SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA LAGUNA – Pope Leo XIV issued a stark warning Friday to migrant smugglers, saying they would answer to God for taking advantage of people driven by desperation. On the final day of his visit to this major hub along the African migration route to Europe, he urged traffickers to stop their abuses and seek repentance.
Speaking to humanitarian organizations in the Canary Islands that assist migrants, Leo delivered a direct appeal to those involved in human trafficking: “Break those chains and free those you hold in bondage.”
The pope concluded his weeklong trip to Spain in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago located nearer to Africa than to mainland Spain and one of the main arrival points for migrants attempting the dangerous Atlantic journey from West Africa.
The visit carries forward a wish expressed by Pope Francis, who had hoped to travel to the islands to honor the thousands who have died at sea. At the same time, Leo is spotlighting the Catholic Church’s biblical call to “welcome the stranger,” even as anti-migrant attitudes harden across Europe and the Trump administration pursues a mass deportation agenda in his native United States.
During a meeting with aid groups in Tenerife, Leo called on host communities to help integrate people escaping war, poverty and climate-related hardship. He said they should not be left to endure the “silent shipwreck” of abandonment after surviving treacherous sea crossings, only to find themselves destitute on the streets.
“A human conscience, and even more so a Christian conscience, cannot remain indifferent in the face of these graveyards of the sea, to the victims of shipwrecks and the lack of aid,” Leo said. “Every life lost on these routes is a failure for the human family.”
A deadly passage and a warning to traffickers
The Canary Islands have long been a stepping stone for migrants trying to reach Europe from West Africa and Morocco.
While people smugglers and human traffickers operate the Atlantic route, there are also many self-organized boats of migrants, including many former fishermen from Senegal who were left without income due to overfishing in recent years.
Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands peaked in 2024 at nearly 47,000. They have fallen dramatically, with over 3,000 people landing there in the first five months of 2026.
Because of the vastness of the ocean and scarcity of rescue ships or monitoring, some experts consider the Atlantic route more deadly than the more well-known central Mediterranean smuggling route from Libya and Tunisia to Italy. Since 2020, several West African boats have been found in the Caribbean and Latin America with only dead bodies on board after drifting across the Atlantic, pushed by trade winds and currents.
Leo directed his remarks Friday to the criminal organizations and individual smugglers who organize these “death routes” to Europe. These smugglers charge thousands of euros a person and often force their passengers into prostitution or other forms of black market labor by withholding their documents to pay off the debt.
“Stop. Repent,” Leo said in his message to traffickers. “For every life lost, every family deceived, every body subjugated, every woman threatened, every worker exploited, you will have to appear before divine justice.”
“Repent while there is still time, for God’s mercy can reach even the most hardened sinner, but it enters only through the narrow gate of truth, justice and conversion,” he said.
With his two-day visit to the Canary Islands, Leo has confirmed himself as the heir of Francis’ migration preaching, which was a priority of Francis’ 12-year pontificate and often caused friction with U.S. and European powers.
History’s first U.S.-born pope has not only echoed Francis’ message and gestures, he has expanded and amplified them during a deeply symbolic visit. Upon arrival on Thursday, Leo threw a bouquet of flowers into the sea from a port nicknamed the “Dock of Shame” in 2020, when migrants were forced to live in squalor during a spike in their arrivals.
Leo’s gesture mimicked the one Francis made in 2013 when he visited Lampedusa, Sicily, another flashpoint in Europe’s migration drama, and denounced the “globalization of indifference” that the world showed asylum seekers.
But in a sign Leo is making the papacy his own, the 70-year-old pope has added a new gesture: After a onetime migrant offered his testimony, Leo did the viral “6-7” hand gesture that’s popular with young people as he joked alongside him. That earned the pope cheers and applause from the crowd.
Leo meets with migrants at reception center
In the Canary Islands and in remarks on the Spanish mainland, Leo has reaffirmed the right of migrants to flee but also to stay home, demanding their countries of origin provide the necessary economic and security conditions. He shamed European countries that turn their back on migrants’ plights, and said every Christian cannot remain indifferent.
On Friday, he noted that for the Catholic Church, the process of integrating migrants into a community can become a chance at spreading the faith, “without imposing” it and in respect of the migrants’ own beliefs.
Leo opened the final day of his trip by visiting the Las Raíces migrant camp and meeting with migrants. Leo drew a round of applause when he went off-script to tell them that he would speak in French and English.
One woman told him of the desperation that drove her to leave her homeland and family, the trauma of the crossings, and her gratitude at finding safety and a new life. The woman, identified as Bousso Diouf, asked for respect and dignity for all migrants.
Next month, on July 4, the American pope will spend U.S. Independence Day on the island of Lampedusa, where Francis in 2013 first denounced the “globalization of indifference” the world shows migrants.
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