Pope Leo Slams Trump Over Chicago Crackdown
In blunt words on Operation Midway Blitz, Pope Leo XIV invokes Matthew 25, reminding a nation in the throes of mass deportations that Christ himself will ask: How did you receive the foreigner?
On Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago native who has watched his hometown become ground zero for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, called for “deep reflection” on how migrants are being treated in America. But the papal restraint in that language belies something far more pointed and personal: a theological indictment wrapped in the gentlest possible words.
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“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?’” Leo told reporters at Castel Gandolfo, his residence near Rome. “I think there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.”
This is no abstract meditation. On Saturday, November 1st, Catholic clergy and an auxiliary bishop from Chicago (Leo’s hometown) tried to bring the Eucharist to migrants detained at the Broadview Processing Center just outside the city. Ice agents turned them away. They had tried the same thing three weeks prior and been denied again.
The pope’s words land like a verdict. He was precise in his criticism: “The spiritual rights of people who have been detained should also be considered,” he said, “and I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral workers to attend to the needs of those people.”
This was no mere suggestion. This was Leo deploying the full weight of Catholic teaching—the Scripture that defines Christian ethics for over a billion souls worldwide—against an immigration enforcement apparatus that has detained thousands of Chicagoans since Operation Midway Blitz began in early September.
The raw mathematics of the moment are staggering. Since September 9, when federal agents began deploying from a nearby naval base as staging ground, the DHS operation has detained at least 1,000 people in and around Chicago.
In late September, agents descended from Black Hawk helicopters—military-style, television-ready—to raid a South Shore apartment building, zip-tying and detaining hundreds of residents in a single morning. After all that show of force, they arrested 37 people. Only one had alleged ties to the criminal organization they claimed to be targeting.
Meanwhile, Pope Leo has been watching from Rome—the first U.S. pope, born in the lake effect winds of Lake Michigan, now watching his hometown transform into something he recognizes viscerally. He carries that knowledge not as abstract theological knowledge but as lived experience.
Before his election on May 8, Leo was known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, an Augustinian missionary who spent years in Peru working with the poorest of the poor. He secured oxygen tanks during the COVID crisis. He broke bread with migrant communities. He lived the Gospel of Matthew 25 before he was elected to preach it to the world.
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That background matters profoundly now. “Many people who’ve lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now,” the pope said. These are not statistics to him. These are people.
In his first major exhortation since becoming pope—a document called “Dilexi Te” (”I Have Loved You”), released in early October—Leo placed Catholic teaching on migrants at the absolute moral center of the Church’s mission. He wrote words that now echo like prophecy:
“Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges. She knows that her proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.”
The scriptural foundation Leo invokes is ancient and unambiguous. It runs through both Testaments like a red thread. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites—who themselves were enslaved and displaced—three times over to show compassion to the stranger: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” God tells them in Exodus 22:21. In Leviticus, the command intensifies: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.”
But Leo returns again and again to Matthew 25. In that passage, Jesus depicts the final judgment of all nations. The saved are those who welcomed the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned. The damned are those who turned them away. “I was a stranger,” Jesus says to the sheep on his right hand, “and you welcomed me.” To the goats on his left, he says the same thing—but this time as condemnation: “I was a stranger and you did not take me in.”
This is not peripheral to Christianity. It is the hinge upon which eternity turns.
Leo has been driving this point home since the earliest weeks of his papacy. In late September, after learning that Trump was deploying the National Guard to Chicago—his hometown, the place that shaped him—he spoke to labor union leaders visiting from the city. “While recognizing that appropriate policies are necessary to keep communities safe,” he told them, “I encourage you to continue to advocate for society to respect the human dignity of the most vulnerable.”
Earlier in October, when Catholic leaders from El Paso came to the Vatican bearing a stack of letters from migrant families, Leo was already waiting—already informed, already emotionally engaged. One of the delegation members later told journalists, “It seemed like he didn’t need a background or explainer on the issue. I think being an American pope, and especially an American pope who has worked in Latin America with migrant communities in Peru, he very much knows the reality.”
Within days, Leo issued perhaps his sharpest public statement yet. Speaking to reporters on October 1st, he questioned the moral coherence of American Catholic politicians who claimed to be “pro-life” while supporting what he called the “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” The language was pointed: “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
The White House responded swiftly and defensively. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “I reject any notion that there is inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. under this administration.” But the Pope had already launched something that could not be unsaid—a moral challenge rooted in 2,000 years of Christian theology.
What makes Leo’s intervention distinctive is not merely its moral clarity but its personal dimension. Previous popes have spoken eloquently about migrants from a position of geographic and biographical remove. Pope Francis, Argentine-born, spoke with deep conviction but from outside the American context.
Leo is speaking from inside it. He was shaped by Chicago—a city that has long prided itself on being a sanctuary for the displaced and dispossessed. He returned to his native country as pope and found it transformed. Federal agents operating in shadows. Families separated. Pastoral workers denied access to the detained. His own archdiocese—the Archdiocese of Chicago—increasingly active in resistance.
On November 4, the same day Leo was speaking to reporters at Castel Gandolfo about spiritual rights and pastoral care, a federal judge in Chicago was hearing testimony about conditions at the Broadview facility. Immigration advocates described scenes that match no known definition of humane treatment: people kept for days, sleeping on floors, medications withheld, no access to showers.
The pope’s language of “deep reflection” is diplomatic, of course. But beneath it lies something fiercer—a man who has read Scripture his entire life, who has lived among the poor, now watching his Church’s moral teachings trampled by the apparatus of the state he grew up in. He is not asking America to end its immigration system. He is asking, with the weight of divine judgment behind him, whether America remembers what its own founding documents promise: that all people are created equal, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.
The question Leo posed at Castel Gandolfo—”How did you receive the foreigner?”—is not really a question. It is an indictment already inscribed in Scripture. What remains is the answer America writes with its actions.
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