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Last August I wrote that Catholics in MAGA country had become the most visible, organized counterweight to Donald Trump’s ICE raids, and I counted six red states to prove it.
Dan Merica of The Washington Post had asked me why. My answer then was that twelve years of Pope Francis appointees had produced an episcopacy willing to stand in contested public space, and that Pope Leo XIV had given those bishops a leader who is not afraid.
As the summer comes to a close, I made the list again, and it got longer.
I grew up in a Tennessee parish the Ku Klux Klan once threatened, so I have never accepted the coastal shorthand that says the Church in MAGA country is just an adjunct of the Trump White House.
I know this reality in the flesh, and the evidence shows something quite different.
In the states where Trump won by the widest margins are, as far as I can tell, the places where bishops and sisters have spoken most plainly in 2026, and the speaking has moved well past ICE raids, though the raids have not stopped.
Here is what Catholics in nine Trump states did in 2026, in the order it happened.
Kentucky: On January 4, the four bishops of Kentucky (Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, Bishop John Iffert of Covington, Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, and Bishop William Medley of Owensboro) issued a joint statement in a state Trump carried by 31 points. “We oppose all efforts to stigmatize immigrants as a group or to spread fear based on national or ethnic origin,” they wrote, naming “the elimination of sanctuary protections for churches, hospitals, and schools” among the causes of the “hostility, anxiety, and fear” they now see in their parishes. They pledged to “stand with all of our immigrant brothers and sisters who have been victimized by unjust government action or by harmful rhetoric.”
Arkansas: Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, whose grandfather lost twenty first cousins in the Holocaust, told readers of his January column that he views “troubling things in today’s world through the lens of 1930s Germany.” He recalled how Hitler exploited public fear, then the 937 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis whom the United States turned away, and then he wrote: “These are the kinds of atrocities to which the dehumanization of mass, indiscriminate deportation can naturally lead.” Caring for refugees and the poor, the bishop of a 31-point Trump state insisted, “is a pro-life issue.”
Texas: Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso called the campaign of mass detention and deportation “a grave moral evil” in a March pastoral letter and told Catholic agents that “no one has to obey an immoral order.” On June 28, ICE agents handcuffed Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Nigerian nurse in her habit, a block from her home in McAllen as she walked to Sunday Mass. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville called the protocols behind it “wildly disturbing,” and a Republican congresswoman joined two Democrats to get her home by nightfall. Nine days later an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston homebuilder, as he drove his crew to work. Sister Rose Kuhn still drives to the Harlingen immigration court every Wednesday to sit beside children as young as four who face a judge alone.
Oklahoma: On April 7, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, told Trump to “step back from the precipice of war and negotiate a just settlement for the sake of peace and before more lives are lost.” Trump had threatened to destroy Iran outright. That threat, Coakley wrote, together with the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, “cannot be morally justified,” and he invited every American Catholic to join Pope Leo’s vigil for peace that Saturday. Trump won Oklahoma by 34 points and carried all 77 of its counties.
Wyoming: On Divine Mercy Sunday, April 12, Bishop Steven Biegler of Cheyenne released a pastoral letter titled “Be a Merciful Neighbor” in the state that gave Trump his widest margin anywhere, 46 points. “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” Biegler wrote, grieving “for parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school.”
West Virginia: On May 1, Pope Leo named Evelio Menjivar the lone Catholic bishop of West Virginia, a state Trump carried by 42 points. Menjivar crossed the border at Tijuana in the trunk of a car in 1990, and Cardinal Prevost’s last retweet before the conclave carried Menjivar’s question about the deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?” Installed at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Wheeling on July 2, the new bishop told West Virginia Watch how his Church treats the stranger: “We help people without asking, without questioning their status. We just help because they are human beings.”
Florida: Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami has had two fights on his hands this summer. As the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians, he wrote on July 24: “To make America Great again is a worthy goal but you don’t make America great by making America mean.” After gangs killed at least 47 people at Kenscoff on August 23, he asked Washington to rethink the deportations, because Haiti “is still a house on fire.” Attorney General James Uthmeier, meanwhile, gave the state’s bishops seven days to start granting religious vaccine exemptions in Catholic schools or watch their students lose state vouchers; the bishops answered that they “do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching,” and Uthmeier compared them to “Muslim schools teaching sharia law.”
Ohio: After ICE began mailing letters in late July to the Haitians of Springfield, a city where roughly one in four residents is Haitian, Catholic sisters started standing outside the ICE office in Blue Ash, north of Cincinnati. They come from the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Sisters of Divine Providence, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of the Precious Blood, and on Sunday, August 9, nearly 700 people lined the street with them. Sister Patricia Wittberg’s sign read: “It’s so bad even the NUNS are mad!” Their presence, Sister Anita Marie of the Sisters of Notre Dame said, “is a type of prayer.” Trump carried Ohio, JD Vance’s home state, by 11 points.
Indiana: On Thursday, September 3, Archbishop Charles Thompson of Indianapolis issued a decree dispensing from Sunday Mass “all those persons living within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis who reasonably fear being detained, separated from their families, or experience intimidation due to the increased immigration enforcement.” It added: “This applies even to those with proper legal documentation.” Days earlier, cellphone video had caught masked agents chasing a man across several lanes of traffic on Post Road at Interstate 70, and Sen. Jim Banks promised that “we will not let Indianapolis become Minneapolis.” Thompson invoked canon 87, which lets a bishop lift a law “when it contributes to their spiritual welfare,” in a state Trump carried by 19 points.
Trump carried those nine states by an average of 27 points (Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming alone account for 122 of the 240), and in every one of them the Church told him no about something he wanted.
On Wednesday in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo told Catholics that “we cannot remain as unengaged spectators” before the injustices of their own age, and he asked them to share the griefs of those “crushed by injustice, discrimination, and violence.”
The bishops, priests, nuns, and most importantly, lay women and men of Trump country had not waited for the instruction; they have been living it since the first week of January.
Last August I closed with a line I believed: in red states and blue, the conscience of the Church is alive and unafraid.
A year later I would add only this, and I say it as a Tennessean who watched our own three bishops find their voice on the Nashville raids: it is loudest where the president won biggest.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Thompson, Bishop Taylor, the sisters on the sidewalk in Blue Ash, and the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe that a nun walking to Mass is no threat to anyone and that, as Bishop Seitz put it, no one has to obey an immoral order.
In a season when the loudest voices in American religious life belong to the prophets of doom (the phrase is St. John XXIII’s, from the morning he opened the Council in 1962), we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They want to know that the Church in Trump country has not gone quiet, and this year, from Cheyenne to Little Rock, it has not.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a government that handcuffs nuns and sends Haitians back into a house on fire — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Thank you for the article, in the newsletter. We are all doing our best to stand up to MAGA. In fact the sermon this morning was how to be humble and kind during these troubling times. I will pray for Pope Leo and this nation, especially during this very difficult times.
Yes, and that resistance is good, but I would surmise they were MAGA opponents to begin with. I would love to see actual MAGA Catholics reverse their positions.