By TRISHA THOMAS

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday strongly backed U.S. bishops who condemned the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, as he urged the American people to listen to them and treat migrants humanely.

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History’s first American pope was asked about the “special message” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted during the bishops’ general assembly last week. The text criticized the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants and the “vilification” of them in the current migration debate. It lamented the fear and anxiety immigration raids have sown in communities, and the denial of pastoral care to migrants in detention centers.

Leo, who has previously urged local bishops to take the lead on speaking out on matters of social justice, said he appreciated the U.S. bishops’ statement and urged Catholics and all people of goodwill to listen to what they said.

“I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have,” said the Chicago-born Leo. “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts, there’s a system of justice.”

Speaking to reporters as he left the papal country house south of Rome, Leo acknowledged there are problems in the U.S. migration system. But he stressed that no one has said the U.S. should have open borders, and that every country has the right to determine who can enter and how.

“But when people are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful to say the least — and there’s been some violence unfortunately — I think that the bishops have been very clear in what they said,” he said.

“I would just invite all people in the United States to listen to them.”

Pope Leo XIV waves to faithful before presiding over special mass for the Jubilee of the poor, in St. Peter’s Square at The Vatican, Sunday, Nov.16, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The bishops’ “special message” was rare, the first time since 2013 the bishops had penned such a single-issue statement at one of their meetings. It was accompanied by an Instagram video of individual bishops reading the text on camera, to hammer home its message.

Upcoming travel plans

Leo spoke to reporters gathered outside his villa in Castel Gandolfo, where he usually spends Monday afternoons and Tuesdays relaxing, playing tennis and swimming in the estate’s indoor pool.

He suggested that he is planning more travel starting in 2026, after his Rome commitments ease up with the end of the Holy Year.

Asked if he would return to Peru, where he spent some 20 years as a missionary, Leo said “of course.”

But he also hinted at other possible destinations, including the Fatima shrine in Portugal, the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico, and visits to Argentina and Uruguay.

“I love to travel, the problem is scheduling with all the commitments,” he said.

Leo next week will embark on his first foreign trip as pope, to Turkey and Lebanon.

Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

To Minnesota Wild fans, the sight of Yakov Trenin playing center might look odd. To the 28-year-old Russian now in his seventh NHL season — most of them spent on the wing — skating at center during Tuesday’s practice was a return to his roots.

Asked if he felt out of place with Marcus Foligno and Vinnie Hinostroza on his wings for the morning skate, Trenin scoffed and noted that from around the age of 2 or 3 to age 20 in his native Russia, he played center.

With a late game versus the Carolina Hurricanes on tap Wednesday night at Grand Casino Arena, Trenin may find himself back in the position of his youth as the Wild are down two of their top three centers. Marco Rossi we knew about. Ryan Hartman’s absence on Tuesday was new, but not totally unexpected after he left Sunday’s overtime win versus Vegas with an apparent lower body injury.

Wild coach John Hynes on Tuesday classified Hartman as week-to-week, but sounded like he could be pleasantly surprised by an earlier return.

“It’s not like a surgical thing or anything, but the diagnosis right now, that’s the timeframe,” Hynes said of Hartman, who centered the Wild’s top line between Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello on Sunday. “It could be quicker, or it could be that timeframe.”

Another potential Wild center, Nico Sturm, was on the ice for practice as well on Tuesday, but Hynes said the faceoff specialist remains week to week, and they are hopeful he could crack the Minnesota lineup in early December if not sooner.

That leaves rookie Danila Yurov and Trenin — who scored his first goal of the season versus Vegas — as the likely first- and third-line centers, respectively. Hynes coached Trenin previously in Nashville, and did not use him as a center there, but Trenin played some in the middle during a 26-game stint with the Avalanche in 2024, so he would not be a fish completely out of water.

“He played center in Colorado and he played center before he was in Nashville,” Hynes said. “He’s good at faceoffs, but he does have a history of playing center.”

The coach admitted that he is hopeful Trenin’s time in the middle is a short-term fix.

Briefly

Wild winger Vladimir Tarasenko, who has missed the past two games with a lower body injury, skated in practice on Tuesday but left early and his status versus Carolina is unclear.

“He tried it today. Obviously, he looked pretty good in practice, but I didn’t get any feedback,” Hynes said. “He did leave early, that’s why I don’t know how he’s feeling.”

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By MATT BROWN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House voted Tuesday to reprimand Illinois Rep. Chuy Garcia over an eyebrow-raising succession plan for his congressional seat, a move that divided Democrats who were furious with a member of their own caucus for triggering the vote.

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The House voted 236-186 for the measure, with 10 members not voting and four voting present. More than two dozen House Democrats voted for the resolution, along with all Republicans.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., defied her party by introducing the resolution on the House floor to rebuke Garcia, who represents parts of western Chicago and its suburbs. She said the vote disapproving of Garcia’s conduct was necessary because it’s important to call out “election subversion” by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Garcia announced he was not seeking reelection earlier this month just before the deadline to file paperwork for the seat. By then, his chief of staff was the only candidate who had submitted the needed paperwork.

“My responsibility as an elected representative of my community is to say loudly and consistently, humbly and with love that no one has the right to subvert the right of the people to choose their elected representatives,” Perez said during a Monday evening floor speech.

Blowback from Democratic lawmakers was swift.

A Tuesday statement before the vote from House Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, defended Garcia as a “progressive champion” and a “good man.”

“We unequivocally oppose this misguided resolution and urge our colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus to reject it,” the statement said.

Multiple Democratic lawmakers rallied to Garcia’s defense ahead of the vote and attested to his character and history as an advocate on issues like immigrant rights. Others jeered and booed at Perez as she spoke during a debate on the House floor.

Democratic leaders had urged their colleagues to oppose the measure and many in the party argued it was a distraction that did not merit a vote.

“This is why the Ethics Committee exists,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote on social media. She warned about a precedent where the House “will be forced to vote on a slew of individual member indiscretions determined by political convenience of whoever is in the majority.”

Nearly every Democrat in the House except Perez voted to quash a vote on the petition Monday night, but the effort advanced with the backing of all Republicans.

After Tuesday’s full resolution prevailed, some Democrats sought to explain their vote against the measure.

“My vote should not be viewed as an endorsement of the actions that created this situation,” Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., said in a statement, adding that she had spoken with Garcia about his situation.

Perez thanked the House members who voted for the resolution. She commended Garcia for a career of public service and called his familial reasons for retiring from the House “honorable.” But she was also frank about the tension surrounding the vote.

“It shouldn’t have caused as much friction as it did to speak honestly and consistently about election subversion,” Perez said in a statement. “Congress is a legislative body, not a social club, and the American people will not accept blind calls to party loyalty in defense of an effort to deny them the right to a free and fair election.”

This is how winning political coalitions unravel. An unforeseen development roils one of the major political parties.

For the Democratic Party, that development was Donald Trump in 2016. For the Republican Party, that development is growing antisemitism on the right, especially among younger voters.

The smoldering tensions flared into open view with Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with the proudly racist, misogynist and Jew-hating influencer Nick Fuentes. The fallout has opened a rift between the populist right and traditional conservatives that threatens to splinter the remarkable coalition — younger and more racially diverse than previous GOP coalitions — that Republicans presumably hope to inherit from Trump.

“The blood and soil nationalism of Israel, it stems from this ethno-religion which is Judaism,” Fuentes said at one point in his interview with Carlson. Carlson’s response: “This is (Black Lives Matter) the new version. This is identity politics.” Later in the interview, Fuentes asserts that “you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons from Jewishness … They’re a stateless people, they’re unassimilable.” He then proceeds to insist that American Jews view the U.S. as “not really my home — my ancestral home is in Israel.” Carlson’s response? Crickets.

That a mainstream figure like Carlson would give unchallenged airtime to an antisemite like Fuentes isn’t necessarily shocking. The Anti-Defamation League finds that belief in antisemitic tropes is increasing, especially among the young, and that 15% of Republicans and 11% of Democrats say violence against Jews is justifiable. Over 95% of both Democratic and Republican Jews say antisemitism in America is rising, according to a 2025 Washington Post poll.

Many traditionally conservative Republicans are appalled at Carlson’s antisemitic turn and worried about the rise of Jew-hatred on the populist right being fueled by influencers like Fuentes. This tug-of-war over the GOP’s future was foreshadowed during Trump’s first term, with events like the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and a mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue that left a dozen Jewish worshippers dead. Now, the populist right — a key part of the GOP base under Trump — has also begun to show an increasing hostility toward Israel and toward the diplomatic and military aid the U.S. provides the Jewish State. That’s a clear break from the party’s establishment.

Yet many traditional Republicans remain reluctant to criticize Carlson. The former Fox News host is popular on the populist right and his podcast is among the country’s most influential media platforms. Others fear alienating the populists, concerned Republicans cannot defeat Democrats in national elections without them. That was essentially the argument Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, made to justify the Washington think-tank maintaining its ties with Carlson following the Fuentes interview.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 54, is not among them. That’s significant because Cruz, a Trump ally whose own political career has been fueled by conservative populism, has designs on running for president again (he was the runner-up for the Republican nomination in 2016, falling to the future 45th and 47th president). Cruz has emerged as a vocal Carlson opponent and among the most prominent GOP figures to warn against letting antisemitism on the right go unchecked.

“I believe now, today, is a time for choosing,” he said Friday, challenging his party to step up during an address to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. As Jewish Insider reported , Cruz was invoking Ronald Reagan’s seminal 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.”

Of course, as antisemitism has become a thing in American politics, it hasn’t only created an internecine battle on the right. It has also riven the Democratic Party.

Center-left Democrats seeking to preserve their party’s historic support for Israel were (and still are) at odds with their left-wing brethren, despite the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire. The far-left’s opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, following the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, manifested across the country not only in protests on college campuses. It also took the form of antisemitic violence and the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses.

Jewish voters are, historically, a liberal voting bloc, and many stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in 2024. But Trump also grew his share of the Jewish vote to record levels for a Republican, according to exit polling collected by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Trump has been incredibly supportive of Israel. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, negotiated the Abraham Accords that led to peace between the Jewish State and its Arab neighbors and supported Netanyahu’s prosecution of the Gaza War (and his decision to strike Iran).

But now, in the fall of 2025, it’s increasingly clear that antisemitism is not simply a problem for the Democratic Party. It has also infected Trump’s GOP.

Matt K. Lewis, a conservative columnist often critical of Trump, told me the president shoulders some of the blame because he has fostered a philosophy of victimhood, framing the struggles of his loyal voters as the result of conspiracies. This sort of rhetoric, Lewis posited, lends itself to one of the world’s oldest and most enduring conspiracy theories: Jew hatred.

“When people feel like the game is rigged against them and they’re being victimized and they’re being told that by the president of the United States, that makes them much more susceptible to all sorts of radical ideas that would be unthinkable,” said Lewis, author of “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections.”

Lewis’ argument is plausible. But there’s another factor that Republicans — or anyone on the right — should consider if they’re worried about the GOP being hijacked by right-wing antisemitism.

In the four decades from Reagan to Trump, Republicans generally fought the Democrats using ideas as weapons; and conservative media personalities used whatever ideological authority they possessed to enforce party dogma. But during Obama’s presidency, Republicans and their media allies got it into their heads that the U.S. was on the brink of an irreversible collapse that could only be prevented by permanently blocking the Democrats from power. Ideology became secondary — if that — to defeating the left.

With that in mind, it’s only logical that, as long as their votes are on offer, some Republicans are willing to tolerate antisemites in their midst.

David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.” He wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.