Vice President JD Vance told Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle that Pope Leo XIV’s recent remarks about how every nation has the right to determine who enters its land is, at its core, the Catholic Church’s position on borders.
During a sit-down with Breitbart News for a wide-ranging discussion of Trump administration policies on Thursday, Boyle noted that Pope Leo XIV recently said, “I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter,” and that “no one has said that the United States should have open borders.”
“That’s amazing to see that from the Pope himself,” Boyle said at the event — held in partnership with CGCN and the ALFA Institute — before asking the vice president for his thoughts on “how President Trump seems to have electrified the world and woke them up to these major issues.”
Vance revealed that as “a devout Catholic,” he had “followed those comments closely. It’s interesting, because, 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.”
“And it’s that, yes, you must treat immigrants humanely. On the other hand, every nation has the right to control its borders,” Vance said. “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.”
The vice president went on to say that one of the things that has “always frustrated me about the immigration debate is that we ignored how open borders were not actually good for the dignity, even, of the illegal migrants themselves.”
“You had little kids getting sex trafficked, we had 300,000 missing children under the Biden administration that the Mexican drug cartels had brought into our country, you had cartels using, in some cases, nine- and ten-year-old children as drug mules for their activity,” Vance said.
“Border security is not just good for American citizens, it is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world, because 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,” the vice president asserted.
Vance added, “You’ve seen this in Europe, you’ve seen this in a whole host of places, but it’s almost like Europe and America got this idea in their head that to control your border at all was fundamentally uncompassionate, maybe it was even racist and bad.”
“The president and I reject that wholesale,” Vance said. “Putting the interests of your citizens first, it’s not some ancillary thing, it is the very purpose of government.”
“I am the American Vice President, I wish very good things for the people of Mexico or the people of the United Kingdom or the people of any other country, but my priority, my charge, is to look after the people of the United States of America,” Vance declared.
“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 vice president said.
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Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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