JD Vance has reportedly admitted behind closed doors that one of his first official statements as vice president was “not true.”
Vance made headlines shortly after joining the White House in January 2025 by laying into the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for their criticism of President Donald Trump’s executive order allowing immigration raids at schools and churches. Invoking his own conversion to Catholicism, he claimed at the time that the church was only speaking out against Trump’s policies because they were profiting off of immigrants.
According to Trump’s favorite Catholic cardinal, however, Vance later sought forgiveness for his remarks in private.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York who delivered the invocation at both of Trump’s inaugurations, told EWTN News in a new interview that Vance privately retracted his remarks. Dolan had blasted the comments as “scurrilous,” “very nasty,” and “inaccurate” at the time.
It appears Vance himself realized he’d gone too far.
“He and I had a little tete-a-tete, you probably know, when he suggested that bishops in the United States were pro-immigrant because we were making money,” Dolan said. “And he apologized. He said, ‘That was out of line and that’s not true.’”
The vice president, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and calls himself a “baby Catholic,” had urged bishops to “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?”
Looking back on that tense episode now, Dolan stressed that he thought Vance was a “very good guy” and that he agreed with him on issues including “the family,” “babies” and “patriotism,” but said he “wasn’t too happy” with the vice president’s failure to support Ukraine.
He also said he was “very upset” about Trump’s deportation agenda and accused ICE of “going into churches and harassing churches” when he was leading the archdiocese.
In December, Pope Leo XIV replaced Dolan, a prominent figure known for engaging in culture wars who serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, with a relatively unknown Illinois-based bishop, Ronald Hicks.
Dolan told EWTN that he used his role on the commission to help end ICE’s practice of showing up to Sunday mass in cars and trucks, which kept parishioners away.
He said he told his fellow commission member Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, “This is a violation of religious freedom. People have the right to worship on the Sabbath. The federal government cannot impede that or harass it.”
Graham, an Evangelical pastor who is head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, suggested they go directly to the local ICE field office.
According to Dolan, the ICE director in New York said, “Thanks for bringing that to my attention. We’re not going to do that here.”
Since then, Dolan hasn’t heard from any pastors that agents were outside churches, he said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to DHS and the White House for comment.
