In a ceremonial throne room at the Vatican last week, Pope Leo stood before a group of visiting American Bishops and Catholic leaders as they played video messages from migrants in the United States. As he watched one message after another from people speaking about their fear of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, his eyes filled with tears, according to one person in the delegation.
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“You stand with me and I stand with you, and the church will continue to accompany and stand with migrants,” the Pope reportedly said after the meeting, which ended with him instructing them to be more forceful in defending immigrants in the U.S.
Pope Leo’s comments were the latest in a string of forceful public statements that demonstrate his increasing willingness to challenge Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
“He just was very, you could see, visibly pained when he watched the video,” Dylan Corbett, an executive director of the Hope Border Institute, who was part of the delegation, told TIME.
Read more: ‘Peace Be With You’: Pope Leo XIV Steps Onto the World Stage
During the meeting, the delegation handed the Pope dozens of letters from immigrants, bishops and social workers describing their fears of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. Corbett, whose grassroots organization works with faith leaders to help communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, said their conversation deeply affected the Pope.
“He was emotionally moved by what we told him, almost, you know, almost angry at times. Just very clear that what was happening was, you know, the church needed to raise its voice, and it was unacceptable,” said Corbett, who lives in the border town of El Paso and has previously worked in an official capacity for the Vatican in promoting migrant and refugee rights.
A personal issue
The issue has become personal for the Pope in recent weeks as Trump has focused his crackdown on Chicago, Pope Leo’s hometown. The day after the meeting of Bishops on Oct. 8, Pope Leo met with union leaders from Chicago and urged them to advocate for immigrants, just as the Trump Administration was trying to deploy the National Guard in the city to assist with its immigration crackdown.
“While recognizing that appropriate policies are necessary to keep communities safe, I encourage you to continue to advocate for society to respect the human dignity of the most vulnerable,” Leo told the union leaders.
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, who accompanied the labor leaders, told the Associated Press after the meeting that the Pope was clear in his support for the undocumented immigrants that Trump is trying to deport.
“He (Leo) wants us to make sure, as bishops, that we speak out on behalf of the undocumented or anybody who’s vulnerable to preserve their dignity,” Cupich said. “We all have to remember that we all share a common dignity as human beings.”
Chicago has become a hotbed for Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign. Since the Trump Administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz” last month, the city has been flooded with federal agents, who have increased raids and arrests. One particularly aggressive military style raid on an apartment building in south Chicago saw dozens arrested and children separated from their parents. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has denounced Trump’s targeting of Chicago, while city leaders and protestors have taken steps to fight against the presence of federal agents.
Pope Leo’s recent comments represent a marked escalation in his rhetoric around Trump’s immigration crackdown, and a potential problem for the president. As the leader of some 50 million Catholic followers in the United States, the Pope is perhaps the second-most influential American in the world.
Corbett said he believed the Pope’s outspokenness on defending migrants in the U.S. was the result of him becoming “more comfortable with the papacy.”
“And so I think you see, as he sort of grows into his role as being Pope, he’s also taking on that global mantle as one of the few world leaders who’s speaking out on behalf of the human dignity of people who migrate.”
A descendant of immigrants
The Pope first began speaking about immigration at the beginning of his term, when he succeeded Pope Francis in May.
In his first address to world diplomats, Leo said the dignity of migrants had to be respected, beginning the dialogue of his papacy against the Administration. He also highlighted his own immigrant background. “My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate,” he told ambassadors at the Vatican.
Before his papacy, Leo served in Peru for decades, assisting the poor, especially Venezuelan migrants who fled there.
The Pope called out Vice President J.D. Vance specifically in resurfaced social media posts from an account linked to Leo; however, Vance did not quip back, but said he would not “play the politicization of the Pope game.”
In June, Leo critiqued the surge of nationalistic political movements as he celebrated Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican city in front of thousands of people. Without naming any country or politician, he continued his vow to make the Catholic Church a symbol of peace.
“Where there is love, there is no room for prejudice, for ‘security’ zones separating us from our neighbors, for the exclusionary mindset that, tragically, we now see emerging also in political nationalisms,” Leo said.
The next month, Leo urged the public in a letter to view migrants as “messengers of hope” on the 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, and highlighted the “link between migration and hope.”
“The current global context is sadly marked by wars, violence, injustice and extreme weather events, which force millions of people to leave their homelands in search of refuge elsewhere,” the Pope wrote. “Faced with frightening scenarios and the possibility of global devastation, it is important that there be a growing desire in people’s hearts for a future of peace and of respect for the dignity of all.”
Those comments followed months of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country and clashes between protestors and the National Guard in Los Angeles.
In late September, Leo continued his steady pattern of comments. In what was likely his most direct address on abortion and immigration since his papacy began, the Pope called the U.S.’s treatment of immigrants “inhumane.”
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” he said. “And someone who says 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.”
Leo’s suggestion that pro-life Catholics’ beliefs do not align with deportation was met with fierce backlash from conservative members of the church.
Leo then urged the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in October, following his critiques of Trump, to be welcoming of migrants. In St. Peter’s Square during Mass, he said that immigrants should not be treated with “the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination,” although he did not reference the U.S.
A Papal tradition
Pope Leo is not the first Pope to criticize the Trump Administration for its treatment of immigrants.
Following Trump’s election in the 2016 election, Pope Francis, who served from 2013 until his death in 2025, criticized the President’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said at the time. Nearly a decade later, at the beginning of Trump’s second term, Francis was still making public rebukes. Before Leo’s recent comments, Francis called the Administration’s deportation campaign a “major crisis” in a public letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops.
“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” Francis wrote in February.
Robert Franis Prevost, Pope Leo’s real name, is the first American elected to the position. However, he has spent much of his life outside of the U.S. Ordained in 1982, Leo received a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. From his time in Peru, he visited orders all around the world. Leo chose his name in reference to the last Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903, one of the longest papal reigns, and is known for marshaling the church into the modern world.