Pope Leo's Ally Cardinal McElroy Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault’ on Immigrants — and the Church

Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., has emerged as a leading Catholic voice opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

At yesterday’s Mass marking the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, Cardinal McElroy delivered a searing rebuke of the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants.

He decried the federal mass deportation policy as a “governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women.”

Preaching on Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, McElroy challenged the faithful with a pointed question about the 10 million undocumented people living in our nation: “Are they our neighbors?

In other words, will we see these migrant families as fellow neighbors in need, or simply as targets for expulsion?

Cardinal McElroy’s answer was unequivocal.

He insisted that Catholics cannot be bystanders to this campaign of fear.

“It is this perspective that must form our stance and action as people of faith,” he said, urging that the Church “must console and peacefully stand in solidarity with the undocumented men and women whose lives are being upended by the government’s campaign of fear and terror.”

He warned that both our nation and the Church are confronting “an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst.”

In this crisis, he emphasized, the Church’s “first obligation” is to embrace and protect those suffering under such oppression.

Tellingly, at the Mass’s outset, McElroy even asked the congregation to pray in silence for the many undocumented Catholics too afraid to attend, driven into the shadows by the current climate of fear.

For McElroy, this stance is not only a moral imperative — it’s aligned with Pope Leo XIV’s own vision.

As Washington’s archbishop and a close ally of Pope Leo XIV, McElroy is echoing the Pope’s consistent message that every immigrant possesses the same God-given dignity as any citizen.

(It was Pope Leo himself who recently reminded world leaders that our human dignity “always remains unchanged” regardless of nationality.)

In fact, McElroy has been one of Leo’s most outspoken lieutenants on this issue.

In a CNN interview this summer, he blasted the Trump administration’s indiscriminate deportations as “inhumane” and “morally repugnant” — a policy of rounding up immigrants that, as he told CNN, “literally rips families apart.”

He noted with outrage that immigrants are now “afraid even to go to church,” after Trump revoked guidelines that once kept ICE agents from making arrests at houses of worship.

In McElroy’s view, such tactics strike at the heart of both the immigrant community and the Church itself, undermining the sanctuary and solidarity that parishes strive to offer.

As I’ve written in these letters before, Cardinal McElroy’s voice is part of a growing Catholic pushback against what Pope Leo has called a politics of cruelty.

Even in deep-red Tennessee, all three Catholic bishops recently united to condemn an ICE raid in Nashville that swept up nearly 200 immigrants — noting that perhaps as many as 100 of those arrested had no criminal record.

And just last month in Iowa, all four of the state’s bishops issued a pastoral letter defending migrants as neighbors and denouncing “enforcement tactics that treat all immigrants… in the same manner as violent criminals.”

From Pope Leo in Rome to pastors on the frontlines in the United States, the Church’s message is remarkably consistent: to be Catholic is to stand with the vulnerable.

Cardinal McElroy’s impassioned homily yesterday drives that point home.

In condemning the Trump administration’s “campaign of fear” as an assault on both immigrants and the Church’s moral mission, he is affirming that the Gospel leaves no room for indifference.

We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers — and no political agenda can be allowed to make us forget that.

Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.

If you want to support this mission, here’s how you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Whether you give $0, $1, or $1,000, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.