Homan: Catholic Church should stay out of immigration

White House border czar Tom Homan criticized the Catholic Church on Tuesday, in the aftermath of President Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff, on social media.

“I love the Catholic Church,” Homan told reporters. “I just wish they ‘d stick to fixing the church because there’s issues — I know because I’m a member — instead of politics.”

Homan specifically defended Trump administration policies cracking down on immigration, saying with “97 percent less people coming,” less woman are being raped, less people are dying from the journey and less people are being sent back.

“I wish they’d sit down with me and hear my experiences over the last 40 years and maybe they’d understand why a secure border saves lives, a secure border is the most human thing this country can do,” he said.

“I wish they’d stay out of immigration because they don’t know what they’re talking about,” added Homan, one of several Catholics, along with Vice President Vance, first lady Melania Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who serve in the Trump administration.

Pope Leo has been critical of the administration’s policies, saying in October that there is “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.”

He’s also called it “extremely disrespectful.”

Trump on Sunday called Leo “WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the pope has spoken out against the Iran war.

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” he wrote, adding, “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected.”

The pope has responded saying he doesn’t “fear” the Trump administration, and a number of Catholics have decried the president’s comments.

Vance downplayed the comments from Trump, saying Monday he didn’t find them “newsworthy” and that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

Trump also caught flak from some of his conservative allies for posting a photo created with artificial intelligence that depicted him as Jesus healing a sick person.

He later took the photo down, saying that he thought the image was depicting him as a doctor.

Homan said Tuesday he hadn’t seen that image.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that he was the one who told him he should take it down.

“I talked to the president about it as soon as I saw it and told him that I don’t think it was being received in the same way he intended it,” Johnson told reporters. “He agreed and he pulled it down. That was the right thing to do.”

He said he did not think Trump viewed the image as “sacrilegious at all.”

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