As the Trump administration escalates its aggressive deportation campaign, Roman Catholic bishops across the United States are raising objections to the treatment of migrants and challenging the president’s policy.
For years many bishops focused their most vocal political engagement on ending abortion, rarely putting as much capital behind any other issue. Many supported President Trump’s actions to overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeted Democratic Catholic politicians who supported abortion access.
But now they are increasingly invoking Pope Leo XIV’s leadership and Pope Francis’s legacy against Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, and prioritizing humane treatment of immigrants as a top public issue. They are protesting the president’s current domestic policy bill in Congress, showing up at court hearings to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to put compassion for humans ahead of political allegiances.
The image in Los Angeles and elsewhere of ICE agents seizing people in Costco parking lots and carwashes “rips the illusion that’s being portrayed, that this is an effort which is focused on those who have committed significant crimes,” said Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of Washington, in an interview from Rome.
“The realities are becoming more ominous,” he said. “It is becoming clearer that this is a wholesale, indiscriminate deportation effort aimed at all those who came to the country without papers.”
Cardinal McElroy, who has frequently spoken against Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was named the archbishop of Washington as one of Pope Francis’s final major actions in the United States, reflecting the Vatican’s desire to counter the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Immigration arrests are rising sharply, and ICE has a goal of apprehending 3,000 people a day.
“A very large number of Catholic bishops, and religious leaders in general, are outraged by the steps which the administration is taking to expel mostly hardworking, good people from the United States,” Cardinal McElroy said.
President Trump campaigned on aggressive immigration tactics, and polls before his inauguration captured broad support among Americans for deportations. Since then, Americans have “mixed to negative views” of the administration’s immigration actions, according to an early June survey by the Pew Research Center.
The Trump administration has said the aggressive immigration tactics are necessary to protect public safety because some illegal immigrants are violent criminals.
Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism six years ago, articulated his personal views in an interview last month, saying that immigration “at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years” was destructive to the common good.
“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,” he added.
“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.”
It is not clear how much influence the bishops will have on the issue. In Congress, there has been little debate between the two chambers over the immigration portion of the policy bill. The bishops expressing concern stand in opposition to the voices of key Catholics in executive leadership, including Mr. Vance.
“We as a church unfortunately don’t have the kind of megaphone that the administration does,” said Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. “It’s a real challenge to reach even Catholics, especially when maybe one out of five who identify as Catholic make it to Mass on Sunday.”
Pope Leo XIV, an American and Peruvian citizen, has from the beginning of his papacy called for the need to respect the dignity of every person, “citizens and immigrants alike.” After his election in May, his brother John Prevost said that Leo was “not happy with what’s going on with immigration. I know that for a fact.” But so far the new pope has not directly weighed in publicly on Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign.
On Thursday, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, implored Congress to “make drastic changes” to Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill, despite its anti-abortion provisions.
He wrote that the bill failed to protect families including “by promoting an enforcement-only approach to immigration and eroding access to legal protections.”
Leading Catholic prelates including Cardinal McElroy and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark went even further in an interfaith letter to Senate leadership on Thursday night, strongly urging them to vote against the bill entirely.
In their letter they claimed that the bill, which calls for billions of dollars to bolster ICE, would spur immigration raids, harm hard-working families and fund a border wall that would heighten peril for migrants.
“Its passage would be a moral failure for American society as a whole,” the letter states.
The letter was organized by Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, N.M., who attended an ecumenical protest against the bill last week.
“This draconian, heavy-handed, meanspirited way that the country is dealing with immigrants today, it is not fair, it is not humane, it is not moral,” he said. “It’s something we have to really be earnest about, and do everything we can within the law to make our voices heard.”
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, has long supported immigration reform and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program that shields from deportation people who were brought into the United States as children and did not have citizenship or legal residency. But as the recent raids were executed in Los Angeles, his criticism of the Trump administration became more direct.
“This is not policy, it is punishment, and it can only result in cruel and arbitrary outcomes,” he wrote in a recent column.
In an interview, he pointed to the example of Bishop Michael M. Pham of San Diego, the first bishop named by Pope Leo in the United States. Bishop Pham, who fled to America from Vietnam as a child, recently went to a courthouse to support migrants waiting for hearings.
“We may have to do that,” Archbishop Gomez said.
More than a third of the Catholic church in the United States is Hispanic. In recent weeks, priests have increasingly reported that families are not leaving their homes to come to Mass, because they are afraid.
Still, many Catholics support Mr. Trump. The president increased his share of Catholic voters in 2024, receiving the majority of their support unlike in 2020, and his support from Hispanic Catholic voters also grew, to 41 percent from 31 percent, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
Progressive and moderate Christians have expressed concern over Mr. Trump’s immigration plans for years, particularly fearing the consequences of his re-election. At his inaugural prayer service, Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pleaded with the president to “have mercy” on vulnerable people, particularly immigrants and children who were afraid. Mr. Trump lashed out, and a Republican member of Congress called for her deportation.
At a private retreat in San Diego this month, bishops discussed the crisis at length over meals.
“No person of good will can remain silent,” Archbishop Broglio, the bishops’ conference president, said in an opening reflection that was made public for churches, to reach immigrant families. “Count on the commitment of all of us to stand with you in this challenging hour.”
Bishops still oppose abortion, in alignment with church teaching. But immigration “has become more and more a serious situation” that must be addressed, said Bishop Seitz, who chairs the bishops’ committee on migration.
In his area, auxiliary bishops and religious sisters in El Paso have been showing up at immigration court to stand alongside migrants who are appearing at required hearings. Some of the migrants have been seized by ICE agents.
Cardinal McElroy and several other top prelates have had private conversations with senior members of the Trump administration on this issue this month. They are also working with their priests to address pastoral needs on the ground.
Not all priests are in lockstep about how far to take their response, but Cardinal McElroy said that significant numbers of them feel they need to take strong action.
In East Los Angeles, Father Brendan Busse, pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, rushed to the scene after a call that ICE vehicles had rammed a car, deployed tear gas and hauled out a man, leaving his wife and two babies in the back seat.
He said he sensed that some Catholics believe their political allegiance comes before the values of their faith.
“My body is tired, my emotions are all over the place,” he said. “But I have to say, my spirit is strong, I think, in part because there’s a kind of moral clarity in moments like this.”
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
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