A Bruising Culture War Over Migrants, Morality And Power Has Left J.D. Vance Apologizing in Private While Doubling Down in Public.
The apology, when it came, was quiet. No cameras, no podium, no crowd of cheering supporters. Just J.D. Vance, the combative vice president who has built much of his political brand on confrontation, is sitting down with one of the most influential Catholic leaders in the United States and admitting he had gone too far.
According to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York and a prominent conservative figure in the American church, Vance privately climbed down from an attack that had infuriated Catholic bishops only weeks earlier.
‘He and I had a little tête-à-tête, you probably know, when he suggested that bishops in the United States were pro-immigrant because we were making money,’ Dolan said in an interview published Thursday, 19 February. ‘And he apologized. He said, ‘That was out of line and that’s not true.”
For a politician who rarely backs away from a fight, even a private mea culpa is striking.
J.D. Vance, The Bishops And The Battle Over Migrants
The row began in January 2025, after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a sharply worded statement condemning Donald Trump’s new executive order authorising immigration raids at schools and churches. For starters, the Conference is the powerful national body representing Catholic bishops across the United States, and its statements carry considerable moral and political weight.
Trump’s order effectively tore up long-standing informal norms that treated schools and houses of worship as off-limits for immigration enforcement. The bishops called it out. Vance, standing squarely behind his running mate, hit back hard.
He accused Catholic leaders of being less interested in defending human dignity than in defending their bank balance.
The bishops, he said at the time, should ‘look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?’
The figure he cited refers to federal funds that go to Catholic charities and other faith-based organizations that, under U.S. law, partner with the government to resettle refugees and migrants. It is a long-standing arrangement, not a secret slush fund, but the insinuation was clear enough.
Dolan, who delivered the invocation at both of Trump’s inaugurations and is hardly a natural enemy of the Republican right, was livid. He called Vance’s remarks ‘very nasty’ and ‘inaccurate.’ It clearly stung that the attack came not from a secular liberal critic, but from inside the broader conservative camp.
Now, though, Dolan says he has made his peace with the man a heartbeat away from the presidency.
He describes Vance as a ‘very good guy’ and says they see eye to eye on what he calls ‘the family,’ ‘babies’ and ‘patriotism’ — shorthand for opposition to abortion, a traditional view of family life and a hawkish, flag-waving brand of nationalism that still resonates deeply across much of the American heartland.
He is less impressed by Vance’s skepticism over U.S. support for Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion, saying he ‘wasn’t too happy’ with the vice president’s stance. For a church that includes large Ukrainian Catholic communities and has repeatedly warned against Russian aggression, that is more than a polite aside.
Church Raids, ICE And A Vice President Who Blames The Dead
The flashpoint over the bishops’ statement did not come out of nowhere. Dolan has his own history with immigration enforcement.
He says he remains ‘very upset’ about Trump’s mass deportation push and particularly about Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE, the sprawling U.S. agency charged with deportations — ‘going into churches and harassing churches’ while he was leading the New York archdiocese. For many Americans, a church is supposed to be a place of sanctuary. Watching agents in body armor sweep into those spaces changed something.
The politics around immigration in the United States have since grown even more brutal, and J.D. Vance has been happy to stand at the sharp end of that shift.
Last month, he made headlines after weighing in on the death of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Good had been protesting the agency’s presence in the city when she was fatally shot. The incident has become a lightning rod in America’s culture war over policing, protest and migration.
Vance was unequivocal in his defense of the shooter and remarkably harsh toward the dead woman herself.
He said the ICE agent had acted in self-defense and branded Good a ‘victim of left-wing ideology.’
‘I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it is a tragedy of her own making,’ he said.
Pressed by reporters, he went further. ‘What I am certain of is that she violated the law,’ he insisted. ‘What I’m certain of is that the officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat for injury or, in fact, his life.’
‘This was an attack on law and order,’ Vance declared. ‘This was an attack on the American people.’
For Catholic bishops who still talk about migrants as ‘brothers and sisters’ and warn against the dehumanizing language of politics, there is an obvious tension in embracing a man who can talk about a dead protester in those terms yet still be welcomed back after a discreet apology over one particularly sweeping slur.
Dolan, for his part, appears willing to hold both views at once. Very upset about ICE in churches. Not too happy about Ukraine. Warmly disposed toward J.D. Vance on ‘babies’, ‘the family’ and ‘patriotism.’ And satisfied, at least for now, with an apology that most Americans will never hear for themselves.
News @Njemata Momo