Vice President JD Vance spoke at length about reconciling his Catholic faith with the immigration polices of the Trump administration — which led earlier this year to a rebuke by some men of the cloth — during the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday.
While the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued statements in January denouncing President Trump’s hardline policies, Vance told The Post’s Miranda Devine that the administration is seeking to respect migrants’ “dignity” while also being able to seal the southern border.
“The Vatican, especially under Pope Francis, had a particular line on immigration. And I try to interpret this stuff charitably, partially because I’m a new Catholic,” explained the VP, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019. “I think the Catholic Church recognizes we have to have border control. … That’s very clearly written in Catholic teaching, is that nations are allowed sovereignty, they’re allowed to control their own borders.”
“However, it’s always useful to remind ourselves that a lot of the people who have come into our country, they’re struggling in some way. They’re human beings,” he said. “And even though we have to engage in immigration enforcement, I try to remind myself — consistent with church teaching — that doesn’t mean we can let these people stay in our country, but I do have a responsibility to try to remember their humanity.”
“And that’s sort of my charitable interpretation is: Yes, you can have your border policy; yes, you can enforce your borders. You also have to try to [remember] that all 8 billion people who are alive on this planet are God’s creatures, we have to owe them a certain respect and a certain dignity — doesn’t mean we should let them illegally immigrate into our country.”
Over the course of the Biden administration, as many as 8 million migrants poured into the US through a patchwork of programs that flew, bussed or allowed them to walk through ports of entry — while others barged directly past Border Patrol agents and were later released into the interior of the country.
According to Vance, any ill-feeling over the immigration issue has been directed by Trump officials toward their Biden-era predecessors for having “waved the magic asylum” or “waived the parole law” to permit the entries.
“I would say, and this is something that I really wish that all Christians took more seriously, that, yes, we have to show dignity to people, whether they’re in our country legally or illegally, but when you encourage illegal immigration [at] the scale that Joe Biden did, you empower the cartels, you empower these people who are raping and murdering and selling 12 year old girls [as] sex slaves,” he said.
“Or C sections on little girls,” Devine noted.
“Exactly,” Vance replied. “There’s a balance between immigration enforcement and treating people like humans. … And in some ways, the best thing that we can do to protect the human dignity of the migrant — but certainly of the American citizens that I have a certain responsibility to protect — is to stop the border crisis, which, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
In June, border officials recorded the lowest number of migrant crossings in modern history.
Asked what he thought the reasoning was for the millions of crossings in the prior administration, Vance claimed Biden officials “were using immigration to seize control, illegitimately, of the institutions in this country.”
“Some of them would say that openly, by the way. They would actually say, ‘We want these new people to come in because we can’t win the votes of the people who are already here, so we’re going to import new voters to replace them.’”
“If I’m being a little bit more charitable — I think that was certainly going on — but I also think that there was this distorted humanitarian thing going on where any enforcement, any law enforcement, period, these people have convinced themselves is somehow un-Christian or immoral,” he added. “I think that’s the wrong attitude to take because when you don’t enforce the law against the people who violate the law.”
“And you bankrupt Medicaid,” noted Devine.
“And you bankrupt, absolutely, you bankrupt the country,” Vance replied. “What happened, is a lot of Americans looked at our border and said, ‘Wait a second, they are actually violating the law to let people come in, which drives up the cost of housing, actually has a lot of people competing against Americans for American jobs, and you do it in this fundamentally illegitimate way.’”
“Because if Joe Biden stood before the American people and said, ‘I’d like to let 5 million low-wage immigrants into this country every single year,’ the American people would say, ‘No,’” he said. “But he didn’t ask the American people. He just did it without asking permission. I think that’s illegal, but I also think it delegitimizes the entire immigration system in this country.”
At least 1.4 million people left the US in the first six months of 2025, many of whom did so voluntarily as a result of Trump’s policies.
More than 100,000 migrants were forcibly removed as of the end of March, The Post previously reported, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations have targeted migrants convicted of crimes.
But Vance said that total deportations have now reached around 2 million.
“We’re trying to remove as many as we possibly can,” Vance said. “That was a combination of deportations and what we call self-deportations. … But there’s a lot to go. We’re just gonna keep on working at it. We’re gonna try to chip away at that as much as possible.”
“I remember during the campaign, Miranda, people would ask me, ‘How do you possibly deport 10 million people? How do you possibly deport 18 million people?’” Vance responded to Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
“And I say, ‘The same way that you eat a very big sandwich — you do it a bite at a time.’”
Vance also recounted his recent trip to Jerusalem, during which he was brought to tears visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, burial and ultimate resurrection, according to the Catholic tradition.
“It’s actually where the cross was. And I’d never seen that and I’d never been in there. And I’m not a big crier,” he recalled, “You kneel down and it’s a very short area, so you kind of have to almost crawl underneath, but then you can actually place your hand where the understanding of, like, where the cross would have been placed on Golgotha. And I start crying.”
“I was completely overcome with emotion, and I didn’t expect that,” he said. “You never know what to expect, but there was this moment of just complete silence. … I got similarly emotional when I touched, it’s the slab that is placed over the tomb.”
