SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Spain — Pope Leo XIV warned people smugglers on Friday that they will face God's wrath for exploiting the desperation of migrants, demanding they stop and repent during his final day in this epicenter of the African migration route to Europe.
For the second day in a row in the Canary Islands, the American pope insisted on the inherent dignity and rights of migrants and demanded they be welcomed and integrated into society, in some of his strongest comments on the politically divisive issue.
“Break those chains and free those you hold in bondage,” Leo said in a message to human traffickers that he delivered during a meeting with humanitarian aid organizations that help migrants on the island of Tenerife.
Leo was wrapping up his weeklong trip to Spain in the Spanish archipelago, which is closer to Africa than the Iberian Peninsula and is a key point of entry for migrants who make the perilous Atlantic crossing from West Africa.
His return to Rome was delayed when his Iberia charter flight developed a technical problem. King Felipe VI offered his private plane instead, and Leo accepted. The problem couldn't be fixed, so Iberia said it was sending a separate aircraft from Madrid to fetch the journalists and Vatican officials left behind in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
It was the first time in decades that a papal flight had experienced a problem so serious that it required the pope to deplane and change his travel plans.
The pope had been fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit the islands to commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea. He is also drawing attention to the Catholic Church’s biblically-mandated mantra to “welcome the stranger,” amid anti-migrant sentiment in Europe and the Trump administration's mass deportation program in his native United States.
During the encounter with aid groups in Tenerife, Leo implored receiving communities to integrate people fleeing war, poverty and climate change and spare them from the “silent shipwreck” of abandonment when they are left on the streets with nothing after surviving perilous crossings.
“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. Such 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, emphasizing each word in Spanish and drawing a sustained applause from the crowd. “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 to his repertoire: After a onetime migrant offered his testimony during Leo's encounter Friday, the pope 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 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 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. Leo drew a round of applause when he went off-script to tell migrants that he would speak in French and English, the language spoken by many of the people living in the camp.
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.
“We aren't asking for privileges. We aren't asking for compassion. We just want respect, humanity and the chance to live with dignity,” said the woman, identified as Bousso Diouf.
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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