions on the unaccompanied minors shelters, was aimed at creating “some spin because he didn't expect the pushback that he is now receiving on this from our community.”

Unfortunately, the archbishop said in his statement, “it showed that the governor has a powerful machine in South Florida capable of mobilizing (and manipulating) a segment of our community to advance his political agenda — but his bullying of kids also showed weakness.

“The success of the Pedro Pan kids,” the archbishop’s statement concluded, “made possible by the freedom and opportunity of this great land, makes clear that magnanimity rather than mean-spiritedness is a ‘best practice’ in resolving our immigration challenges.”