In his nascent papacy, Pope Leo XIV has so far skirted a direct confrontation with the White House over its treatment of immigrants.
But on Wednesday Pope Leo made some of his strongest comments yet, urging U.S. bishops to strongly support immigrants as President Trump escalated his deportation campaign, including in Chicago, the pope’s hometown.
With National Guard troops expected to arrive in Chicago, Pope Leo met with a group of Catholics from El Paso. The group gave the pope more than 100 handwritten letters, written by immigrants — mostly undocumented individuals but also mixed families — living in Catholic communities across the United States.
The letters were tied together with twine and included a small yellow note that read, in Spanish, “Pope Leo, please listen to the clamor of those who are being marginalized.”
Bishop Mark J. Seitz, long an outspoken supporter for immigrants in the United States, was among those in the group. “We could see his eyes watering up a little bit,” he said about the pope. “He said, ‘I am happy to stand with you.’”
Pope Leo did not specifically mention Mr. Trump, Bishop Seitz said, or Chicago. But the crisis unfolding in the church in America — where a third of the church is Hispanic and families have told priests they are uneasy about going to Mass for fear of being apprehended by officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — was the obvious backdrop.
The group and the pope discussed the challenge of wanting to avoid the political fray while still speaking boldly for their beliefs, and how to translate that to action, Bishop Seitz said.
“To have the United States changing so radically is something that calls for attention,” he said.
Pope Leo said “that he would love to see a statement from the conference of bishops,” Bishop Seitz said, adding that one was already in progress. The bishops are scheduled to meet in Baltimore next month for their annual conference, where the issue is expected to be a central focus.
Pope Leo told the group it was critical that the church speak “forcefully and in unity” about these issues, said Dylan Corbett, the founding executive director of the Hope Border Institute, who attended the meeting with the pope.
The Trump administration has said its tactics on immigration are necessary to protect public safety because some illegal immigrants are violent criminals. Some conservative Catholics support the president’s position despite church teaching on immigration, similar to how some progressive Catholics support abortion rights, which also contradicts church teaching.
Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism six years ago, said in an interview shortly after Pope Leo’s election that immigration “at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years” has destroyed “social solidarity.”
“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance,” he said. “That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.”
The meeting at the Vatican on Wednesday had been requested to present to the pope “the pain and the anxiety that’s felt by the immigrant community in the United States right now,” said Mr. Corbett, whose group does research and advocacy on social justice issues at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The pope agreed to watch a four-minute video with the delegation. Titled “Letter to Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church in the United States,” it highlighted the concerns, as well as the resilience, of the nation’s immigrant communities, Mr. Corbett said. They all huddled around the screen and watched together.
The El Paso delegation also included the Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Celino; Msgr. Arturo Bañuelas; and Lorena Andrade, a civil rights and labor activist.
Catholic bishops in the United States have worked for months to rally opposition to Mr. Trump’s mass deportation efforts, protesting bills in Congress, supporting migrants at immigration courts and condemning ICE raids and arrests.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is expected to meet with Pope Leo in the coming days for an annual meeting about the state of church in America.
Pope Leo has so far adopted a more reserved political tone than his predecessor, Pope Francis, who frequently criticized Mr. Trump’s positions, even suggesting that Mr. Trump was “not Christian” for his promise to deport immigrants and build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
But Pope Leo has also consistently made his support for migrants clear. 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.”
Last weekend, Pope Leo celebrated a special Holy Year Mass for migrants, in which he called on people to welcome and care for migrants fleeing from poverty, violence and suffering. They “cannot and must not find the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination,” Pope Leo said.
Last week, he wrote to the Catholic Charities USA network, thanking them for being “agents of hope” for the “most vulnerable, including migrants and refugees.”
He also commented after some conservative bishops in the United States vehemently protested the decision by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago to give Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, an award for his commitment to immigration reform. They objected because Mr. Durbin also supported abortion rights.
Pope Leo weighed in from the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo, noting the complexity.
“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but says I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. So someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhumane treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” he said.
He asked “that we search together — both as human beings, in that case as American citizens or citizens of the state of Illinois, as well as Catholics — to say we need to really look closely at all of these ethical issues and to find the way forward as church. The church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear.”
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
The post Pope Leo Urges U.S. Bishops to Support Immigrants appeared first on New York Times.
