Pope Leo’s top U.S. ally has lashed out at Donald Trump’s deportation program, describing ICE as a “lawless” operation and likening it to a “machinery of death.”
In a scathing rebuke of the president’s signature election policy, Cardinal Joseph Tobin urged people of faith to stand up against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—including telling their lawmakers to vote against giving ICE additional funding.
“How will you say no?” he asked during an online interfaith prayer gathering after the death of Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti.
“In this week when an appropriations bill is going to be considered in Congress, will you contact your Congress representative, the senators and representative from your district?
“We ask them, for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can’t be separated: vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.”
The comments came as Trump sought to recalibrate after Pretti’s death, sending in border czar Tom Homan to de-escalate tensions between federal immigration agents and anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis.
The move sidelined Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who met for nearly two hours with the president on Monday night to discuss the staffing shakeup alongside her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday for the first time since that meeting, Trump said Noem, who has faced calls to resign or be impeached, would not be standing down.
He also insisted she was doing “a very good job” and noted that the southern border, for which her department has oversight, is “totally secure.”
But as polls show Americans are increasingly against Trump’s deportation strategy due to ICE’s heavy-handed tactics, Tobin invoked some of the strongest language yet by a U.S. cardinal to condemn the administration’s crackdown.
Recounting a story from Ignazio Silone’s 1936 novel Bread & Wine, Tobin described a female character angered by the incursion of fascist forces, who asks a priest, “Father, what can we do?”
With “the machinery of death” set in motion, as Tobin put it, the priest tells the young woman that dictators and authoritarian regimes dislike resistance, or saying “No.”
“I think if we are serious about putting our faith in action, we need to say ‘no,’ each one of us,” he said, urging people to tell the truth about what was happening in America.
Tobin is a key player in the Vatican and is known for his alignment with the late Pope Francis and now, the Chicago-born Pope Leo.
His comments came after the pope also hit out at Trump’s deportation strategy and said he was troubled by the way immigrants were treated in his home country.
“We have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts. There’s a system of justice,” the pope said last year.
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