I remember where I was in the early 1990s when the Father James Porter sexual abuse revelations made news in Boston and across the country. I was working on something I still regard as confidential that was germane to that. Fortunately, my client was on the side of the angels.
It took a few years for that one case to smolder until it erupted into the flames of a national and global crisis that has plagued the Catholic Church in ways it can never reverse or fully move on from. A few priests who were still alive to face justice did so. Many were deceased before revelations of their corrupt behaviors came to light. Still others who were allegedly complicit were never held to account.
To say the scandal was vast and deep is an understatement. As a result, the church faced a level of moral collapse that is one of the worst in its history.
When the priest-abuse scandal made news, it wasn’t just the crimes alone that shocked the world; it was the systemic cover-up. Consistent patterns revealed that bishops had quietly reassigned child predators to new parishes, keeping them one step ahead of accountability and justice. Leadership of the church decided its reputation was more important than the people who were victimized, and more important than the truth itself.
This was so much more than institutional hypocrisy. It was institutional perpetuation of evil incarnate.
Over the years, I’ve talked to many fellow Catholics about this, and sooner or later, the conversation comes home. We wonder what we might have done had we heard something, seen something, or when something just didn’t look right.
We don’t need to look far before we see the potential for finding ourselves in such a position. Recently, on America’s southern border, very bad things happened, thanks to the left’s open-border policy, which also aggressively suppressed any efforts to best track, process, and handle the illegal immigrants themselves. Even more critically, nothing has been done to hold the organizations and systems accountable for enabling such a massive illegal invasion of America.
The church is one of those institutions close enough to the situation that it could do one of three things about the problem. First, it could sound the alarms on the massive amounts of trafficking and cartel activity that it knows about. Second, it could treat each immigrant case as a one-off and choose not to see the patterns. Or third, it could ignore what it sees altogether.
Since the church has been noticeably silent, we are left by that silence to conclude it has elected the willful ignorance option. We don’t know who in the church knows what, or what they may or may not have said internally to address the problem. Are church leaders looking the other way? We can’t know.
The U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops (USCCB) claims that it received about $122.6 million in 2022 from the federal government, and in 2023 another $129.6 million for what are describe as “refugee-related services.”
You can’t sit at this intersection of so many interests involved with the management of illegal immigration without knowing something about cartel activity, corruption, and other terrible things.
In Texas, Arizona, and California, church-affiliated agencies like Annunciation House in El Paso and Catholic Charities USA have become integral to the flow of the illegal immigrant pipeline. These organizations provide food, water, temporary housing, transportation, and legal support to illegals the federal government has released.
Pope Leo XIV recently chastised the United States and the Trump administration for its America-First policies. On Nov. 4, 2025, the American pope requested “deep reflection” about how illegals are being treated in America. He talked about Jesus challenging us and our treatment of foreigners in our own lands.
He then added, “Many people who’ve lived for years and years and years (in the U.S.), never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now.”
“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we're going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there's a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what's happening,” the pontiff said.… pic.twitter.com/LWkeKrbXqg
— Christopher Hale (@chrisjollyhale) November 5, 2025
This sounds nice, but the pope is also ‘CEO’ of a very wealthy organization that takes in vast sums of U.S. taxpayer money for the movement of illegals. While charity is certainly a part of these efforts and the church’s mission, it’s naïve to think the church can’t see the bigger picture and all who are involved, and what their endgame may be. Is the church helping to prop up a system that is dominated by and run by the most brutal cartels in the world? What does the pope have to say about that?
In February 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Annunciation House, alleging that it had harbored and transported illegal immigrants, essentially operating what he called a “stash house.” The shelter claims it does nothing illegal.
With the case and related investigations still ongoing, nothing has yet been determined. The Texas Supreme Court did, however, unanimously rule that Paxton has the right to continue his investigation. A lower court will likely be the first place where the facts that emerge from Paxton’s investigation will be tested.
One thing Paxton has already accomplished is that he’s started the larger conversation on just how altruistic and on-mission these billion-dollar humanitarian aid initiatives actually are or are not. The church, as one of the biggest players in the space, will find itself in the crosshairs of greater and greater scrutiny going forward.
DOGE proved it wouldn’t take much to get some answers. The question is, are we prepared to ask the tough questions and get answers we really don’t want to hear?
Cartels don’t traffic illegals out of kindness. They victimize, extort, and exploit. Their victims often suffer a lifetime of trauma, psychologically broken, financially bankrupt, and yet still indebted to the cartels. They risk being re-trafficked in America. Meanwhile, the systems and processes Catholic organizations use to manage illegals are opaque.
It’s almost as if, in the interest of not dredging up bad experiences or furthering trauma, social workers don’t want to ask too many questions, and that’s the decidedly altruistic take. More cynically, do they suspect or even know of likely bad behaviors, but they just don’t want to go there?
This moral and ethical blind spot feels sickeningly familiar.
During the priest abuse crisis, the leadership seemed to take the position that allowing it to quietly fester was necessary to prevent irreparable damage to the church's reputation that could harm its mission and hurt a lot of people who relied on it. Some may have justified looking away from the evil that presented itself to them.
At the border, the thinking could be that the church is just trying to help refugees. But when compassion becomes an excuse for negligence, the line between ministry and complicity is erased.
Of course, you can’t doubt the genuine care and concern that church volunteers and line staff members may bring to their work. Still, such true care and concern is not a defense for looking the other way when you can sense something is wrong. Cartels are part of the supply chain of human trafficking. There are also some illegal immigrants who don't fit the mold of that poor foreigner from the Bible, but instead are obviously trying to game the system to get into America without detection. The church can easily find itself as a critical part of what is effectively a criminal ecosystem.
From the cartels to the illegals themselves, laws are being broken, and the system, instead of discouraging lawbreaking, enables it.
The church and its nonprofit partners insist that they cooperate with law enforcement and maintain anti-trafficking protocols. Maybe on paper, they do. But in practice, the volume of migrants and the lack of transparency we already know about reveal that, prior to 2025 and even now, the federal tracking of possible trafficking activity was substandard by design. We all know how openly the Biden administration and its agencies actively facilitated lawbreaking at the border, and worked to conceal all of it. Could the church have spoken up about this?
How many illegals assisted by Catholic organizations have been identified as trafficking victims? How many referrals were made to federal authorities? How much federal funding do these programs receive each year? Where is that data? Where is the independent oversight of all of this?
JUST IN: Cardinal Cupich issues new statement supporting immigrants --
— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) October 21, 2025
“Let me be clear. The church stands with migrants”
Cupich's message comes after 2 recent meetings he had with Pope Leo this month & also after Leo's own comments supporting immigration
Video @archchicago pic.twitter.com/n09x2BIXDW
The lack of data, or at least the perceived secrecy of it, is worrisome. I fear that if you really start to pull back the curtain, what you find could be very troubling.
The church doesn’t need to choose between its humanitarian mission and the truth and transparency. It can have both. It could lead a moral reckoning. It could demand independent audits of every border program it funds. It could publish full statistics on trafficking referrals and federal reimbursements. It could require every diocese housing illegals to certify that no facility is being used by non-sanctioned or black-market entities. If it does any of this already, it needs to publicize it.
But instead of this, what we see is a church leadership that seems to want to brand critics of illegal immigration as xenophobic, racist, cruel, and inhumane. It seems to pretend, at least at this point, that there is nothing that needs to be defended. That is precisely how the priest-abuse scandal metastasized: by ignoring it at first and later trying to discredit those who asked uncomfortable questions.
The church should have learned by now that if it refuses to actively and publicly expose what has been happening on the border for too long, then it becomes a part of the problem.
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The fallout could dwarf the crisis of the 1990s. For the church’s sake, now would be the right time to start raising the substantive questions that people are afraid to ask. Until we get some answers, it doesn’t help when the pope lectures Americans when we are facing open borders, compromised national security, rising crime rates from illegals in our cities, and a concerted attack on our own Western and Judeo-Christian culture from enough people who want to invade and destroy all of it.
