Pope Leo warns traffickers exploiting migrants to repent or face hell

Pope Leo XIV confronted traffickers and criminal groups on the Canary Islands with some of his sharpest language yet, warning them to repent or face hell as he made migration central to a week-long tour of Spain. He delivered the message in Tenerife, after meeting migrants and humanitarian workers at the Las Raíces migrant center and in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, on what was the first official papal visit ever to the islands.

The pope aimed his warning directly at people who profit from desperation and at those who organize what he called death routes across the Atlantic. He paired the moral rebuke with a broader appeal for legal and safe pathways, protection for trafficking victims, international cooperation against smugglers and reception and integration for migrants. Vatican coverage said Leo urged traffickers to stop, repent, make amends and break the chains of bondage, and he framed human dignity as something that, in his words, has no passport.

The Canary Islands have become one of Europe’s most exposed entry points, where overcrowded and often improvised boats carry migrants across a deadly stretch of ocean. The scale of the crisis has grown sharply: the islands received 46,843 irregular migrants in 2024, up from fewer than 1,000 in 2015. An NGO cited in the reporting said more than 3,000 people died in 2025 trying to reach the islands, and more than 1,300 migrants had already died trying to reach the Spanish coast in the first five months of 2026.

Leo’s visit landed as the European Union’s Migration and Asylum Pact became fully applicable on June 12. Human Rights Watch described the pact as 10 binding laws adopted in 2024, and critics have warned that the overhaul could weaken asylum protections even as governments seek tighter control of arrivals. The timing gave Leo’s intervention added political force, especially in a region where local authorities have struggled to absorb a surge in irregular migration over the past decade.

The pope’s language also placed him in a familiar line of papal condemnation aimed at organized crime. Vatican commentary compared his appeal to traffickers with John Paul II’s 1993 call to the Mafia in Agrigento, underscoring how Leo has chosen to cast migration not only as a policy challenge but as a moral indictment of those who turn human movement into a business of exploitation.