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Tom Homan told Benny Johnson last week that he would be happy to take Pope Leo XIV on a ride-along with an ICE raid.
The moment came inside a packed Baylor University auditorium during Turning Point USA’s campus tour stop. Johnson, the MAGA podcaster who serves as the movement’s in-house catechist on grievance, asked whether this was the border czar’s “invitation to the Pope for a ridealong with ICE.”
Homan’s answer: “Yes. And I said that.”
Homan had laid out his credentials earlier in the same set.
“As a lifelong Catholic — baptized, first communion, confirmation — I love the Catholic church,” he told the crowd. “But you know it, they’re wrong.” Then came his framing for the room.
“I’m a little troubled right now. I call out the Pope.”
By the time he reached the offer to ride along, the border czar had already explained why he believed he was qualified to instruct the pontiff. “I’ll sit down and talk to them,”
Homan said of Leo and the cardinals who had spoken out, “because they’re talking about something they don’t understand.”
It is the same riff he has been running for months.
The premise, once the theatrics are stripped away, is that an American pope who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, spent decades in the poorest neighborhoods of northern Peru, and now reads the desperate letters of migrant families terrorized by federal raids is uninformed.
What Leo really needs, Homan keeps insisting, is forty minutes with the man who runs the raids.
One of the things I have learned from covering Tom Homan over the past year is that parochial-school education fifty years ago does not make you an expert on anything.
His claim to authority on the Church’s doctrine of migration rests on the credentials he just recited at Baylor — baptism, first communion, confirmation, and the fact that he attended a Catholic grade school in the 1960s.
On that, he has spent months offering to “educate” the first American pope about human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the moral status of the stranger.
The pontiff whom he proposes to tutor holds a doctorate in canon law from the Angelicum, led the Augustinian order worldwide for twelve years, served as a missionary bishop in Chiclayo, and ran the Dicastery for Bishops before his election.
That is the pope Homan has offered to instruct on Catholicism.
The Baylor invitation fits a pattern. In February, Homan publicly volunteered to sit Leo down and explain Biden-era migration.
Last week, after the pope spoke publicly about immigrants who have lived in the United States for years without causing problems, Homan told the Catholic Church to “stay out of immigration” and compared the Vatican’s ancient walls to the southern border.
From the Baylor stage, he sharpened the comparison with this falsehood: “If you go to the Vatican and jump their wall, the penalty is about three times that is here.”
None of this is freelancing. Homan is running point on a coordinated campaign. Donald Trump has called Leo “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” on Truth Social, then claimed personal credit for his election.
Vice President JD Vance twice warned the pontiff to stay out of American politics and to “be careful” talking theology. From the Speaker’s rostrum, Mike Johnson attempted to school the pope on Augustine’s Just War doctrine. Sean Hannity declared himself uniquely qualified to correct the Holy Father on scripture.
The official who dispatched the invitation from Waco, meanwhile, is the same border czar who, on September 20, 2024, accepted $50,000 in cash inside a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as contractors seeking future government business.
The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section opened an investigation into whether the exchange violated federal bribery law. In early 2025, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove signaled the probe should close. It did.
A watchdog group is now suing the FBI to compel release of the tapes. The border czar still runs the largest enforcement operation in the country. No one ever returned the Cava bag. And from a stage in central Texas, he invites the pope to ride along while ICE breaks up American families.
Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe named this season in his recent interview with the National Catholic Reporter, calling it a “Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment” for American Catholics — the hour in which the Church decides whether its witness will cost it anything or whether it will march quietly alongside the regime.
Seventeen other bishops signed Wester’s statement demanding an end to enforcement raids at churches, schools, and hospitals.
In El Paso, Bishop Mark Seitz hand-delivered letters from terrorized migrant families to Leo at Castel Gandolfo. From Chicago — the pope’s hometown, and a city Homan’s agents have militarized with helicopter raids and chemical agents deployed near public schools — Cardinal Blase Cupich has blasted the White House. The American bishops have drawn the line. The border czar keeps trying to mock them over it.
Leo himself has already given his answer. “I have no fear of the Trump administration,” he told reporters aboard the papal plane, “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.”
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV against Tom Homan and the MAGA brigade that has tried to bully and humiliate him since the white smoke first rose over St. Peter’s — against Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Tom Homan, Sean Hannity, and the entire apparatus of MAGA anti-Catholicism.
There is no neutral ground here. The man who accepted $50,000 in cash inside a Cava bag is now lecturing the Vicar of Christ on morality. His boss has stripped Catholic Charities of federal funding and sent a deportation force into the Chicago neighborhoods where Leo grew up.
Catholics and people of goodwill cannot look away from this. Treating it as ordinary politics is its own surrender. The Gospel makes demands, and this is the hour to meet them — by standing with our Holy Father, and with the migrant families he is protecting.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because millions of people are hungry for something deeper than the cruelty and performance of the Homan era. They are hungry for courage, for truth, for a Church that will not flinch when the border czar turns a TPUSA rally into a papal insult.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a regime that has made cruelty its governing principle — I am asking you to join us.
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