Pope Leo warns leaders on migration during Canary Islands visit

Pope Leo XIV turned a stop at the Port of Arguineguín into a rebuke of Europe’s migration politics, telling leaders that history would judge those who allow people fleeing war or poverty to suffer and die at sea. At the Gran Canaria harbor once branded the “Dock of Shame,” he met migrants, volunteers and rescue workers and pressed a message that human dignity does not disappear at a border.

The visit put one of Europe’s most fraught migration routes in the spotlight. The Canary Islands, reached by crossings from West and Northern Africa, saw arrivals peak in 2024 at nearly 47,000. In 2025, irregular arrivals fell to 17,788, a drop of 62 percent from the year before, but the Atlantic route remained among the deadliest in recorded migrant deaths and disappearances at sea.

The human cost is measured in names rarely known outside the rescue boats. The Spanish aid group Caminando Fronteras said 3,090 people died trying to reach Spain from January 1 to December 15, 2025, including 437 children. It also said 1,906 people died or disappeared on the Atlantic route alone. Leo’s warning framed those figures as a moral test, not just a border-management problem, and he urged people not to become accustomed to counting the dead.

Arguineguín carries that burden visibly. In 2020, thousands of migrants arrived there and were left in makeshift open-air camps with inadequate facilities, sometimes sleeping for weeks on blankets and without showers. Church leaders have since tried to recast the port as a place that could move from shame to hope, but the memory of that crisis still hangs over the harbor.

The pope is also expected to meet about 1,000 migrants on Friday, making migration the centerpiece of a visit that has taken on clear political weight. His sharper tone in recent months toward governments he sees as hardening against immigrants, including the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, has made the trip more than a pastoral stop. It is a public attempt to force a moral reckoning onto a debate that many European leaders still frame in terms of patrols, arrivals and deterrence.

That human dimension was echoed by a young Senegalese survivor of a 2020 shipwreck, who said he still remembers his brother’s death and now works as a chef after being welcomed by a local family. His story underscored what Leo put at the center of his visit: behind every policy argument are lives hanging on crossings that have become more dangerous year by year.