Trump Border Czar Tom Homan Mockingly Invites Pope Leo XIV on an ICE Raid
At Baylor TPUSA this past week, the border czar facing federal scrutiny for accepting $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag told Benny Johnson he’d invite Pope Leo XIV on an ICE raid.
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Tom Homan told Benny Johnson last week that he would be happy to take Pope Leo XIV on a ride-along with an ICE raid.
The moment came inside a packed Baylor University auditorium during Turning Point USA’s campus tour stop. Johnson, the MAGA podcaster who serves as the movement’s in-house catechist on grievance, asked whether this was the border czar’s “invitation to the Pope for a ridealong with ICE.”
Homan’s answer: “Yes. And I said that.”
Homan had laid out his credentials earlier in the same set.
“As a lifelong Catholic — baptized, first communion, confirmation — I love the Catholic church,” he told the crowd. “But you know it, they’re wrong.” Then came his framing for the room.
“I’m a little troubled right now. I call out the Pope.”
By the time he reached the offer to ride along, the border czar had already explained why he believed he was qualified to instruct the pontiff. “I’ll sit down and talk to them,”
Homan said of Leo and the cardinals who had spoken out, “because they’re talking about something they don’t understand.”
It is the same riff he has been running for months.
The premise, once the theatrics are stripped away, is that an American pope who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, spent decades in the poorest neighborhoods of northern Peru, and now reads the desperate letters of migrant families terrorized by federal raids is uninformed.
What Leo really needs, Homan keeps insisting, is forty minutes with the man who runs the raids.
One of the things I have learned from covering Tom Homan over the past year is that parochial-school education fifty years ago does not make you an expert on anything.
His claim to authority on the Church’s doctrine of migration rests on the credentials he just recited at Baylor — baptism, first communion, confirmation, and the fact that he attended a Catholic grade school in the 1960s.
On that, he has spent months offering to “educate” the first American pope about human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the moral status of the stranger.
Here’s the background.
