As President-elect Donald Trump is just days away from returning to the White House, American Catholic leaders are denouncing his immigration agenda. Chicago’s powerful Cardinal Blase Cupich warned in a recent interview that U.S. bishops “are going to have to be prophetic and denounce any abuse of human dignity that may occur” as Trump rolls out his mass deportation program. “We are going to be vigilant and we are going to defend the human dignity of immigrants,” Cupich said. The cardinal called deportation plans “intolerable, especially in a country where we are all immigrants. I am a product of immigration!”
Over the past decade, the USCCB and groups like Catholic Charities have collected over $2 billion from the U.S. government for migrant and refugee “services.”
Cupich’s comments follow those of Cardinal Robert McElroy, the newly-appointed archbishop of Washington, D.C. In a press conference last week, McElroy anticipated conflict with the incoming Trump administration on the issue of immigration and deportations. “In terms of what issue would I see coming forth in the life of the church that might be in contrast with some of the priorities the president-elect has been talking about, a large one, of course, is immigration,” the cardinal said. He claimed that “plans” for “wider, indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
A far more Catholic understanding of and approach to immigration is evinced by Trump’s incoming “border czar,” former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan. In an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, Homan described why he came out of retirement for a second time to join Trump’s administration. “When you lose the border, trafficking and sex trafficking’s gonna skyrocket, child deaths will skyrocket, migrant deaths will skyrocket, American deaths will skyrocket,” the immigration official said. He continued, “I love this country. I want to save some lives. Secure borders save lives. So I’m gonna come back, do what I can.”
Homan lamented the more-than-300,000 migrant children who have gone missing at the border since President Joe Biden took office four years ago. “We gotta save these women and children,” he said. “We gotta save these kids, a lot of them are living a life of hell every day.… We’re gonna find some of them living with pedophiles, living in sex-slavery, some are gonna be dead, but we gotta find these children.”
Endorsing Chaotic Immigration
The approach of the U.S. bishops — that of facilitating the wanton violation of America’s laws, of encouraging the invasion of the nation by a host of criminals, of turning a blind eye to the horrific abuses that Homan plans to end — is not a compassionate one. The chaotic crisis at the southern border has fostered a dramatic increase in deaths, national security risks, drug trafficking, child sex trafficking, and a bevvy of other atrocities besides. Endorsing the crisis, as the U.S. bishops do, does nothing to protect the dignity of immigrants.
The Catholic Church has very clear teachings on immigration and border control, but Cupich, McElroy, and their episcopal brethren are seemingly content to ignore and even denigrate these teachings. Why? Because the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) profits from the ongoing immigration crisis. Over the past decade, the USCCB and groups like Catholic Charities have collected over $2 billion from the U.S. government for migrant and refugee “services.” Lawsuits have alleged that these “services” include shuttling illegal immigrants released by Border Patrol further into the U.S. and providing them with pre-paid debit cards, phones, and food and housing vouchers.
It just could be that all the pontificating from Cupich, McElroy, and the other USCCB illegal immigration apologists is less a matter of pearl-clutching in the face of Trump’s planned deportations and more a matter of clutching at their ill-gotten cash.