Trump’s plans for mass deportation a ‘disgrace’, says Pope Francis
Crux Staff• January 20, 2025
Pope Francis has said it would be a “disgrace” for incoming US president Donald Trump to make good on promises to expel undocumented immigrants.
“We have not spoken [of this], but if it is true, it will be a disgrace, because he will make these poor unfortunates, who have nothing, pay the bill of disorder,” the Pope told Italian TV host Fabio Fazio during a conversation on Fazio’s Che Tempo Che Fa program on 19 January.
“This won’t do,” Francis said, “this is not the way to resolve the matter.”
Trump also addressed the immigration issue at the weekend when he spoke to NBC News ahead of his inauguration today. Trump said his administration will begin mass deportations “very early” in his new term as the 47th US president, but did not say where or precisely when they would begin.
“It’ll begin very early, very quickly,” said Trump, adding, “I can’t say which cities, because things are evolving, and I don’t think we want to say what city.”
“You’ll see it first-hand,” Trump said.
Trump also told NBC News he would sign a “record-setting” number of Executive Orders on his first day in office but was short on specifics regarding their scope.
Pope Francis, in his interview, recalled his May 2017 meeting with Trump, a few months after Trump began his first term in the White House as the 45th US president.
That 2017 meeting followed harsh words from the Pope in 2016 for then-presidential candidate Trump regarding his plans for a border wall, which was a major presidential campaign issue at the time.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said in 2016, in response to a journalist’s question during an in-flight press conference en route to Rome after a papal trip to Cuba and Mexico.
The Pope’s remarks in 2016 led to a tense exchange of views that was played out on the global stage.
“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” Trump said in a statement at the time. “I am proud to be a Christian and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President [who was Barack Obama at the time].”
After their first face-to-face in 2017, however, Trump modified his stance to the Pope, and said: “We had a fantastic meeting.”
“He’s something,” Trump said of the Pope, adding: “[I]t was an honour to be with the Pope.”
President Trump and Pope Francis are not likely to decrease the daylight between them on immigration, but they have both expressed support for “dialogue” to end the war of Russian aggression that has been raging for nearly three years in Ukraine. They have also converged in opinion when it comes to the need to resolve the war in Gaza.
Though whether Pope Francis and President Trump will find a tangible way to work together on Ukraine, or any other issues on which their views possibly converge, remains very much to be seen.
Photo: US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania are welcomed by the prefect of the papal household, the German prelate Georg Gänswein, as they arrive at the Vatican for a private audience with Pope Francis, Vatican City State, 24 May 2017. (Photo by VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images.)