The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has made repeated missteps when dealing with the issue of immigration. These include misrepresenting the Catholic Church’s teachings on refugees, mitigating the Church’s teachings on national sovereignty, downplaying the responsibilities of immigrants, and lambasting faithful Catholics for upholding national security and cultural identity. The latest example of the USCCB’s pontificating on the subject has drawn strong responses from numerous prominent Catholics, including the Pope himself! “We are punishing individuals…. But they are part of a system that for more than 40 years has been left broken by our leaders.” Earlier this month, America’s bishops issued a “special message” condemning President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, particularly mass deportations. In a press conference last week, the American-born Pope Leo XIV, who has generally avoided commenting directly on Trump’s policies, affirmed the Catholic Church’s teachings on immigration. “No one has said that the United States should have open borders. I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter,” the Pontiff asserted. He did, however, urge that illegal aliens in the U.S. who are seeking a legal pathway to permanent residency ought to be treated with dignity, even in the midst of enforcing immigration law. “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that — there are courts, there’s a system of justice. I think there are a lot of problems in the system,” he suggested. “I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have.” Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, also critiqued the USCCB’s message, echoing much of what the Pope said. “You may not know it, judging purely from the comments of some people on social media, but the Catholic Church’s views on this are actually quite clear,” Vance noted in an interview with Breitbart News’s Matt Boyle. “It’s that, yes, you must treat immigrants humanely.” “On the other hand, every nation has the right to control its borders. And obviously, how you strike that balance is very important, but there’s a lot of room there to actually control your own borders for the sake of your own people,” Vance continued. “My priority, my charge is to look after the people of the United States of America, and you cannot do that if you’re flooding the country with a ton of illegal immigrants and the drugs and the crime that they bring,” the vice president said, noting that illegal immigration often results in assaults on “dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves.” He added, “When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world.” Another Trump administration official, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) principal deputy assistant secretary for communications Nathaniel Madden, also offered a Catholic defense of the administration’s immigration policy. “We are upholding federal law that’s been in place for 60 years,” Madden told Catholic News Agency. “We are upholding federal laws that were justly and duly passed by the United States Congress, by the American people … and none of those laws are unjust,” he said, pointing to St. Augustine’s City of God, in which the Doctor of the Church clarifies that immigrants have a moral responsibility to respect and adhere to their host nation’s laws, while lawmakers and magistrates likewise have a moral duty to enforce just laws. “We have to take into account that laws were broken,” Madden said, addressing illegal immigration. He said that St. Augustine clarifies a “key distinction” in how to demonstrate charity “when you’re talking about people who have knowingly broken laws to get somewhere,” which is “a much different situation than dealing with the blameless poor who are citizens of the same country.” “This administration cares deeply about the intrinsic human dignity of everybody it comes in contact with,” Madden said. “Whether you are a citizen, whether you are somebody in our custody who is being removed from the country, you have that dignity … [and] that worth just simply by being made in the image of God and this administration respects and upholds that.” As an example of this, he pointed to the administration’s “incredibly humane” encouragement that illegal aliens “self-deport,” noting that the administration has offered self-deportees a small stipend and a legal pathway to return to the U.S. once complying with federal law, while immigration authorities focus on arresting and deporting “severe criminals,” illegal aliens convicted of murder, rape, human trafficking, child sexual abuse, terrorism, and other serious offenses. Conversely, Mexican-born Archbishop José Gómez, who has served as the archbishop of both Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, both major immigration hubs, offered a more nuanced defense of his brother bishops’ “special message,” rightly noting that mass immigration is an issue of great concern for Americans and threatens to fundamentally reshape American culture, economy, and life. “Immigration has become the defining issue of our times,” the archbishop wrote. “The election results [in 2024] were more than a reaction to the previous administration’s loose border enforcement policies. They also reflect growing anxiety and fears about how the global economy is reshaping local economies and communities,” Gómez continued. “Many of our neighbors see immigrants as threats to their livelihoods. They are worried about crime, if there will be enough jobs, if our education and welfare systems can handle more people, and if our country will be able to integrate so many who are coming from different cultures.” While he characterized the president’s mass deportation program as “disturbing,” Gómez also warned that such a drastic measure may seem like a necessity due to decades of increasingly liberal immigration law and lax enforcement policies. “We are punishing individuals; and it is true, they have responsibility for their actions. But they are part of a system that for more than 40 years has been left broken by our leaders,” the archbishop rightly noted. “Many who are here illegally came with the implied understanding that the authorities would look the other way because businesses needed their labor. Politicians, business leaders, and activist groups have long exploited this issue for their own advantage. That is why the problem persists.” READ MORE from S.A. 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