Pope Criticizes Trump’s Immigration Crackdown in Apparent Response to J.D. Vance

Pope Francis has rebuked the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations in a statement that appears to directly hit back at recent comments made by Vice President J.D. Vance.

Francis encouraged Catholics in the U.S. to reject the right’s anti-immigration incitement and emphasized that “all people … especially the poorest and most marginalized” deserve to be treated with dignity.

“[A]ll the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa,” he said.

He suggested that it is cruel to deport people for seeking refuge in the U.S. after fleeing danger in their countries of origin.

“[T]he 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 of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” said Francis.

The statement is a condemnation of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, which includes a plan for mass deportations and seeks to further criminalize migrants and others caught up in racist raids by federal officials. Deportations during Trump’s first term hit a record high, which was then broken by President Joe Biden as Democrats embraced fascist immigration policies; now, the Trump administration is reportedly setting arrest quotas and demanding more and more deportations.

Francis appeared to directly take aim at Vance, a Catholic convert who recently invoked his faith as a supposed justification for Trump’s cruel immigration policies.

In a post online last month, Vance invoked the theological concept of ordo amoris, meaning “order of love.”

He argued that it means that people should value their family and direct community over anyone else, referencing it after he said in a Fox News interview: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” The left, he claimed, has “completely inverted that.”

Vance immediately faced pushback for his suggestion that his spirituality leads him to embrace bigoted anti-immigrant sentiments. Theological experts and commentators noted that Jesus espouses the opposite teaching in the Bible — that all people should be treated as a “neighbor,” and thus someone to be cared for and looked after.

Francis raised ordo amoris, refuting Vance’s interpretation.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” Francis said. “But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” he went on.