In an interview with CNN, McElroy said, “This is not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, but it is inhumane and morally repugnant.”

Robert McElroy is criticized by conservative circles within the US Catholic Church; his open stances in favor of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and other minorities are known from his bishopric in the Diocese of San Diego.

Even Pope Francis, according to analysts, appointed him Archbishop of Washington, choosing one of his most progressive allies to lead the Catholic Church in the United States capital at the beginning of Trump’s second administration.

In this sense, the US archbishop’s position is not strange, as he stated in this new interview.

“It is right to be able to control our borders. However, what is happening now goes much further. It is a massive and indiscriminate deportation of men, women, children and families that he literally destroys, and he intends to do so,” he said.

According to the EFE news agency, McElroy’s interview was conducted in Rome on the same day that the president visited the controversial immigration detention center in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz.

The archbishop maintained that the mechanism used by Trump is based on “creating a deep fear” among the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of whom “have worked hard, lived within the law and have contributed enormously to society.”

The Trump administration has the right to deport people who have committed serious crimes, and because of this, McElroy does not believe that Americans will have objections, “but that is not it: this is simply an effort to try to generate a sense of terror in those who are undocumented.”