(LifeSiteNews) — Last week, a revealing poll from EWTN News and RealClear Opinion Research highlighted a profound disconnect emerging within American Catholicism that suggests a growing fissure between the U.S. bishops’ conference and the most devout Catholics who attend Mass on a weekly basis.
Surveying 1,000 self-identified Catholic voters from November 9–11, the results showed that 54 percent of them supported “the detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants on a broad scale,” with only 30 percent opposed and 17 percent undecided.
Support for Trump’s policies was even stronger among Catholics who actually practice the faith and attend Mass weekly. Those Catholics support deportations 58 percent to 23 percent. White Catholics favored the policies by a 60–26 margin while Latino Catholics were split 41–39.
The findings come nearly a year into President Trump’s second term, where his administration has aggressively pursued restrictions on immigration and deportations – fulfilling a campaign promise he made not only during his 2024 bid for the White House but his 2020 and 2016 races as well.
Trump secured the Catholic vote decisively in 2024 55 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43 percent. He did this by calling out the Biden administration’s spying on Catholics and its attacks on pro-lifers like Mark Houck. For his praiseworthy efforts, the USCCB has not thanked him but rather op-ed to undermine him in recent weeks.
Just weeks before the EWTN poll was released, the USCCB issued a rare “special pastoral message” on immigration – the first of its kind in over a decade – during their November 2025 plenary assembly. The statement, which was nearly universally decried by Catholic influencers, lamented a “climate of fear” in immigrant communities while opposing “indiscriminate mass deportation.”
The statement was spearhead by ultra-liberal El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who during the 2020 race participated in a Black Lives Matter protest. At the time, he also said he was “encouraged by the Biden campaign’s promises to address climate change.” He also praised Biden’s plan to “create a path to citizenship for the undocumented.”
Historical context only sharpens the irony of the poll’s findings. During Trump’s first term in 2019, Texas Cardinal Daniel DiNardo criticized his plans for a border wall as divisive, echoing Pope Francis’s bridge-building rhetoric. In March of that year, 14 Catholic bishops who lived on the U.S. and Mexican sides of the Texas-Mexico border signed a statement rebuking Trump’s immigration policies.
Both statements selectively quoted Scripture while ignoring root causes like cartel violence and drug smuggling, which Trump aggressively fought and even sought to undermine when he gave $5.8 billion in aid and investment to Central America and another $4.8 billion for southern Mexico. The bishops said nary a word about the funding.
Catholic teaching, per the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St. Thomas Aquinas, has long affirmed that a country has a right to regulate its borders to protect the common good. Nations, like people, have a right to life, in other words.
Factors that play into a country’s common good include social, religious, economic, crime, education, and a multitude of other issues. Trump border czar Tom Homan, who is Catholic, has repeatedly drawn attention to the efforts the administration has taken to root out corruption and ensure Americans remain safe. He recently said that immigration official officials have located 62,000 unaccompanied migrant children, some of whom were victims of sex trafficking and child labor. “Over half a million children were smuggled into this country under Joe Biden,” he told Fox News recently.
The bishops’ hyper-focus on promoting liberal immigration policies stands in stark with the attitudes of their most devout parishioners. If they were faithful to actual Catholic teaching, they would make comments similar to the ones that Bishop Athanasius Schneider made to Catholic World Report in 2018.
“We have to distinguish between different types of immigrations. I was a migrant, with my family, because we were persecuted and deported. When people are really persecuted, you need to help them,” he said at the time. “But as for the phenomenon of the European so-called immigration, it is clear and evident by what we can observe, that this is an orchestrated action of the international powerful political organizations. It is the aim, the clear aim, to take away from Europe its Christian and its national identity. It is meant to dilute the Christian and the national character of Europe.”
His Excellency’s comments are more in alignment with what laity Catholics in the U.S. believe on the subject. Hopefully, more American clergy will be persuaded by them and speak out on the subject as he has.