“I am sure that all Hispanics,” especially the undocumented, hope Francis will talk about the “immigration drama” flaring in the United States, said Mario Dorsonville, an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington.

“We expect him to talk about the invisible, those in limbo,” the millions with no legal status, Dorsonville said. “There’s no bigger poverty than being invisible.”

Daniel Flores, a Catholic bishop in the border city of Brownsville, Tex., said one of the hardships for undocumented immigrants is that they cannot return to Mexico or Central America to see their parents and children because they would not be able to return to the U.S. jobs they need to earn a living.

Flores said he believed the pope would “not be pointedly political” or offer specific policy suggestions, but he would use, instead, his influence as the leader of a church with 1.2 billion members to “remind politicians, when they are crafting laws, to keep in mind human dignity and the importance of family life.”