JD Vance Is Lying — Catholic Church Doesn’t Profit Off Migrants

A baseless claim from MAGA’s Catholic poster boy has gone viral again after the U.S. bishops stood up against Trump-Vance's deportation raids. Pope Leo and the bishops are setting the record straight.

Dear friends —

Happy Monday. Today’s piece is a subscriber-only deep dive — part exposé, part moral call-to-action — on one of the most damaging lies to infect the American conversation about faith and immigration: the idea that the Catholic Church makes money off the migrant crisis.

You may recall this falsehood first gaining traction in February, when Vice President J.D. Vance accused the U.S. bishops of opposing harsh immigration enforcement out of financial self-interest. His claim was quickly debunked — but it resurfaced this past week after the American bishops, echoing Pope Leo XIV, issued a clear denunciation of the Trump campaign’s proposed mass deportation agenda.

Rather than engage with the Church’s moral argument, Vance and his allies doubled down. Once again, they painted the Church’s refugee ministries as corrupt profiteering. Once again, they slandered bishops, nuns, and lay workers who’ve spent decades serving migrants in the name of Christ.

Today’s essay tells the truth. It walks through the origins of this narrative, its laundering by MAGA-aligned media, and its weaponization by Vance. It shows, with hard numbers and on-the-ground testimony, that the Church doesn’t profit from this work — it loses money doing it. It keeps doing it anyway. Because it’s the Gospel.

And above all, the piece centers Pope Leo XIV — whose defense of migrants has become one of the hallmarks of his pontificate. In the face of lies and cynicism, Leo calls us back to clarity. The Church, he says, must be a Church of the Beatitudes — one that makes room for the little ones.

This is one of the most important essays we’ll publish this year, because it’ll help push back against this insidious slur against Pope Leo and the Church.

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From day one, Pope Leo XIV has emphasized that welcoming and defending migrants is pure Christianity — a core duty of the faith, not some partisan political spectacle. In speech after speech, he’s hammered this point home.

Just last month in Rome, Leo deplored the “inhuman” treatment of refugees, calling it a “serious crime” when governments treat human beings “like garbage.”

The pontiff’s moral clarity is not new; it flows straight from longstanding Catholic teaching.

Catholic ministries in the U.S. have been serving immigrants for over a century — long before any government grants — out of an “institutional acceptance of the Gospel demand to protect the sojourner.”

In other words, the Church helps migrants because of Christ’s command to welcome the stranger, not because there’s money to be made.

Some people missed the memo in their conversion classes.

JD Vance Launders an Old Lie

This February, JD Vance — yes, the Catholic convert who is now vice president — took to a Sunday news show to question the U.S. bishops’ motives.

He was responding to the bishops’ outspoken critique of President Trump’s renewed immigration crackdown. Rather than engage the substance of the Church’s moral objection, Vance resorted to an ad hominem smear.

He mused aloud on Face the Nation whether the bishops were truly “worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

In effect, Vance insinuated that the only reason Catholic leaders oppose draconian raids and deportations is because the Church is raking in federal dollars for refugee resettlement.

It’s a cynical, evidence-free narrative — and one that anti-immigrant pundits in the MAGA sphere were all too happy to amplify.

Here’s what followed and why Vance is 100% wrong.