Pope Francis Gave JD Vance a Serious Lesson Just Hours Before He Died

Not long before Pope Francis passed away Monday, he met with Vice President JD Vance and lectured him about immigrants.

The 88-year-old pontiff seemed to initially snub Vance over the weekend, having his deputy Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the Vatican Foreign Minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher meet with Vance on Saturday. The Vatican described that meeting as “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.

“Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged,” the statement from the Vatican added.

Vance’s office issued its own statement, saying that the group discussed “the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world” and Donald Trump’s “commitment to restoring world peace”—making no mention of immigrants, refugees, or prisoners.

On Sunday, Vance met with Francis in a brief meeting, telling the pontiff, “It’s good to see you in better health,” and accepting Easter eggs for his children. But the Pope’s official Easter sermon that day criticized hostility toward immigrants and international aid, a trademark of the Trump administration.

“How much contempt is stirred up at times toward the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants?” Francis said in his address.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has provoked tensions with the church with his defense of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and even attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in January for assisting immigrants, saying their concerns about the Trump administration were due to the fear of losing federal funding.

“Are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said at the time.

Vance further drew the ire of the Vatican when he invoked the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris”—the order of love—to defend the White House’s mass deportation policies, claiming in January that the well-being of Americans trumped any concern for that of immigrants.

Francis, the first and so far only Latin American pope, responded with a letter saying, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the February letter stated, pointedly criticizing mass deportation.

Francis more explicitly condemned Trump’s mass deportations on an Italian talk show that month, saying, “If true, this will be a disgrace.… This is not the way to solve things.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials were exposed for using encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information regarding an attack on Yemen—a significant breach of security. Now it’s been reported that Hegseth shared similar information in a second Signal chat, this time with his wife and brother present in said chat.

His response to this second national security bombshell has been to insist that it’s simply a politically motivated smear campaign rather than yet another massive faux pas.

“Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD,” Hegseth wrote late Sunday night, in response to the Democratic Party’s X account saying he “needs to go.”

A longer statement from the Department of Defense also downplayed the national security concerns of Hegseth’s actions.

“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda,” wrote Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell. “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story. What is true is that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda.”

Hegseth doubled down again Monday at the White House Easter Egg roll, of all places.

“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax; that won’t give back their Pulitzers—they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies,” he told CSPAN reporters on Monday morning, while Easter festivities went on behind him. “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”

While the first Signal chat was created by national security adviser Mike Waltz, the second one was created solely by Hegseth.

“Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity,” Senator Tammy Duckworth commented.

This story has been updated.

Senator Chris Van Hollen set the record straight Friday on the shameless lies about his meeting with the Maryland man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. 

During a press conference, Van Hollen put to rest right-wing rumors started by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who claimed that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia were “sipping margaritas” and shared a photo on X of the two men at a table with drinks topped with maraschino cherries. 

The Maryland Democrat said that when they sat down to talk at his hotel, “one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice, and I don’t know if it was salt or sugar around the top, but they looked like margaritas.”

“If you look at the one they put in front of Kilmar, it actually had a little less liquid than the one in front of me, to try to make it look, I assume, like he drank out of it,” Van Hollen said.  

“Let me just be very clear, neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us. And if you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you how you could know that,” he continued. 

Van Hollen explained that if either of the men had sipped from the cups, there would be a gap in the dressing around the rims. 

“There’s no gap. Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” he said. “But this is a lesson. It’s the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on.” 

Van Hollen said that when Donald Trump was asked later Friday about the photograph, “he just went along for the ride.” 

Van Hollen also said that the so-called “margarita-gate” could have been even worse. 

“I should also just say, you know I mentioned the fake margarita scandal, they actually wanted to have the meeting by the side of the pool, right? In the hotel,” Van Hollen said. “I mean this is a guy in CECOT, this is a guy who has been detained. They wanted to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie.”

Abrego Garcia’s experience in CECOT was anything but luxurious: the senator said he’d been kept in a cell with 25 other prisoners. 

Abrego Garcia “said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell but he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cellblocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen explained.

Nine days prior, Abrego Garcia had been moved to another detention facility in Santa Ana, where the conditions were better. But Van Hollen stressed that Abrego Garcia had been given no contact with the outside world, and no opportunity to communicate with a lawyer or his loved ones since he was “abducted.”

“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said. 

The Trump administration continues to flout orders from a federal court, an appeals court, and the Supreme Court ordering it to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, who was deported due to an “administrative error.”

Elon Musk’s latest pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service is being forced out after less than 72 hours, The New York Times reported Friday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to Donald Trump that Musk went behind his back to appoint Gary Shapley, a former supervisor at the agency who garnered attention for blowing the whistle on Hunter Biden’s tax investigation, without his knowledge. Trump gave Bessent the go-ahead to oust him from the IRS, which falls under Bessent’s jurisdiction as head of the Treasury Department.

Shapley’s meagre three-day tenure beats that of Anthony Scaramucci, who was famously booted from his role as Trump’s communications director after just 10 days during the president’s first term. It’s also yet another change in leadership for the IRS, which has now lost its fourth commissioner in three months.

Melanie Krause, the IRS acting commissioner before Shapley, was appointed in February but resigned earlier this month after the Treasury Department allowed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement access to IRS data to help deport immigrants. Doug O’Donnell retired amid agency cutbacks and chaos, and Danny Werfel, Joe Biden’s appointed IRS commissioner, resigned on Trump’s Inauguration Day. The agency is facing so much turbulence, it’s starting to become known as a “zombie agency” among tax attorneys, CNBC reported Thursday.

While Trump’s official pick to lead the IRS, Representative Billy Long (who suspiciously just had a six-figure debt paid off by campaign donors), awaits Senate confirmation, Musk and Bessent continue to publicly butt heads.

On Thursday, Musk shared a tweet from far-right activist Laura Loomer slamming Bessent for his reported association with a Trump hater. “Troubling,” Musk replied. It’s a sign that much of the Trump administration is not on the same page, as federal agencies fall apart at the seams.

Friday was not a good day in court for the Trump administration.

The White House suffered not one but two federal court setbacks: Judges paused President Trump’s plan for mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and halted the administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries other than their place of origin without due process.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she was “deeply concerned” about Trump’s attempt Thursday to fire nearly everyone at the CFPB, saying it would violate her earlier court order against the administration’s attempt to shut down the agency. Jackson has scheduled a hearing for April 28 to hear testimony from the officials behind the CFPB’s reduction in force.

“I’m willing to resolve it quickly, but I’m not going to let this [reduction in force] go forward until I have,” said Jackson.

The CFPB’s union estimated Trump’s layoffs could hit as many as 1,700 workers. The layoffs would result in the CFPB’s enforcement division being cut from 248 employees to just 50. The supervision division would go from 487 to 50 and be relocated from Washington, D.C., to the southeastern United States. In some cases, some of the agency’s legally required functions would only have one person assigned to them.

Hours before Jackson’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a separate injunction against the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries such as El Salvador, regardless of where those immigrants are from.

“Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation,” Murphy wrote in his ruling.

“All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree,” Murphy added.

Last month, the White House cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants that it claims are gang members to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a Salvadoran prison known for human rights abuses, without court hearings for the accused. Many of the immigrants didn’t have criminal records and were considered gang members merely for having tattoos, which isn’t even a clear indicator of gang affiliation in Venezuela.

Trump won’t react positively to the rulings, and may even defy them, as he has done with other court orders. It’s another example of how recklessly his administration operates, taking action without any regard for legality or constitutionality. The question is whether Congress or the Supreme Court will eventually limit his authority as the Constitution demands.