Texan bishop infuriated by claims the Church is profiting from mass migration

The Catholic Herald• February 13, 2025

NEW YORK – An American bishop has hit out at the claims of U.S. Vice President JD Vance that the Catholic Church is actively supporting open borders because it profits financially from the care of migrants.

Mr Vance, a Catholic convert, said in an interview on CBS’s Sunday news programme Face the Nation, that the U.S. bishops received millions of dollars annually from the federal government to resettle refugees.

Responding the bishops’ opposition to President Donald Trump’s deportation policy, he said: “Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, reacted by saying the remarks represented a “tremendous mischaracterisation”.

Mr Vance “clearly doesn’t know me,” said Bishop Seitz, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration. “He doesn’t know my heart.”

Bishop Seitz said: “I would love to sit down sometime with Vice President Vance and talk to him about these issues in regard to our resettlement work and things like that, because he clearly has been misinformed, and that’s so unfortunate, and when it comes from a person who has a loud megaphone right now it can be very, very harmful to this work of the Church to very vulnerable people. So it is really concerning.”

Mr Vance’s remarks were also met with a swift response from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, defending its work.

The conference received in excess of $100 million from the federal government as a resettlement contractor in both 2022 and 2023, according to the conference’s published financials.

However, records indicate that in each year the conference actually spent more than it received from the federal government on its refugee resettlement efforts.

Speaking at a Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life dialogue, Bishop Seitz also spoke against the inflammatory rhetoric of the Trump administration and other political leaders.

“The rhetoric from leaders opens the door because it doesn’t distinguish,” he said. “It calls all immigrants criminals, rather than criminals, criminals … and that allows many to hear that at least and say, ‘if the person is brown, you know, they’re bad’.”

As the Trump administration has targeted migrants who have committed crimes in the first phase of its mass deportation efforts – a part of which they’ve already detained and deported thousands – Seitz also questioned the responsibility the country has to rehabilitate those individuals instead of deporting them.

“Is it really OK to say these people are so bad we’re going to ship them to Guantanamo Bay and forget about them without a trial, without even a due process, much less an effort to rehabilitate them?,” he asked.

“And frankly, if you want to look from the standpoint of self-interest, you’re not fulfilling self-interest either when you’re putting people in a situation where they’re constantly made worse than they were before because of the way they were incarcerated.”

Pope Francis’s recent letter to the U.S. bishops on immigration, where he criticises the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans, only came up briefly during the dialogue, with Bishop Seitz simply saying the pontiff “has once again come forward and spoken in a certain way on our behalf, with an eloquence that few of us can”.

Bishop Seitz spoke of the trauma many migrants experience in their home countries that force them to flee, and that they experience on their journey, noting that many of them now feel forced to go back to those situations.

He told the story of a man named Jesus, who is in his mid-20s, and how after a Mass last week he spoke before the entire congregation, thanking them for the warmth they have showed him, and letting him know that because he has lost his parole “he wasn’t going to stay in the midst of the fear that they now have in the immigrant community”.

“That kind of story is being repeated throughout the immigrant community,” Bishop Seitz said. “Not everyone is choosing to leave, but many of them are saying, ‘as bad as it was at home, as much as I was in fear of my life at home, I just can’t live like this.’”

The White House has moved quickly to answer the criticisms of President Trump’s deportation policy by Pope Francis.

Tom Homan, the President’s border czar, told reporters that he wished the Pope would focus his efforts on resolving problems within the Catholic Church, and suggested the Francis was guilty of hypocrisy.

“I’ve got harsh words for the Pope. The Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church,” said Mr Homan.

“I’m saying this as a lifelong Catholic: I was baptised Catholic, [had] 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 added: “He wants to attack us securing our border? He has got 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.”

(CNS Photo)