Evelio Menjivar-Ayala first arrived in the United States hidden in the trunk of a car. On May 1, Pope Leo xiv appointed him as bishop of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia.

This appointment is the latest of a series of jabs by the Vatican against President Trump. The pope has made several statements criticizing U.S. immigration enforcement as undignified, troubling and “inhuman.”

Evelio Menjivar-Ayala is an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration.

• Last year, he spoke out against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids against violent migrants in Washington, D.C., saying, “That could have been me.” “For weeks now, the federal government has pursued a ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aggressive threats and highly visible operations of questionable legality that go far beyond mere immigration ‘enforcement,’” he wrote at the time.
• He gave a portion of his acceptance speech in Spanish, despite the fact that only 2.4 percent of the population of his new diocese is Latino.

Many of the illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. are Catholic. In fact, 10 years ago, then Bishop of San Diego Robert McElroy estimated mass deportation of illegal immigrants could remove 10 percent of the Catholic Church’s parishioners.

In 2011, Archbishop José Horacio Gómez described immigration as a way to fundamentally change America’s character, saying, “Immigration is a key to our American renewal.”

• He described the America of men like “Washington, Jefferson and Madison” and “great documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights” as an “Anglo-Protestant” story. He wanted to embrace a different “Hispanic-Catholic” America, “centered not in New England but in Nueva España—New Spain—at opposite corners of the continent.”

When Pope Leo was elected, the Trumpet wrote:

Will it take an American pope to bring down the traditional American economic system? Flooding the U.S. with immigrants from nations where Catholic social doctrine is practiced is certainly one way to bring down America’s free-market system. … Like Francis before him, the new pope will undoubtedly use Hispanic immigration to move America away from the traditional free-market principles it was founded on and toward the neo-feudalism of the Holy Roman Empire.

Nearly a year later, he has clearly done just that.