Pope Leo XIV and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have been wagging their fingers at the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. Too harsh, they say. Not compassionate enough. Think of the migrants.
Tom Homan thought about the migrants. Then he thought about the nine-year-old girl who was raped multiple times by traffickers. Then he thought about the five-year-old boy who baked to death in the back of a tractor-trailer. And then he went on television and told the Church to sit down.
“I’m a lifelong Catholic,” Homan said. “I wish they’d STAY OUT of immigration. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Ouch. Three sentences. Thirty years of moral authority — gone.
Homan didn’t stop there. He described standing in the back of a tractor-trailer with 19 dead migrants at his feet, including that five-year-old boy who suffocated in the heat. He’s spent 40 years in immigration enforcement. He’s seen what happens when the border is open. He’s carried the bodies.
And the Pope — a guy who lives behind a 40-foot wall in a city-state with some of the strictest immigration laws on the planet — wants to lecture HIM about compassion.
(Quick geography lesson for the Vatican: your country is 0.17 square miles, has roughly 800 residents, and you can’t become a citizen unless the Pope personally approves it. But please, tell us more about our border policy.)
“Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” Homan continued. “Where President Trump had the most secure border in the lifetime of this nation, right now, lives are being saved. Human traffickers are out of business. The cartels are going bankrupt because of that secure border.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SYur2BCl5jk?feature=share
That’s the part the bishops never want to talk about. They frame immigration enforcement as cruelty. Homan frames it as what it actually is: saving lives. Every mile of secure border is a mile where a coyote can’t charge a family $10,000 to stuff them in a van and drive them through the desert. Every deportation flight is one fewer person in the clutches of a cartel.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative, does it? The Church wants the photo op — the bishop standing at the border looking sad. They don’t want the photo of what Homan has seen. The dead children. The rape victims. The bodies in the desert that nobody finds until the vultures do.
And here’s the detail that should make every Catholic in America raise an eyebrow: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to “resettle” immigrants. Hundreds. Of. Millions. Your tax dollars, flowing through the Church, funding the very migration pipeline that Homan is trying to shut down.
Trump’s administration cut that funding. And suddenly the bishops are very concerned about immigration policy. What a coincidence.
We’re not saying the Church’s position on immigration is entirely motivated by government contracts. We’re just saying that when your moral outrage happens to align perfectly with your revenue stream, people are going to notice.
Homan is a lifelong Catholic who has spent four decades pulling dead kids out of trucks and watching cartels get rich off human misery. The bishops are administrators who cash government checks and issue press releases. One of these groups has earned the right to talk about the human cost of immigration. It’s not the one wearing the fancy hats.
President Trump isn’t apologizing. Homan isn’t apologizing. And the border is more secure than it’s been in decades. Traffickers are going broke. Cartel revenue is collapsing. Fewer people are dying in the desert.
If the Church has a problem with that, maybe they should spend less time writing sternly worded letters to Washington and more time asking why their own immigration policy at the Vatican makes Trump’s look like open borders by comparison.
We love the Church. We respect the Church. But on this one? Homan wins. And it’s not even close.