Role of Religious NGOs in Facilitating Mass Unlawful Migration Draws Fresh Scrutiny

Vice President JD Vance has sparked discussion about the role of the Catholic Church and religious nongovernmental organizations in facilitating massive illegal immigration to the United States by bringing up Christian social teachings in a recent interview on Fox News.

As the Trump administration attempts to enforce the nation’s border laws, the vice president articulated the Christian principle of “ordo amoris”—or “order of love”—where priority is given for one’s family and neighbors above strangers from around the globe. The concept dates back to at least St. Thomas Aquinas.

“There’s this old school, very Christian concept that you love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity that aired Jan. 29.

Vance continued, “A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

The Vance interview quickly spawned public debate over the correct interpretation of Catholic social teaching, and the role religious NGOs, including Catholic ones, have in facilitating the breaking of American law.

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Mike Howell, a former lawyer with the Department of Homeland Security and the executive director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, explained how religious NGOs worked with the Biden administration to ignore American immigration law.

“They help cause [mass illegal immigration], in that they’re perpetual lobbyists and advocates for lax border controls and even illegal immigration itself. And then more importantly perhaps, they are the logistical implementation arm of it,” Howell said.

“To put it simply, the Biden administration never would have been able to pull off their creative invasion, if not for the hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed to the—quote-unquote—nonprofit sector in order to provide logistical assistance to take care of illegal aliens … it should be viewed as the Biden administration’s decision to basically put logistics on their invasion.”

Howell also told The Daily Signal he would like to see the Trump administration compile a report on the total number of federal dollars going to nonprofits that facilitate mass illegal migration, and to potentially make grants to other nonprofits that would help facilitate an orderly and humane deportation process.

“One lesson we should take away from the Biden administration’s utilization of nonprofits to get around their limitations on what they could do otherwise is that the Trump administration could also do the same thing,” Howell noted.

Some Catholic organizations, such as Annunciation House, have been accused of breaking American law by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. At the same time, former president and self-declared Catholic Joe Biden vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded the number of federal judges across multiple presidential administrations. The bill would have helped speed up the process of convicting illegal aliens who commit crimes in the United States.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the new Catholic archbishop of Washington, has said that “massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”

Joshua Mercer, vice president of CatholicVote, a Catholic conservative political advocacy group, took issue with that. He told The Daily Signal that the vice president was, in fact, “in alignment with Catholic teaching.”

“The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that ‘political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions.’ To put it more simply, this means that nations have the right to regulate migration, by making and enforcing immigration laws.”

“The Catechism also teaches that immigrants are ‘obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.’”

The Most Rev. Michael Burbidge, bishop of the Diocese of Arlington, agrees. In a statement released on Friday, he wrote, “As the Catechism of the Catholic Church emphasizes, Catholic teaching does not support an open-border policy, but rather emphasizes a commonsense approach, where the duty to care for the stranger is practiced in harmony with the duty to care for the nation.”

Ultimately, Catholics in Washington and around the country will have to decide what policies accurately reflect their religious tradition, and whether they are willing to let nonprofits in their name facilitate the breaking of United States law. Vice President Vance has made clear where he stands.

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