Tom Homan Fires Back at Pope Francis for Calling Mass Deportations a ‘Disgrace’
BY DAVID ZIMMERMANN
President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan fired back at Pope Francis on Friday for calling the new administration’s mass deportation program a “disgrace,” charging the pontiff to focus on problems within the Catholic Church instead.
The night before Monday’s inauguration, Pope Francis suggested Trump’s mass deportation operation will be inhumane for illegal immigrants and disgraceful “because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill.”
Homan, who served as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018, lambasted the pope for criticizing U.S. immigration policy.
The pope “ought to stick to the Catholic Church and fix that. That’s a mess,” Homan told Newsmax personality Rob Schmitt.
The Catholic Church has faced numerous problems in recent years, including its poor handling of the sexual abuse of children committed by clergy.
Trump made mass deportations a signature issue during his 2024 campaign, promising to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. The Trump administration is expected to deport about 1.4 million immigrants who have committed crimes or are otherwise staying in the U.S. illegally.
Nearly 600 aliens have been arrested by ICE agents as of Friday, and mass deportation flights to Mexico and Guatemala have already begun.
The head of the Catholic Church has repeatedly called for compassionate and humane immigration policies, calling on nations to accept immigrants within their means and to take down their barriers. Francis himself grew up in a family of Italian immigrants in Argentina.
The pope previously blasted Trump’s hardline stance on illegal immigration, particularly over the Republican’s 2016 campaign promise to build the border wall. Francis said anyone who builds a wall to shut out immigrants was “not Christian,” pointedly referring to Trump.
Homan, who described himself as a “lifelong Catholic” in the interview, pointed out the pope’s hypocrisy for criticizing the border wall when the religious leader has a 39-foot-high wall that encircles the Vatican.
“They have a wall around the Vatican. And if you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You’ll be charged with a serious crime and be jailed,” Homan said Friday evening. “So he can protect the Vatican where he lives. He can build a wall where he lives, but the American people are not allowed that.”
The border czar went on to say that border security “saves lives,” and the pope “needs to understand that.”
“When less people come, less women get raped by the cartel, less children die in the river, less Americans die from fentanyl overdoses,” he continued.
Homan will be working closely with Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem on securing the southern border and providing resources to Border Patrol agents for the purposes of curtailing the record inflow of illegal immigrants under the Biden administration. Noem’s cabinet nomination easily passed the GOP-controlled Senate midday Saturday.
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