Tom Homan Just Invited Pope Leo on an ICE Ride Along and the Pope Has No Answer

April 28, 2026 Cat2, Illegal Immigration
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Tom Homan spent forty years watching what an open border actually does to people.

Pope Leo XIV called Trump's deportations "extremely disrespectful" – then spent this week flying between Cameroon and Angola praising peace.

Now Homan has extended an invitation the Vatican cannot refuse without admitting it has no idea what it's talking about.

What Homan Actually Said at Baylor

At a Turning Point USA event Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan confirmed he has invited Pope Leo XIV to join ICE agents on an enforcement ride-along.

"Yes," Homan said when asked flat out. "I will sit down and talk to him because they're talking about something they don't understand."

Homan has earned that statement the hard way.

He told reporters outside the White House what the Pope has never witnessed firsthand: "If they wore my shoes for 40 years, and talked to a nine-year-old girl that got raped multiple times, or stood in the back of a tractor trailer with 19 dead aliens at my feet, including a five-year-old boy that baked to death – I think their opinion would change."

That is not a policy position.

That is forty years of evidence.

The Number That Ends the Argument

Homan dropped the statistic nobody on the left wants to touch.

"President Trump has illegal immigration down 96.7 percent," he said.

Then he asked the questions that matter.

"When 97 percent less people are coming, how many women aren't being raped? How many children aren't dying? How many pounds of fentanyl is not getting in to kill Americans? How many known suspected terrorists aren't making it into the United States?" he asked.

The Catholic Church has a 130-year-old body of social teaching on migration.

Not one page of it answers those questions.

Pope Leo can quote doctrine from a press briefing on a Vatican jet.

Tom Homan can quote the weight of a five-year-old boy.

The Pope's Own Words Contradict His Complaint

Here is what makes Leo's position impossible to sustain.

Flying back from Africa this week, the Pope himself said: "I personally believe that a state has the right to impose rules for its frontiers."

He also said migrants "deserve to be respected in their human dignity and not be treated worse than house pets, animals."

Homan agrees with both statements – and argues his border enforcement delivers exactly that.

A secure border, he told the Baylor crowd, stops women from being trafficked and children from dying in trailers.

Fewer people in the hands of cartels means fewer victims – full stop.

The Pope drew a line between principle and practice.

Homan is the practice.

What, exactly, is the disagreement?

Leo walked back the feud this week, saying he had no interest in debating the president and that the media had turned his comments into something more combative than he intended.

Vice President Vance said he was "grateful to Pope Leo" for trying to lower the temperature.

But the Vatican has confirmed Leo has no plans to visit the United States in 2026 – which means the ride-along invitation is almost certainly going unanswered.

Rome Enforces Its Border. Why Can't Washington?

Here is the argument that leaves the Catholic left with nothing to say.

The Vatican last year raised its own penalties for illegal entry – fines up to $29,500 and prison sentences up to four years for violations involving violence.

The world's smallest sovereign state enforces its borders harder than California does.

Homan noticed.

"If we jumped the wall at the Vatican, the penalties for doing that are much harder than the ones here in the United States," he told reporters in February.

Nobody in Rome disputed it.

JD Vance – also Catholic – drew the line clearly.

"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,” he said.

The conservative Catholics who pack the pews every Sunday agree with Vance – and they have watched Rome lecture Washington on borders while locking its own gates tighter than ever.

Homan is not asking the Pope to abandon his faith.

He is asking him to ride along for one shift before calling the men doing the job "inhuman."

The Pope has the plane.

He has no answer.

Sources:

  • Peter Pinedo, "Trump Border Czar Tom Homan Wants Pope Leo XIV to Ride Along with ICE Agents," Fox News, April 23, 2026.
  • "Tom Homan Invites Pope Leo on ICE Ride-Along," Mediaite, April 23, 2026.
  • "How the Dispute Between Trump and Pope Leo Escalated," WSGW, April 2026.
  • "Tom Homan Tells Catholic Church to Back Off Immigration Policy After Pope Leo XIV Clash," Heritage Review, April 2026.
  • "A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws," The Public Discourse, March 23, 2025.
  • U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "Making America Safe Again Press Releases," DHS.gov, April 2026.