Border czar Tom Homan, who oversees President Trump’s mass-deportation program, shot back at Pope Francis after he chastised the administration’s approach to immigration enforcement.
“I’ve got harsh words for the Pope,” Homan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church.”
“I’m saying this as a lifelong Catholic. I was baptized Catholic. My first communion as a Catholic, confirmation as a Catholic. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us,” he continued.
Homan noted that the Vatican, where the pope resides, is walled in.
“He wants to attack us securing our border? He has a wall around the Vatican, does he not? So he has a wall to protect his people and himself, but we can’t have a wall around the United States,” Homan said.
“I wish he’d stick to the Catholic Church and fix that and leave border enforcement to us,” he added.
Homan’s remarks come in response to a letter the pope wrote Monday criticizing mass deportations from the U.S. and calling for the dignified treatment of migrants.
The pope, in his letter, recognized “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but he condemned the approach that the Trump administration has taken.
“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” Francis wrote in the letter.
Treating people with dignity, the pope said, “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration.”
“However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others,” Francis continued. “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
The Trump administration has prioritized mass deportations, a long-standing promise from the campaign trail.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that more than 8,000 people had been arrested in immigration enforcement actions since Trump took office on Jan. 20, The Associated Press reported. Some migrants have been deported, while others are being held in federal prisons or at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
