“We Are a Nation of Immigrants” — Cardinal Dolan Echoes Pope Leo XIV, and MAGA Erupts
The retired New York cardinal invoked Jesus and the Statue of Liberty in a video this week. Within hours, replies branded him a traitor-priest out of the nativist right’s favorite novel.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan looked into a camera on Tuesday morning and celebrated the people Donald Trump has spent eighteen months trying to deport.
“We are a nation of immigrants,” the retired archbishop of New York said in a video posted to X. “I’m talking to you from the city that has the Statue of Liberty in the bay! Jesus Himself, the Bible, and certainly our American dream, have always called us to welcome the immigrants.”
The backlash needed only hours.
By press time, the video had drawn more than 100,000 views, and the replies beneath it read like a catechism of the movement Dolan was answering. “We are NOT a nation of immigrants,” one account informed him. “That is very, very offensive.”
Another demanded to know about “the immigrants that hate us and want us dead.”
A third told the 76-year-old cardinal, “You are one of Jean Raspail’s priests, come to life” — a reference to The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 French novel treasured by Steve Bannon and the nativist right, in which migrants arrive as a flood and the clergy who welcome them betray civilization itself.
Dolan spoke ten days after Pope Leo XIV spent America’s 250th birthday among the migrants of Lampedusa, where the first American pope urged his countrymen to receive immigrants with “compassion and generosity.”
The video leaves no doubt about whose argument he is advancing. Dolan opens by praising “that magnificent letter the Holy Father sent to us Americans on our 250th anniversary” and recalls the pope’s Fourth of July pilgrimage to the island “where suffering immigrants wash up on the shores” — a journey Leo made, in Dolan’s telling, “to bless them and to love them, and to call us all to welcoming the immigrants.” MAGA spent the past week savaging the pope for exactly this. Now the same crowd has come for Dolan.
He joins a chorus that keeps widening. Over the anniversary weekend, Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin called hostility toward immigrants that claims to defend Christianity “blasphemous,” giving the crackdown’s religious apologists a name drawn from the Church’s oldest vocabulary.
Still, nobody wrote this script for Timothy Dolan — least of all me.
The cardinal spent years as the friendliest face the American hierarchy offered Trump. He prayed at both of the president’s inaugurations. In December 2024, he assured a Fox News audience that Trump “takes his Christian faith seriously.”
Last September, days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, he called the slain activist “a modern-day Saint Paul” — a comparison the Sisters of Charity of New York publicly rebuked, warning that Kirk’s racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric “do not reflect the qualities of a saint.” And in May, he lent his collar to a White House prayer rally headlined by pastors who built careers on anti-Catholic bigotry. I have criticized him for nearly all of it in these pages.
But look at what the man has actually done since the deportation machine began grinding through Catholic parishes.
When JD Vance claimed in January 2025 that America’s bishops defended migrants to protect their “bottom line,” Dolan branded the accusation “scurrilous” within days. “You think we make money caring for the immigrants?” he asked months later on EWTN. “We’re losing it hand over fist.” In that same interview, Dolan revealed that the vice president had apologized to him directly — a private confession Vance now denies ever making.
When ICE agents began staking out Sunday Masses as part of a campaign that has targeted parishes from Minnesota to Texas, Dolan used his seat on Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission to intervene, helping end the practice of federal agents showing up outside worship in cars and trucks. He has spoken openly of his alarm at ICE harassing churches and frightening parishioners away from the sacraments.
And last September, he unveiled the largest commissioned artwork in the 146-year history of St. Patrick’s Cathedral: a 25-foot mural by Adam Cvijanovic depicting Irish families stepping off ships beside today’s immigrants, watched over by the saints who served them. Dolan blessed it himself and called it “a celebration of a city that has been built by immigrants.”
None of this began with retirement, either. During Trump’s first term, Dolan took to the pages of the Washington Post to attack the family-separation policy and the dismantling of DACA, back when much of the hierarchy still treated the president’s nativism as a passing storm.
The cardinal turned 76 in February. He holds no see anymore, and no ambition tethers him to Washington’s favor. What remains to him is the thing he started with — the Gospel — and the Gospel is blunt about this question. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus says in Matthew 25, describing the final judgment of the nations. A churchman with nothing left to win has decided, at least for now, those words mean exactly what they say.
His successor is already carrying the argument forward.
In December, Pope Leo handed New York to Ronald Hicks, a Chicago-formed protégé of Cardinal Cupich who was installed at St. Patrick’s in February and used his first St. Patrick’s Day in the city to defend immigrants from the pulpit while ICE raided the streets around him.
Hicks has even struck up an improbable working partnership with Zohran Mamdani, New York’s Muslim democratic socialist mayor, who pledged to work with the new archbishop to build “a more just and compassionate city where every New Yorker can thrive.”
Retirement offered Dolan a quiet exit from this fight. He chose instead to stand in front of a camera, invoke the Statue of Liberty, and remind a movement that treats mercy as weakness what Jesus expects of a nation built by strangers. The reply guys understood the stakes immediately — that is why they came for him.
When even Timothy Dolan has become a target, the administration is running out of Catholics willing to bless its war on the stranger.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal Dolan today, Pope Leo XIV every day, and the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who believe the stranger at our border carries the face of Christ.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that refuses to flinch, one rooted in welcome for the immigrant, solidarity with the poor, and honesty about power no matter which party holds it.
As our government stakes out Sunday Mass and calls it law enforcement, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a deportation machine that empties pews — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
"No ambition tethers him (Dolan) to Washington's favor." Well said, Christopher. Wish it were true of countless others still bending the knee to Trump et al. And not just politicians. If Cardinal Dolan can do a 180 back to Gospel principles . . . surely others can, too. There is hope.
I will be peevish and say, "It's about time!", but ... thank you, Cardinal Dolan for coming on strong, and thank you, Christopher Hale, for giving credit where credit is due.