"Christians and those who are persecuted in the Middle East should not have to rely on multinational institutions when America can help them directly and tonight it is my privilege to announce that President [Donald] Trump has ordered the State Department to stop funding the ineffective relief efforts of the United Nations and from this day forward America will provide support directly to persecuted communities," he said. The vice president also announced that he will be making a trip to the Middle East in December but did not release details."I promise you one of the messages that I will bring on the president's behalf to the leaders across the region is that now is the time to bring an end to the persecution of Christians and all religious minorities," he said.

Pence was introduced at the dinner by Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, CEO of the Knights of Columbus. The dinner was part of three days of prayer, workshops, meetings and a lobbying effort by the nonprofit In Defense of Christians organization, which advocates mostly for Christians in the Middle East but also calls attention to the plight of other minority groups in the region.The organization primarily aims to call attention to disappearance of Christians from their ancestral home, prompting Christians in the U.S. to do something to help them. The organization claims "over 200,000 volunteer citizen activists" in its ranks.

Pence said Christianity is facing "heartbreaking" acts of violence as well as an "exodus" from its ancestral home, but said the Trump administration is focused on destroying "the embodiment of evil in our time: ISIS." He largely focused on the group as the source of the evils perpetrated on Christians who "are today the targets of unspeakable acts of violence and atrocities."The vice president is correct that Christians are under particularly brutal pressure in countries where local branches of IS are active, such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt," said Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Middle East Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.