Trump Administration Strips Catholic Charities of $11 Million After Attacking Pope Leo XIV

In a grave attack on religious liberty, the Miami facility named for the priest who sheltered 14,000 Cuban children during Operation Pedro Pan will shut down in three months.

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In December 1960, a thirty-year-old Irish priest named Bryan Walsh stood in a Miami airport terminal and watched the first planeload of unaccompanied Cuban children walk off the jet bridge.

Over the next two years, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami would shelter more than 14,000 boys and girls whose parents had sent them alone across the Florida Straits to escape Fidel Castro’s revolution.

Operation Pedro Pan became the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere, and it cemented a partnership between the Catholic Church and the United States government that endured for more than six decades.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration killed it.

The Department of Health and Human Services canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami to shelter and care for migrant children who arrive in the United States without a parent.

The Monsignor Bryan Walsh Children’s Village — named for the priest who started Pedro Pan, an 81-bed facility in Cutler Bay that provides foster care, family reunification, and trauma services — will be forced to shut down within three months.

Archbishop Thomas Wenski called the decision an abrupt end to “more than 60 years of relationship” and said the government was destroying “a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” the Church had demonstrated.

The timing tells you everything about the motive.

Two days before the cancellation, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Pope Leo XIV is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

The attack came after Leo denounced the “delusion of omnipotence” fueling the U.S.-Israel war in Iran during a prayer vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The pope responded by telling reporters he has “no fear” of the Trump administration and will “continue to speak out strongly against war.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — no progressive — condemned Trump’s broadside against the pontiff as “unacceptable.”

This is the context in which the administration chose to strip funding from a Catholic ministry that cares for traumatized children. HHS claimed the cancellation reflected a decline in unaccompanied minors in federal custody.

Archbishop Wenski acknowledged the numbers had dropped but noted the obvious: reduced demand might justify scaling back a program, not destroying one that took six decades to build and that the government itself recognized as a national model.

The real reason is retaliation, and the pattern stretches back to the administration’s first days.

In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance went on Face the Nation and accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of caring about their “bottom line” rather than humanitarian concerns — a charge so scurrilous that Cardinal Timothy Dolan called it out publicly and Vance later admitted he had “gone too hard.”

The administration froze federal funding for Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. The bishops sued in federal court over the halt to refugee resettlement funding. Vance has twice told Pope Leo XIV to stay out of American politics.

Trump’s border czar said he would “educate” the pope on Catholic teaching. The Miami cancellation adds a new dimension to this campaign — direct financial punishment against a Church institution in the same week that the president publicly attacked the head of that Church.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from retaliating against a religious institution for the exercise of its faith. The Free Exercise Clause does not contain an asterisk that reads “unless the pope criticizes a war the president started.”

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was written to ensure, in Congress’s own language, that religious people and institutions are “free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by the Federal Government.” Stripping $11 million from a Catholic charity days after the president attacked the pope is a textbook violation of that principle.

The constitutional argument, though, only captures part of the offense. Catholic teaching holds that care for the vulnerable is not an optional ministry the Church performs when it is convenient or popular.

The preferential option for the poor — the conviction that God’s concern reaches first toward those who have the least — is a foundational claim of the Gospel.

Unaccompanied children who have crossed a border alone, carrying trauma that most adults could not endure, are precisely the people the Church exists to serve. When a government financially penalizes a church for caring for children, it is attacking the core of what that church exists to do.

That makes this one of the gravest affronts to religious liberty in modern American history. What happened in Miami is not a budget adjustment. A 2,000-year-old institution is being told that its mission will carry a financial cost if its leader dares to speak.

Consider the political betrayal.

In November 2024, Donald Trump won 55 percent of the Catholic vote — a 12-point margin over Kamala Harris. Today, his approval among Catholics has dropped well below 50 percent, driven by the Iran war and his attacks on the pope. Trump won Catholic America, and he has spent his second term punishing Catholic America for the moral witness of its leaders.

Fifty-three million Catholics live in this country. They worship in parishes that run food banks, homeless shelters, hospitals, schools, and refugee services in every state. They belong to a Church whose leader has said plainly that he will not be silenced by threats from the White House.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Wenski, with Pope Leo XIV, and with every Catholic and person of goodwill who understands that when a government retaliates against a church for speaking the truth, the soul of the republic is at stake.

The Trump-Vance administration has declared war on the Catholic Church — on its charities, its bishops, its pope, and on the sixty-year legacy of a young Irish priest who opened his arms to 14,000 children. They have made their choice. We will hold these tyrants to account.

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