JD Vance Responds to Pope Leo’s Criticisms on Immigration

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.”

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