Trump admin cancels $11M Catholic Charities contract
www.newsweek.com
The HHS said the cancellation was motivated by a falling number of migrant children entering the United States without adult supervisors.

The Trump administration has reportedly canceled an $11 million contract with the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which offers shelter and care to migrant children entering the United States alone.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has paid Catholic Charities for numerous years to house immigrant children entering the U.S. without adult supervision. The federal government contacted the charity about the cancellation in late March, according to The Miami Herald.

The abrupt severing of the White House’s long-term support to the nonprofit comes amid an ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV. Responding to Leo’s repeated criticism of the Iran war, Trump bashed the pope on Sunday in a social media post in which he called him “weak” on crime and “terrible” for foreign policy, urging him to “get his act together as Pope.”

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

    searches

    It looks like there’s some commentary out there on this already:

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/14/donald-trump-attack-pope-leo-2026-midterms/89606369007/

    President Donald Trump has stepped on a political hornet’s nest with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV that have infuriated Catholics worldwide. The rift with the Vatican could exacerbate an already challenging 2026 election season for congressional Republicans as Trump risks alienating a key constituency.

    Several conservative-leaning Catholic leaders have publicly called on Trump to apologize – which the president rebuffed – saying they shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their country. “There is no doubt that President Trump’s post insulting Pope Leo crossed, again, a line of decorum that plays an important part in diplomacy,” Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, a political advocacy group, said April 13 in a post on X.

    Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the United States, accounting for one-fifth of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. Catholics are 10 percentage points more likely to lean toward Republicans than Democrats, Pew found in 2025.

    Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden 52%-47% in 2020, according to CNN exit polls. He won over Catholics 59%-39% against Kamala Harris in 2024.

    2026 is expected to be a tough year for the GOP as forecasters shift more races in Democrats’ favor.

    Republican pollster Brent Buchanan said his polling firm Cygnal has been tracking Catholic voters since the 2022 midterms. He said that American Catholics have repeatedly shown their independence from the Vatican’s policy guidance but that if Trump persists in squabbling with the pope, it could spell trouble for the GOP this fall.

    “The papacy is an institution that has existed for thousands of years,” Buchanan said. "Even if you don’t ascribe to Catholicism, you know who the pope is and you have an idea what the pope stands for, and it’s usually broad, positive, moral things.

    “Catholics tend to be one of the swingier groups in the country, and pretty much whatever direction Catholics go politically, the country goes politically. They’re almost like a bellwether of sorts. So it’s unnecessary noise for an important swing group.”

    Political scientists note that Washington and the Vatican have been at odds over policy before, but this war of words is uniquely bitter.

    “There’s never been anything this public, this personal or this partisan,” David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, told USA TODAY in an interview.