Pope Leo Takes Aim at Trump’s Migrant Crackdown in First Major Statement

Pope Leo has come out swinging in his first marquee document, urging Catholics worldwide to stand with migrants and the poor, while pointedly reviving one of Pope Francis’ harshest critiques of President Donald Trump’s anti immigration agenda. The 104 page apostolic exhortation, released Thursday, reads like a mission statement for a new papacy that intends to put vulnerable families at the center of the Church’s public witness, not as a footnote, but as the headline. Leo makes clear he is picking up a pen that Francis first lifted, and finishing a text his predecessor began before his death, then sharpening it with his own imprint.

“I am happy to make this document my own, adding some reflections, and to issue it at the beginning of my own pontificate,” Leo writes in the opening pages. That single sentence sets the tone, continuity with Francis, and a bolder willingness to wade into political waters where migrants are treated as bargaining chips. Throughout the exhortation, Leo calls on parishes, schools, and dioceses to move from platitudes to practice, to offer legal support, language classes, shelter, and, crucially, public advocacy when governments criminalize those seeking safety.

The Trump era looms in the subtext and sometimes in the text. Leo invokes the late pope’s sharp rebuke of wall building and cruelty at the border, echoing Francis’ insistence that a politics that tears families apart cannot call itself pro life with a straight face. By citing that standard, Leo brings an old argument into a new moment, reminding the faithful that the Church’s stance on migrants is not a mood or a trend, it is Catholic social teaching 101. The timing feels deliberate, at the very moment Washington is hardening enforcement and expanding raids, the Vatican is telling bishops, say plainly whose side we are on.

The document is not only about immigration, it is also an economic manifesto. Leo sketches a case for wide ranging changes to a global market system that, in his view, rewards speculation and punishes the paycheck to paycheck majority. He calls rising inequality a slow moving moral disaster, one that pushes families toward displacement and desperation, and one that demands more than charity. The text urges debt relief, wage safeguards, and social safety nets that do not vanish when a crisis hits. It is a blueprint that links the factory floor to the border crossing, and it asks Catholics to see those connections in their voting and their parish life.

Leo thanks parish volunteers who sit with asylum seekers at court, religious sisters who run drop in centers near detention sites, and lay leaders who translate medical forms for families that could not otherwise navigate a new country. He asks bishops to spend time at the margins, to listen before they pronounce, and to show the same tenacity for a child in a shelter that they would for a donor at a gala. It is the kind of challenge that can unsettle comfortable chancery calendars.

Critics will accuse Leo of importing politics into the pulpit, even as they cheer when religious leaders bless their preferred policies. Supporters will say the Church is doing exactly what it should, defending human dignity where it is trampled. By finishing Francis’ unfinished work, by quoting his toughest lines on the treatment of migrants, and by pressing Catholics to trade sentiment for solidarity, he has planted a flag for a pontificate that will measure orthodoxy not only by creed, but by the welcome offered to the stranger.