The Catholic archbishop of Chicago has shredded the Trump administration’s brutal deportation crusade and called President Donald Trump out personally for a racist post about the Obamas.
Cardinal Blase Cupich has claimed in a series of interviews that clergymen in the Windy City are being stopped by federal agents in what he framed as blatant racial profiling.
“I’ve had some priests who are of a different color being targeted and arrested—stopped—because of their color and asking them to prove that they’re citizens,” he told Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW in January.
“That’s not America,” the 76-year-old cardinal went on. “We should not have to live in a country where people have to carry around their documents all the time.”
He further tore into the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-immigration crackdown in a separate interview last week with Spanish newspaper El Pais.
“It brings terror into a city where not just immigrants, but the population, feel as though they’re being terrorized by the ways that these roundups are going,” he said.
“This is really unheard of,” he added. “That kind of tactic is really fueling the outrage of people, not only because of the murders that we had in Minneapolis, but also because of our experience here.”
Cupich, who was appointed to lead the United States’ third-largest archdiocese by the late Pope Francis in 2015, also took aim at Trump directly after the president posted a racist meme depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as apes.
“Our shock is real. So is our outrage,” he wrote in a response to the vile clip on Monday. “Nothing less than an unequivocal apology—to the nation and to the persons demeaned—is acceptable.”
The White House has denied Trump was the person responsible for posting the video to his Truth Social account, and the president has refused to offer an apology for it. The clip remained online for more than 12 hours before it was taken down.
Trump has a tempestuous relationship with the Catholic Church. He came under fire from Francis on everything from his plans for a border wall with Mexico to his wider immigration stance, climate change denialism, and isolationism.
The president has also not exactly enjoyed cordial relations with Francis’ Chicago-born successor, Pope Leo XIV, who, despite his brother being a stalwart MAGA supporter, has similarly criticised the administration over its attacks on Iran and Venezuela.
The first American pontiff has also criticised the Trump administration for creating a climate of “fear and anxiety” with its anti-immigration policies and questioned Vice President JD Vance’s interpretation of Catholic doctrine.
Since Trump assumed office for the second time last January, his administration has embarked on a campaign to dramatically increase the number of migrants being detained and deported from the country.
Legal experts have decried rampant violations of due process and other constitutional rights as a direct result of that campaign.
Late last year, those efforts witnessed large-scale raids in Cupich’s archdiocese of Chicago, along with other cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Oregon.
Beginning in January, Homeland Security launched its largest effort to date, Operation Metro Surge, sending an estimated 3,000 federal agents to carry out detentions in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
DHS claims it is going after the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders amid a fictional “crimewave” driven by an “invasion” of “illegal aliens.”
Statistics have consistently shown that 70 percent of those arrested have no criminal background.
U.S. citizens have increasingly found themselves caught up in what critics describe as excessive use of force during DHS raids.
In January, confrontations between federal immigration officials and protesters in Minneapolis saw two protesters, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, fatally shot by ICE agents.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and DHS for comment on this story.
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