JD Vance Comments on Being One of Last People to See Pope Alive

Vice President JD Vance thought it was “crazy” that he was one of the last people to see Pope Francis before he died early Monday morning.

“I thought a lot about that, it’s pretty crazy actually,” Vance told reporters while on a visit to Agra, India, on the tarmac on Wednesday. 

“Obviously I was able to see him very briefly the morning of Easter Sunday. I knew he was very ill, I didn’t realize how sick he was. The thing that I will always remember Pope Francis for is that he was a great pastor. People on the margins, poor people, people suffering from diseases, they saw in Pope Francis an advocate, and I think a true expression of Christian love.”

Pope Francis has had a tenuous relationship with Trump, Vance, and the Christian right in America for the entirety of his papacy. He was a noted environmentalist who often chastised the Trump administration for its lack of humanity on immigration and climate change and its misuse of Catholic Social Teaching.  

Pope Francis’s funeral will be held on Saturday, according to the Vatican.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right security minister who openly supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, said on Wednesday that the Republican leaders he met with in the United States were in full support of his plans to bomb Gaza’s humanitarian aid stations.

“I had the honor and privilege of meeting with senior Republican Party officials at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate,” Ben-Gvir wrote on X. “They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

This is par for the course for a government that has massacred likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of self-defense. Ben-Gvir doubled down on his hatred shortly after.

“I see the reports about the debate over who should bring ‘humanitarian’ aid into Gaza: Well, it’s a fundamentally stupid debate, because the entire Strip should not receive any ounce of aid as long as our hostages are being held there,” he said.

Ben-Gvir was welcomed to Florida with open arms. He met with the Miami Police Department, spoke at a Jewish school in Fort Lauderdale, and stopped by an Israeli-Russian-owned gun store. He also had dinner at Mar-a-Lago, which President Trump was not present for. Ben-Gvir will be in New York City on Thursday.

Ben-Gvir has a long history of cruel, racist, anti-Arab sentiments that has led him to be convicted of eight charges related to incitement of racism and support for Israeli terrorism against Arabs. Multiple protests have erupted around his visit to the United States.

Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky is planning to announce her retirement next month, leaving the Democratic primary for her district wide open.

“I’m going to announce my plans on May 5th. Stay tuned,” Schakowsky said, Politico reported Wednesday. That’s the day that Schakowsky’s annual Ultimate Women’s Power Lunch is scheduled in Chicago.

The veteran Democrat’s exit announcement will invite other Democrats to try to grab her seat. State Senator Laura Fine and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss are both expected to announce bids for Illinois’s 9th congressional district after Schakowsky officially makes her plans public.

But there’s another opponent already in the field. While Schakowsky has been on retirement watch for at least a few months, 26-year-old lefty content creator Kat Abughazaleh revealed her own gambit for Illinois’s vote. Abughazaleh announced her campaign on March 24.

In a potential sign of the times, Abughazaleh’s campaign outpaced Schakowsky’s first-quarter fundraising in just one week after she announced her candidacy, reportedly raising more than $379,000 in eight days, according to Abughazaleh.

However, less than 1 percent of Abughazaleh’s fundraising stemmed from campaign contributions of more than $200 within the region that she intends to represent, which stretches from Chicago’s North Side through southeast McHenry County.

Abughazaleh’s campaign manager, Sam Weinberg, said that the political newcomer had received more than 1,100 donations from people within Illinois, though the vast majority were under $200—something that Weinberg blamed on the “economic struggles” faced by many Americans that Abughazaleh is “seeking to address.”

“The average American can’t spare $200 or more to donate to a political campaign, and we shouldn’t fault people for that,” Weinberg told WTTW News. “This is the result of an economy that is working for the few rather than the many, and this dynamic should be entirely unacceptable in the richest country in the history of the world.”

The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to deport immigrants to Rwanda who can’t be sent back to their country of origin due to fears of prosecution.

The Handbasket newsletter reported Tuesday that a State Department cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on March 13 stated that the country would be willing to accept such people. A new cable sent Tuesday from the State Department said that a refugee from Iraq, Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, became the first person to be officially deported to Rwanda thanks to this arrangement.

It’s quite a departure from the public deal the U.S. cut with El Salvador to accept deported immigrants in January, which resulted in legal challenges and at least one immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, being mistakenly sent to the country. The use of Rwanda as a third country for deportations has not been publicly disclosed by the country or the U.S. government.

“This successful relocation—and Rwanda’s subsequent agreement to accept additional third-country nationals (TCNs)—proved the concept for developing a new removal program to relocate TCNs from the United States to Rwanda,” Tuesday’s cable states, according to The Handbasket.

The cable mentions a “wish list” from Rwanda, including policy concessions as well as a single $100,000 payment for “social services, residency documents, and work permits.” The newsletter confirmed that the payment was made, but how the U.S. responded to other items on the list is unknown.

“Rwanda also agreed to accept another ten TCNs of various nationalities,” the cable also states, while adding that the country “seeks a bilateral dialogue to develop a durable program to facilitate these relocations and avoid reinventing the wheel with time-intensive ad hoc negotiations.”

Similar to Abrego Garcia, Ameen was accused of being a terrorist by the first Trump administration, who called him a member of ISIS and said he abused the refugee resettlement program. In 2014, Ameen and his family were granted refugee status, but he was arrested in 2018 by “dozens of armed men” at his Sacramento home.

The administration claims that Ameen murdered an Iraqi police officer as part of an ISIS plot, and tried to have him deported back to Iraq to stand trial. Ameen maintains that he is innocent, saying that he was in Turkey at the time of the murder, awaiting refugee status with the United Nations.

A federal judge ruled in 2021 that the case against Ameen was “dubious” with “unreliable” witnesses and allegations that were “simply not plausible,” ordering his immediate release. But just after he was released, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Biden administration, picked him up again and began deportation proceedings.

Last year in May, Ameen said in a statement that “I am so grateful to the judge for listening to all the evidence, and I thank God that in this country, I had the right to defend myself and be found innocent. I love America and want to enjoy living here with my wife and children for the rest of my life. It saddens me that I still have to fight for my freedom again.”

Yet Ameen was let down by the U.S. and is now the first person to be deported by the Trump administration to Rwanda, and on the basis of weak evidence to boot. Will he get any restitution, or will he be stuck overseas like Abrego Garcia?

Immigration was one of Donald Trump’s winning priorities with American voters, but not anymore.

Three recent polls have practically spelled disaster for Trump on the issue, with Americans increasingly disapproving of the president’s immigration policies amid a flurry of rushed deportations.

A YouGov/Economist poll released Wednesday indicates that Americans have soured on Trump’s immigration stances, with 50 percent of respondents disapproving compared to 45 percent approving.

The poll comes on the heels of a Reuters-Ipsos poll published Monday that indicated that 46 percent of the country disapproved of Trump’s immigration policies. And earlier this month, a Quinnipiac survey found that 50 percent of polled respondents didn’t agree with Trump on immigration.

During his second inaugural address in January, Trump promised to “eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil.” But in the months since Trump has returned to the White House, he has defied court orders, ignored the Supreme Court, and challenged the Constitution in order to advance his nativist immigration agenda.

In March, the Trump administration deported more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador by invoking a Japanese internment-era wartime policy. That gave the administration the cover to deport the men without due process, a critical error that has only continued to mire the administration in more controversy, as it has become increasingly apparent that some members of the charged group—such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia—had never been convicted of a crime.

The administration has since had to admit that it mistakenly deported Garcia, though it has simultaneously appeared unable to retrieve him from the crowded foreign prison where the government is paying El Salvador $6 million to house the alleged gang members.

The YouGov/Economist poll found that 50 percent of Americans wanted Trump to bring Garcia back, while 28 percent agreed with the president’s actions.

The White House has said that Garcia “will never live” in the U.S. again.

“When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that (Abrego Garcia) was no longer eligible, under federal law … for any form of immigration relief in the United States,” said White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller last week.

Despite the White House’s insistence, just 27 percent of Americans are convinced Abrego Garcia’s a member of MS-13, according to the YouGov survey.

In a meeting with Trump, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele referred to a question regarding Garcia’s potential release as “preposterous.”

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele said, claiming that he did not have the authority to return Garcia to his family in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pitched immigration alternatives such as the “gold card” that seem to be little more than opportunities to sell American democracy to the “highest bidder,” allowing America’s longtime adversaries—including Russian oligarchs—to effectively buy their way into the country.