On the menu today: The week begins with news somehow simultaneously shocking and expected — Pope Francis is dead at age 88. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., laying out the case that Kilmar Abrego Garcia must be brought back to the United States so he can be deported to El Salvador a second time in accordance with the law; some more rattles in the American economic engine; and a disgraced politician of the Covid era continues his comeback in the New York City mayor’s race.
Pope Francis Has Died
Apparently, Pope Francis’s return to the arms of his Creator could no longer be postponed.
The pope died April 21 at 7:35 a.m. local time; the Vatican’s announcement of his death did not state a cause of death. Francis’s passing was simultaneously expected and a surprise. Eleven days ago, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis was no longer in immediate danger from double pneumonia. The front page of the print edition of this morning’s Wall Street Journal features a photo of Francis in the popemobile in Saint Peter’s Square, making an appearance Easter Sunday.
Francis’s final audience was with Vice President JD Vance; I suspect this will launch a million conspiracies, in part because just about every death of a pope generates conspiracy theories.
Somewhere in Hollywood, the producers of the film Conclave are high-fiving each other about the greatest publicity they could ever want.
When you have an octogenarian pope, people are always going to fear that death is imminent. Back in 2021, John Gizzi, the long-time Washington correspondent of Human Events, who then worked for Newsmax, reported, “Vatican insiders, including my source, do not believe he will survive past 2022.” At that point, Francis was about to turn 85, part of one of his lungs removed many years ago, and had surgery in the previous year removing part of his intestine and colon. (As Vin Scully said, “He’s listed as day to day, but then again, aren’t we all?”) Perhaps Americans should keep that in mind as they contemplate future presidents.
Every Catholic — and non-Catholic — will have their own perspective on Francis; here in the United States, I suspect he will be widely remembered as a man whom the U.S. media desperately wanted to be progressive “Buddy Christ.” This morning, the Washington Post concludes, “He was more broadly embraced by liberals, even if they felt his personal ecumenism never translated into the radical reform they sought, especially on the role of women. . . . Though LGBTQ+ outreach became a hallmark of his papacy, Francis did not fundamentally change church doctrine or its official teachings that homosexuality is ‘intrinsically disordered.’”
From the beginning, the U.S. media preferred to see — some might way “wishcasted” — Francis as the ideal progressive pope. Every comment was interpreted as an endorsement and later walked back by the Vatican that insisted the remarks had been misinterpreted or mistranslated. While Francis declared that those in gay marriages could be blessed by priests — not the marriages themselves, a detail that many progressives chose to ignore — he simultaneously occasionally used an offensive Italian slang term for gays.
To be an American Catholic in the era of Francis meant regularly getting news alerts on your phone, announcing some sweeping, epoch-defining change — and then walking into church and everything seeming pretty much the same. (Actual changes, like the push to get rid of the Latin Mass, rarely seemed to generate those newsy push alerts.) Catholic liberals seemed to convince themselves that on any given day, Francis was going to rewrite the catechism to match the platform of the Democratic National Committee — ordain women priests, accept abortion, bless gay marriage.
Francis was not nearly as progressive as his cheerleaders on the left wanted to believe he was.
Way back in September 2015, still relatively early in his papacy, Francis met with Kim Davis, a county clerk for Rowan County, Ky., who defied a U.S. federal court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At the time, I wrote that the meeting was “delightful for the way that it disrupts the media’s preferred narrative that Francis is rewriting the Catechism of the Catholic Church to align with the Democratic party’s platform”:
The Catholic Church’s views have never aligned perfectly with either major American political party, and they probably never will or should. The Church is usually reflexively anti-war, at least wary of free-market capitalism — “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” — skeptical of limits on immigration and migration, and supportive of generous programs to help the poor. But it’s also indisputably pro-life, wants broad legal protections for religious liberty, wants family-focused policies and for all the calls for love and compassion for gays, does not recognize or perform gay marriages.
When Pope Francis spoke critically of Charlie Hebdo magazine, some people reacted as if they were genuinely surprised that the pope wasn’t a First Amendment absolutist. Any faith that believes in blasphemy is going to have a complicated relationship with the concept of freedom of expression — that clash between an ardent belief that you shouldn’t say something with the notion that you legally should be allowed to say it without consequence from the authorities.
And soon, a new chapter in the history of the church will begin. . . .
Bring Abrego Garcia Back . . . to Send Him to El Salvador Again
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not a nice guy, and he does not have a legal right to remain in the U.S. indefinitely. He entered the United States illegally way back in 2011.
He requested asylum . . . eight years later. The deadline for requesting asylum is one year after entry. Exceptions can be made if an applicant can demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances relating to the delay in filing,” but there is no indication that Garcia did so.
An immigration judge ruled in October 2019 that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador — granting him a form of protection called “withholding of removal” — because of his fears that the gang, Barrio 18, would persecute him. ICE did not appeal that decision. Keep in mind, Donald Trump was president at that time and ICE was being led by Trump appointee Mark Morgan.
In 2021, Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, filed a protective order petition against him, alleging that he had physically attacked her on multiple occasions, according to court documents.
This is all separate from whether Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 or any other gang. (I am uncomfortable with the notion that merely wearing a Chicago Bulls hat or sweatshirt would be sufficient evidence to conclude someone was affiliated with MS-13. You may recall some guy named Michael Jordan who made the team rather popular worldwide back in the 1990s.)
As Rich observed, the right move is to comply with the court order, bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, appeal the “withholding of removal” order, get it overturned, and deport him. Both MS-13 and Barrio 18 are “dramatically weakened” in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele — that’s from MSNBC, hardly an echo chamber of the Trump administration’s preferred narratives. The threat to Abrego Garcia in El Salvador is dramatically reduced; it is safe for him to return.
I can understand the exasperation, “What’s the point of bringing him back to the U.S. if you’re just doing to deport him again?” The answer is that the law and proper procedure matter.
Even if you don’t like a court order, you cannot just ignore it, and the U.S. government certainly cannot deport people based on a self-admitted “administrative error.” There is a legitimate interest in making sure the government is deporting the people they say they are. If the U.S. government deports someone erroneously, it is obligated to bring that person back so that the individual can have his immigration status adjudicated properly. That is what being a nation of laws is all about; shipping someone overseas by mistake is neither law nor order.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. Economy . . .
It is extremely advantageous for the Trump administration that the media and democrats have embraced Abrego Garcia as the cause du jour and not the economy. From the perspective of political messaging, this is baffling, on the verge of malpractice.
In Trump’s first term, the performance of the American economy was his strongest asset. At this rate, it will become his biggest weakness soon; “President Donald Trump is registering the worst economic approval numbers of his presidential career amid broad discontent over his handling of tariffs, inflation and government spending, according to the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey.”
The next calculation of the U.S. gross domestic product will be released in nine days, April 30. The Atlanta Federal Reserve bank is projecting that GDP is probably going to come in at negative 2.2 for the first quarter of 2025. (Yes, the first 20 days of that are Biden’s presidency, but that’s not really going to get Trump off the hook for bad numbers.)
The major U.S. stock markets are less tumultuous than they were a few weeks ago, but they haven’t recovered. This morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average starts at 39,593.66, the tech-heavy Nasdaq starts at 16,387.31, and S&P 500 starts 5,268.05 — declines of 9 percent, 17 percent, and 13 percent since Trump took office, respectively.
Volvo North America announced it would be laying off 250 to 350 people at the Mack Trucks Lehigh Valley Operations in Macungie, Pa.; 250 to 350 people at the Volvo Trucks New River Valley Operations in Dublin, Va.; and 50 to 100 people at the Volvo Group Powertrain Operations in Hagerstown, Md. Kimberly Pupillo, a Mack spokesperson, said, “Heavy-duty truck orders continue to be negatively affected by market uncertainty about freight rates and demand, possible regulatory changes, and the impact of tariffs.”
Across the tech industry, so far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been laid off. Up in Massachusetts, “Harvard Medical School leadership told employees at a town hall Wednesday morning that the school was preparing to make staffing reductions and cut programs as a result of the Trump administration’s actions against Harvard.” (Seems like a good reason to dip into that $53 billion endowment, no?)
We will see how the second quarter goes, but the second Trump term could well start with a recession.
ADDENDUM: While I was away, I shared some thoughts on the ongoing Andrew Cuomo comeback. The disgraced former governor isn’t just winning the New York City mayoral primary; no one is even coming close.