JD Vance responds to Pope Leo’s comments on immigration policy

Vice President J.D. Vance is defending the Trump administration’s enforcement of the U.S. government’s immigration policies, which he says are consistent with Catholic Church teaching and Pope Leo XIV’s own comments that every nation has the right to control its borders. 

During an interview with Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle Thursday, Vance was asked to weigh in on Pope Leo XIV’s remarks on immigration, in which he said, “I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.”

“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 said.

Vance, a practicing Catholic, characterized the Catholic Church’s teachings on immigration as “you must treat immigrants humanely” while acknowledging that “every nation has the right to control its borders.” 

“How you strike that balance is very important,” said Vance. “There’s a lot of room there to actually control your own borders for the sake of your own people.” 

Asked by reporters to weigh in on U.S. immigration policy earlier this week, the pope claimed that “No one has said that the United States should have open borders.”

Vance said he agreed with the pontiff’s opposition to open borders, describing it as “not actually good for the dignity even of the illegal migrants themselves.” 

“You had little kids getting sex trafficked. We had 300,000 missing children under the Biden administration that the Mexican drug cartels brought into our country. You had cartels using, in some cases, 9- and 10-year-old children as drug mules for their activity. Border security is not just good for American citizens; it is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world,” Vance asserted. 

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.”

While the pontiff stated that the U.S. has the right to control its borders, he also condemned what he characterized as the “extremely disrespectful” treatment of illegal immigrants who are “living good lives” and have already been in the U.S. for “10, 15, 20 years.” 

Leo’s comments about immigration came in response to a question about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Special Message” on immigration. Issued last week at the USCCB’s Plenary Assembly in Baltimore, Maryland, the message condemned what the U.S. Catholic leaders referred to as “a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement” and expressed concern about “the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants.”

“We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care,” they said in part. 

The bishops added that they are “grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.” And called for an end to the “indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or law enforcement.”