In a striking display of selective moral outrage, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has followed the lead of Pope Leo XIV—elected just months ago as the first American pope—by releasing a viral video on November 13, 2025, condemning the Trump-Vance administration’s “inhumane” deportation raids as a direct assault on human dignity. The clip, featuring bishops speaking solemnly to the camera and decrying “indiscriminate mass deportation,” has amassed over 5 million views, invoking rare “special message” language not used in over a decade to frame the policy as a grave sin against migrants. Yet, this fervent production stands in stark contrast to the bishops’ silence during Joe Biden’s presidency, when no such video emerged to denounce the administration’s aggressive funding and facilitation of abortion—resulting in over 900,000 procedures annually—or its expansion of gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and surgeries that the Church has long condemned as mutilation of the human body created in God’s image. Even more damning, amid reports of over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children vanishing into potential trafficking networks under Biden’s open-border policies—many sold into sex slavery or forced labor—the USCCB issued no comparable solemn video, despite receiving hundreds of millions in federal grants to “resettle” these very vulnerable youth.

This glaring hypocrisy finds its roots in the bishops’ apparent alignment with Biden’s professed Catholicism, which shielded his administration from institutional rebuke despite policies that directly contradicted core Church teachings on the sanctity of life and the integrity of the body. As a self-identified Catholic, Biden received tepid statements from the USCCB on abortion—such as Archbishop José Gomez’s 2021 inauguration-day note calling it a “preeminent priority” but stopping short of excommunication threats—while the bishops debated “Eucharistic coherence” without enforcing Communion denial for pro-choice politicians. Similar reticence marked their response to Biden’s support for transgender interventions on children, with only scattered condemnations from individual bishops like Michael Burbidge, who decried FDA expansions of abortion pills and gender policies as “harmful to women in need” and violations of divine design, yet no unified video campaign. On child trafficking, the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services arm pocketed over $635 million from Biden’s coffers for immigrant aid, enabling a system that whistleblowers like Tara Lee Rodas labeled a “white glove delivery service” for traffickers, without a single high-profile video to spotlight the “hellish” exploitation of these minors. The ends justified the means: Biden’s policies advanced a globalist vision of open borders and social progressivism that dovetailed with the Church’s emphasis on welcoming the stranger, even if it meant overlooking mortal sins.

Trump, neither Catholic nor beholden to ecclesiastical pressures, pursues policies that inadvertently align with Church doctrine—curbing abortions that disproportionately affect Black and Jewish communities, dismantling child exploitation networks through border security, and inadvertently stemming the influx of impoverished South American Catholics that some fear could “replace” America’s Protestant heritage—yet he draws the full ire of the hierarchy. Deportations, far from “inhumane,” restore order to a broken system ravaged by cartel-driven chaos, protecting vulnerable migrants from the very trafficking the bishops ignored under Biden; as Border Czar Tom Homan retorted, the prelates should “fix the Catholic Church” before lecturing on enforcement. This sudden vocal courage on immigration—echoing Pope Leo XIV’s own “inhuman” label for raids—exposes the USCCB not as impartial shepherds but as a political entity, hypocritical in its application of Jesus’ teachings on mercy and justice. Where Scripture commands defense of the unborn (Proverbs 31:8) and warns against harming the innocent (Matthew 18:6), the bishops’ silence on Biden’s sins while amplifying anti-Trump rhetoric betrays a worldly agenda, prioritizing institutional funding and progressive alliances over the Gospel’s unflinching truth.