Church groups grew massively with government funding for the controversial immigrant and refugee programs that Trump is now cutting.
Vice President J. D. Vance has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s unwavering defenders on many issues. One of his most widely quoted retorts to critics occurred on the January 26 edition of CBS’s Face the Nation. Vance was responding to statements by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning as “deeply troubling” the administration’s enforcement actions against illegal aliens and its pause of government-funded refugee-resettlement programs. As a Catholic, Vance said, the criticism left him “heartbroken.” Then he hit out at the church for its role in garnering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to serve immigrants over the last several years. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”
