Trump Yanks Millions From Catholic Charity Amid Fight With Pope

President Trump has canceled $11 million in funding to Catholic Charities in Miami for taking care of immigrant children as he continues to feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized Trump’s mass deportations and the war in Iran.

The federal government has worked with the organization since the first Cuban exiles arrived in south Florida. The government, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has paid the nonprofit for years to house immigrant kids who arrive in the U.S. without any adult guardians. The operation runs in a similar way to foster care, independent from state agencies, and the government notified the charity in March of its decision.

“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of the Miami Archdiocese said in a statement to the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”

Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.… It is baffling that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” shown by the organization.

The Department of Health and Human Services told the newspaper that the refugee office is handling about 1,900 unaccompanied minors daily, compared to a peak of 22,000 during the Biden administration.

“ORR is closing and consolidating unused facilities as the Trump Administration continues efforts to stop illegal entry and the smuggling and trafficking of unaccompanied alien children,” said HHS spokesperson Emily G. Hillard. It’s unclear how many children are in the Catholic organization’s care, and what will happen to the children if their full-service child welfare program in Miami-Dade County is forced to close.

Trump has blasted the pope for being “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” but the administration’s criticism of the church’s immigration stances goes back even further. In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance suggested that Catholic bishops were more worried about their federal funding than administration policies. It would seem that Vance’s words back then have now become the administration’s policy.

The Trump administration is lying to the public—and it doesn’t care.

In a heated exchange before the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday morning, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted that his department has “done better” at preventing measles amid a global epidemic than “any country in the world.”

Measles is an incredibly contagious disease, meaning that an outbreak anywhere is dangerous for people everywhere. Several countries across the globe, including India, Angola, and Mexico, are currently combating thousands of cases. But even America’s relatively small caseload—which currently sits at more than 1,800 for 2026—does not suggest that the Trump administration has excelled at combating the virus. Instead, that number has put the U.S. at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has maintained since the year 2000.

“There is no country that has seen a bigger percentage increase” than the U.S. under the second-term Trump administration, argued California Representative Linda Sanchez.

Measles does not have a cure. The disease can cause a blotchy rash, pinkeye, a high fever, white spots inside the mouth, full body aches, pneumonia, and severe dehydration, and it can result in hospitalization or even death.

Fortunately, however, it is highly preventable thanks to a vaccine that was developed by a couple of American scientists in 1963. Less than a decade later, in 1971, researchers created yet another vaccine capable of preventing measles as well as two other contagious illnesses—mumps and rubella—thanks to miraculous developments in modern medicine.

The joint shot was named the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” Kennedy has railed against the three-in-one shot, baselessly claiming that it was not “safely tested.”

America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy champions at the federal level—who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

During the deadly measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy advised that state residents take extra vitamins rather than receive the vaccine, and justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive it by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not.

But the 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits.

He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of 5.

Two years ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that Black children prescribed depression or ADHD medication should be “re-parented.” When confronted with that statement on Thursday by Representative Terri Sewell—a Black Democrat from Alabama—he denied ever saying it.

“In a 2024 podcast interview, you suggested that Black children on ADHD medication should be ‘re-parented.’ You said: ‘Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,’ and that those children are going to have to go somewhere to get ‘re-parented,’” Sewell said. “Have you ever ‘re-parented,’ or parented, a Black child?”

RFK Jr. immediately went on the defensive.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it,” he replied.

“It’s just a yes or no answer,” Sewell responded.

“I doubt that I said that phrase, no. Not gonna answer something that I didn’t say.”

“You absolutely said it.”

“I’d like to hear the recording.”

Kennedy is completely wrong here, and he said what Sewell is accusing him of saying nearly verbatim. Here’s the recording:

“My Peace Corps program is going to be wellness farms, rehabilitation facilities that I’m gonna start in rural areas all over the country, where people—any American—can go for free,” Kennedy said, painting a utopian picture for his solution to the prescription drug epidemic. “Psychiatric drugs, which every Black kid is now just standard put on—Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence—and those kids are gonna have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

Even with the utopian framing, it’s impossible to ignore that Kennedy is pushing for Black children to be separated from their families and taken to farms to do God knows what—all because they’ve been prescribed depression or ADHD meds. That alone is extremely troubling given Kennedy’s position as health secretary and his lack of any kind of medical expertise. The fact that he denied even saying it during a congressional hearing—when there is clear evidence proving otherwise—is just as troubling.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quoted the fake Bible verse from Samuel L. Jackson’s monologue as Jules Winfield in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, apparently believing it was completely real.  

The moment came at one of Hegseth’s Pentagon sermons on Wednesday morning. 

“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17,” Hegseth erroneously said, saying the lead planner of the Combat Search And Rescue operation in Iran shared it with him.

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads … “the path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Almost every single line from Hegseth’s prayer is ripped from Jackson’s iconic recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 in Tarantino’s film, not the prophet Ezekiel as ordained by God.

Here’s what the original verse in the Bible actually reads:

I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them.

That’s it. The flowery language, the allusions to destruction of evil—all come from Tarantino. 

But if that wasn’t bad enough, Hegseth added his own spin on a Bible verse that was already fake. Compare Hegseth’s monologue to the version in Pulp Fiction: 

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. 

It’s hard to parse how incredibly stupid this is. Why is the former Fox News alcoholic turned defense secretary even holding sermons at the Pentagon in the first place? And no one thought to let him know that the verse he so poetically interpreted was a blasphemous one? Did he even care? And to make matters even worse, this blatant display of religious ignorance comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV for his opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. 

Donald Trump reportedly discussed the AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ with an adviser before he posted it to Truth Social.

The president sparked national outrage among his base on Sunday when he shared an image of himself as a haloed messiah cupping light into a bedridden individual (who, by apparent coincidence, looked almost identical to comedian and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart).

But the idea may not have been his own. Trump reportedly discussed the picture with Bill Pulte, the controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, before he shared it online, insiders told Axios.

Pulte and Trump were both in south Florida over the weekend. Pulte reportedly saw the image first and decided to share it with the president.

“Everyone thought it was a joke,” one person that advised the president about the image told Axios.

The Christian faction of the MAGA movement did not find it funny, however. Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: While Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)

Trump deleted the image the day after he put it online, telling reporters that he believed it portrayed him as a doctor healing people.

It was a particularly bad time for the president to make a religious flub. That Sunday was Easter Sunday for Eastern Orthodox Christians. The previous Sunday, which was Easter for Catholics and Protestants, Trump threatened to completely annihilate Iranian civilization and wrote on Truth Social, “Praise be to Allah.”

Trump is also in the midst of a feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings by advocating for world peace. Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his “State of the World” address. Since then, the White House has issued several barbs directed at the pontiff, including claims that the religious leader is “weak on crime.”

Pope Leo XIV continued preaching a message of peace Thursday, telling an audience in Bamenda, Cameroon, that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

The pope is touring Africa, and delivered his speech in a country in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people and displaced over 500,000. But the comments also come just days after President Trump, upset that the pope vocally opposes the war in Iran, called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

Though the pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he condemned leaders who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

It’s a continuation of the pope’s response to Trump on Monday, when he told reporters that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.”

“We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker,” the pope said on Monday. “I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.”

One would think that a man who claims he ended multiple wars wouldn’t get offended if the pope calls for peace, but Trump has not engaged in any religious introspection this week, instead inciting a backlash from his Christian supporters by posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which he later deleted, and then reposting a picture of Jesus hugging him. He probably knows deep down that he is actually a major source of conflict in the world right now.

What is it with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and roadkill? The guy can’t seem to get enough of the stuff!

A new biography called RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, by Isabel Vincent, includes a journal entry describing an instance where the health secretary left his kids in the car so he could cut the sexual organs off a dead raccoon on the side of the road, TMZ reported Wednesday. 

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members turned out to be,” the journal entry read. 

This is hardly the first gag-worthy story to surface involving Kennedy and dead animals. 

In August 2024, Kennedy revealed an incident 10 years earlier, when he’d picked up a bear cub carcass off the side of the road, and then ditched the body in Central Park when he didn’t have time to take it home. Before he abandoned the body, he mutilated it to make it look like it had been hit by a biker because he thought it would be funny.

In a 2012 interview, Kennedy’s daughter Kick spoke about a wild excursion the family had taken to Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, when she was 6 years old. Kick claimed that her father had used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a beached whale. He then proceeded to tie it to the roof of his family’s minivan and drive it five hours back to Mount Kisco, New York. 

And ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, his daughter Caroline wrote a letter to the Senate describing how he used to put baby chickens and mice in the blender to make food for his hawks. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets,” Caroline wrote, “because he himself is a predator.”

When the first dead animal story comes out, you cringe. When the second one comes out, you gag. When the third one comes out, you seriously question the state that our country is in. But when the fourth one comes out, well, all you can do is laugh.  

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is once again helping President Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution. 

The ODNI’s general counsel on Wednesday referred the whistleblower who led to Trump’s first impeachment, and the inspector general who found the complaint credible, for criminal prosecution, MS NOW reported.  

The whistleblower, whose identity has not been made public, claimed that in July 2019, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to pressure the foreign leader into investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. 

Despite Trump’s insistence that his phone call was “perfect,” the president was impeached by the House of Representatives in 2019, and then acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate in early 2020. 

Earlier this week, Gabbard criticized how former intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson handled the whistleblower complaint, alleging that the watchdog had relied on “secondhand evidence.” 

She released a trove of documents related to Atkinson that she claimed revealed a “coordinated effort” by members of the intelligence community to “manufacture a conspiracy” to get Trump impeached. Ultimately, the documents did not demonstrate any criminal wrongdoing at all, CBS News reported.

It seems that Trump is after something specific with this latest attack against his perceived political enemies. Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday about the possibility of getting his impeachment “expunged.” If that’s really what he’s after, all of Gabbard’s efforts may be for nothing: Unfortunately for Trump, impeachment expungement is not really a thing. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is preaching from the Pentagon pulpit again.

In the midst of an Iran war briefing Thursday, Hegseth delivered a sermon from the Defense Department’s press room dais, scolding the American press for its “relentlessly negative” coverage of the Trump administration and comparing journalists to the biblical Pharisees.

“A note to the press corps, as I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage,” Hegseth said, referring to America’s myriad journalistic organizations as if they operate as some ubiquitous entity. “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which side some of you are actually on. It’s incredibly unpatriotic.

“This past Sunday I was sitting in church with my family, and our minister preached from the Book of Mark, the third chapter. And in the passage, Jesus entered a synagogue and healed a man with a withered hand.

“The Pharisees came to watch, and as the Scripture reads, they came to see whether He, Jesus, would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. You see, the Pharisees, the so-called elites of their time, were there to witness, to write everything down, to report. But their hearts were hardened,” Hegseth said.

“Even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda,” Hegseth continued. “I sat there in church, and I thought, ‘These press are just like these Pharisees.’ Not all of you, but the legacy, Trump-hating press.”

Hegseth then asked the press to “open their eyes” to the “historic goodness” of America’s military might, the recent developments in the war in Iran (which includes thousands of dead civilians, 13 dead U.S. service members, and internal reports that regional American bases were caught off guard), “historic recruiting numbers,” and two “miracle” search-and-rescue operations.

The Pentagon chief was apparently undeterred by recent backlash to the Trump administration’s explicit evangelical bent.

Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ to his Truth Social acount, setting off sparks among even some of his most ardent supporters. Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS NOW said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, which depicted Trump as a haloed messiah. Trump deleted the image shortly afterward, telling reporters that he believed it illustrated him as a doctor healing people.

Federal employees across the executive branch have also complained about the administration’s hyperfixation on Christianity, claiming that the religious inclusions—which flagrantly defy the First Amendment and the Founders’ intention to separate church and state—have made the government a very uncomfortable place to work. Other, non-Christian staffers have expressed that the environment has made them fearful of potential retaliation within the workplace for failing to homogeneously identify as the same religion as their leadership.

Somehow, those aren’t the administration’s only recent Christian faux pas. The White House is also in the middle of a feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has apparently upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings by advocating for world peace. Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Vatican ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday refused to rally behind twin resolutions sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders to block nearly $450 million in weapons sales to Israel.

Seven Democrats joined every Republican in the Senate to vote against a resolution blocking the sale of bulldozers to Israel, given their role in razing Gaza to the ground. The resolution failed by a vote of 59-40. Another resolution to block the transfer of 1000-pound bombs failed by a vote of 63-36, with 11 Democrats voting against.

Despite protests at their offices on Monday urging them to support the resolution, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand still voted against both resolutions.

This was the latest in a series of efforts by Sanders to halt weapons sales to Israel, which is bombing Lebanon and Iran with U.S. weapons and continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank despite a ceasefire, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Israel is also accused of encouraging ethnic cleansing against Shia Muslims in southern Lebanon.

“Under Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, we’ve seen an expanded war in Lebanon that is putting innocent Lebanese civilians at risk, and ongoing violence against Palestinians and their homes being demolished in the West Bank,” said Senator Mark Kelly, who had voted against Sanders’s previous two resolutions against weapons sales to Israel. “All of this has undermined the path forward for peace.”

Last July, 19 Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blocked Sanders’s last attempt. This time, Kelly was among the Democratic senators who changed their minds and voted for the resolution, taking into account that the resolutions are intertwined with President Trump’s unpopular war in Iran. A vote to continue weapons sales, which include $150 million in 1,000-pound bombs and $300 million in bulldozers, could be seen by voters as an endorsement of the war, which has hurt the economy and caused gas prices to skyrocket.

Here is the full list of Democrats who voted to continue sending bombs to Israel, with those who voted against both resolutions in bold:

1. Richard Blumenthal (CT)
2. Chris Coons (DE)
3. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)
4. John Fetterman (PA)
5. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY)
6. Gary Peters (MI)
7. Jack Reed (RI)
8. Jackie Rosen (NV)
9. Chuck Schumer (NY)
10. Mark Warner (VA)
11. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)

* This article has been updated to clarify the number of resolutions and how Democrats voted on each one.