The Catholic Church is Getting Swept Away by ICE Outrage

Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark and a close confidant of Pope Leo, called for the defunding of ICE during an interfaith prayer livestream. “If we are serious about putting our faith in action, we need to say ‘no,’” he said. As Congress debates ICE funding this week, Tobin urged Catholics to write to their lawmakers and encourage them to “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.”

The scenes from Minneapolis are disturbing, and the dissonance between what I see and what I’ve been told – either by Trump administration officials calling Alex Pretti a “would-be assassin” seeking to “massacre” law enforcement, or by commentators depicting him as a martyr and saying that people are being “executed” on the street – has made me desperate to turn to some wise voice of moral and spiritual authority. Perhaps that’s what makes it so disappointing to hear Tobin fall in with such an obviously partisan and misguided call to defund ICE. It indicates that the Catholic Church lacks confidence in her own ability to address these complex issues with justice as well as mercy.

American bishops have so far struggled to offer much in the way of practical guidance on the immigration issue, or more specifically, what to do about ICE. Several wrote letters against President Trump’s immigration policy shortly after his inauguration in January 2025, with Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), saying that many of the new executive orders were “deeply troubling and will have negative consequences.” Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, stressed “that national self-interest does not justify policies with consequences that are contrary to the moral law.” Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles said that statements from the then-new administration “have caused fear in our parishes, schools, and communities,” and that any law enforcement actions “should be matched by immediate action in Congress to fix our immigration system, which has been broken for decades now.”

One has to wonder if many politicians would not consider the “broken” immigration system to have been functioning as intended in those decades. It was not action in Congress that halted the flow of illegal immigrants over the southern border, but an executive order. Vice President J.D. Vance has criticized the USCCB for its lack of a “commonsense” stance on immigration. “I think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for,” Vance said, “and I hope – again, as a devout Catholic – that they’ll do better.”

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