Six Decades of Service, Ended in a Letter: Trump Pulls $11 Million from Miami Catholic Charities

The Trump administration has canceled a contract with the Archdiocese of Miami that sheltered unaccompanied migrant children — abruptly ending a partnership that stretches back to the Cuban exodus of 1960.

In December 1960, a young Irish priest named Father Bryan Walsh stood at Miami International Airport and met the first planeload of unaccompanied Cuban children — boys and girls whose parents had sent them alone across the Florida Straits to escape Fidel Castro's revolution. Over the next two years, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami would shelter more than 14,000 such children in what became known as Operation Pedro Pan, the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere.

That mission of mercy has continued, in one form or another, for more than sixty years. This week, Donald Trump ended it.

The Trump administration has canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which has operated a full-service child welfare program — including an 81-bed shelter, foster home placements, and family reunification services — for unaccompanied migrant children under the watch of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The organization was notified of the cancellation in late March. The program is expected to shut its doors within three months.

"The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami," Archbishop Thomas Wenski wrote in a statement for the Miami Herald's editorial board. "The Archdiocese of Miami's services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country."

"Totally Unacceptable"

For the faith community in South Florida, the news has landed like a blow.

Members of the Miami parish are "beyond shocked," CBS News Miami reported. Father Federico Capdepom, who retired in 2016 after 33 years of priesthood in the Archdiocese, told the outlet he was heartbroken. "The children that we've helped for so many, many years — to abruptly cancel $11 million, I believe, of help for migrants, I think it's totally unacceptable," he said. One parishioner called the cancellation simply "disgraceful."

The human stakes extend beyond bruised feelings. Children are currently in the care of Catholic Charities in Miami, and it remains unclear where they will go if the program closes. An associate director at the University of Miami Law School's Children and Youth Law Clinic warned that relocation would be "incredibly psychologically harmful" for the children involved. "For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community," she said. "They don't know who they are and where they will be from day to day."

Archbishop Wenski, a longtime immigrant-rights advocate, acknowledged the administration's argument that the number of unaccompanied minors in federal custody has dropped — from a peak of 22,000 during the Biden administration to roughly 1,900 today, according to HHS. But he rejected the idea that smaller numbers justify dismantling what took generations to build. It is "baffling," he wrote, "that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence" shown by the Church.

A Shadow of the Larger Feud

The cancellation arrives in the midst of President Trump’s escalating attacks against Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born pontiff who has become one of the most outspoken critics of the administration's policies on immigration and the U.S.-led war with Iran.

Leo, the first American-born pope, has called for peace repeatedly from the Vatican, declaring in an April homily, "Stop! It is time for peace!" and writing on social media that "God does not bless any conflict." He has also questioned the administration's immigration crackdown, asking publicly whether it is truly "pro-life."

Trump responded last Sunday with a lengthy Truth Social post calling Leo "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy," claiming the pope was "catering to the Radical Left" and urged him to "get his act together." The president also posted an AI-generated image depicting himself in a Christ-like pose — a move that drew condemnation from across the Catholic world.

The backlash from Church leaders was swift. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was "disheartened" by the president's words. Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump's own Religious Liberty Commission, called the post "entirely inappropriate and disrespectful" and said the president "owes the Pope an apology." Leo himself, speaking from the papal airplane en route to Africa, was characteristically direct: "I have no fear of the Trump administration," he said. "I will continue to speak out loudly."

What Is Lost

The contract canceled in Miami was not an abstraction. The Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh Center — named for that same young priest who stood at the airport in 1960 — has for decades offered traumatized children a roof, a meal, a caseworker, and a path toward a family. It has done so with a record of excellence the government itself acknowledged and used as a national model.

For the faithful in Miami and across the country, the message from Washington this week is a painful one: a ministry rooted in the Gospel, proven across six decades of service, has been deemed expendable.

Pope Leo, for his part, has made clear he will not be silenced. "Too many people are suffering in the world today," he said Monday aboard the papal plane. "Too many innocent people are being killed."