Vice President JD Vance pushed back against Pope Leo’s comments on immigration, calling the US’s response “humanitarian.” Vance, who is Catholic, responded to comments the Pope made, requesting the Catholics worldwide support a US bishops’ letter that accused the US of “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” ““No one has said that the United States should have open borders. I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter,” said the Pope.

“You may not know it, judging purely from the comments of some people on social media, but the Catholic Church’s views on this are actually quite clear. It’s that, yes, you must treat immigrants humanely,” the Vice President said to Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle. “On the other hand, every nation has the right to control its borders. And obviously, how you strike that balance is very important, but there’s a lot of room there to actually control your own borders for the sake of your own people.”

He pushed back against open borders, noting how it promotes trafficking and the passage of drugs into US. ““When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world,” warned Vance. “My priority, my charge is to look after the people of the United States of America, and you cannot do that if you’re flooding the country with a ton of illegal immigrants and the drugs and the crime that they bring.”

The Jesuit Review has pushed back against Vance, noting comments he made on “Pod Force One” with Miranda Devine. “It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I wanna live next to people who I have something in common with, I don’t wanna live next to four families of strangers,’” Vance said during the podcast, noting that the US should draw in people with values in line with the United States. “What JD Vance is teaching is not nuanced or complex. He is simply saying, ‘If you’re different, go away,’ accused The Review. “And it’s not just a single out-of-context clip from a podcast. The entire immigration policy of the Trump administration says the same thing: Be rich, be white, be like everyone else, or go away.”