Pope Francis issued an important reprimand of Trump administration plans for the mass deportations of migrants, emphasizing that the forceful elimination of people simply by their immigration state deprives them of their inherent dignity and “will end badly.”
Francis wrote a letter to the US bishops in which he seemed to criticize the religious argument of vice president JD Vance in defense of deportation policies.
The border tsar of the United States, Tom Homan, responded to the Pope, saying that the Vatican is a city-stated city and Francis should leave the immigration application. Homan, a Catholic, also said that Francis should focus on fixing the Catholic Church instead of immigration policies in the United States.
“He wants to attack us to ensure our border. He has a wall around the Vatican, right?” Homan said to journalists. “So he has a wall around that protects his people and himself, but we cannot have a wall around the United States.”
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Pope Francis presides over a Mass for the Jubilee of the Armed Forces in the Plaza de San Pedro in El Vaticano, on Sunday, February 9, 2025. (AP)
As the first Latin American Pope, Francis has long occupied the position of caring for migrants, pointing out the biblical command to “welcome the stranger” by calling countries to welcome, protect, promote and integrate people that flee from conflicts, poverty and climatic disasters.
Francis and President Donald Trump have made a long time on the issue of immigration, even before Trump’s first mandate, when Francis said in 2016 that anyone who builds a wall to keep migrants “was not a Christian.”
In his letter, Francis acknowledged that governments have the right to defend their countries and keep their communities safe from criminals, but said that deportation of people who fled their countries due to several difficult circumstances damages their dignity.
“That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women and whole families , and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and helpless, “he wrote.
Noting the book of Exodus in the Bible and the experience of Jesus Christ, Francis emphasized the right of people to seek refuge and security in other lands and said that the deportation plan of the Trump administration was a “great crisis.”
Any person educated in Christianity, he said, “cannot stop making a critical judgment and express their disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal state of some migrants with crime.”
“What is built on the basis of force, and not about the truth about the same dignity of each human being, starts badly and will end badly,” he continued.
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Pope Francis at his weekly audience in the Vatican on February 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
The president of the US Catholic Bishops Conference., Archbishop Timothy Broglio, thanked the Pope for his letter.
“With you, we pray that the United States government maintains your previous commitments to help those who are desperate,” Broglio wrote. “I boldly ask for its continuous sentences so that we can find courage as a nation to build a more human immigration system, one that protects our communities while safeguarding everyone’s dignity.”
The White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said last week that more than 8,000 people had been arrested since Trump took office on January 20 as part of the president’s plan to stop and deport immigrants in the country illegally, although hundreds of those arrested have been released since then. In the United States, others have been deported, are arrested in federal prisons or are arrested in the field of detention of Guantanamo Bay, detention.
Vance, a Catholic convert, has defended the administration’s deportation plans citing a concept of medieval Catholic theology known in Latin as “Ordo Amoris”, which he describes a hierarchy of attention: prioritizing the family first, then to the neighboring, community, community, community, fellow citizens and, finally, those of other regions.
But Francis sought to verify Vance’s understanding of the concept.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that gradually extend to other people and groups,” Francis wrote in his letter. “The true Ordo Amoris that must be promoted is what we discover constantly meditating in the parable of the ‘good Samaritan’, that is, meditating the love that builds an open fraternity to all, without exception.”
JD Vance enters the Senate Chamber in Capitol Hill on April 23, 2024 in Washington, DC (Andrew Harnik/Getty images)
As homan made reference, the Vatican is a walled city-state of 108 acres within Rome, and recently increased sanctions for anyone who enters illegally. The law, approved in December, requires that people face up to four years in prison and a fine of up to 25,000 euros, or $ 25,873, if they enter with “violence, threat or deception”, even evading the security control points.
The US bishops conference had already published a statement condemning Trump’s immigration policies after his first executive orders.
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Anyone “focused on the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty and the environment are deeply worrisome and will have negative consequences, many of which will damage the most vulnerable among us,” the statement said.
Cardinal Blas Cupich of Chicago praised Francis’s letter, telling the Vatican media that showed the Pope who saw “the protection and defense of the dignity of migrants as the preeminent urgency at this time.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
