Donald Trump is seizing a Catholic mountain to build his wall. The Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Kristi Noem, filed an eminent domain lawsuit seeking fourteen acres of Mount Cristo Rey in Sunland Park, New Mexico, where for generations forty thousand pilgrims a year have climbed to a twenty-nine-foot limestone statue of Christ on the summit. The Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces is in federal court arguing that the seizure would substantially burden the free exercise of religion. The government wants the land for roads, fencing, vehicle barriers, security lighting, cameras, and sensors. Ruben Escandon, who helps maintain the shrine with an all-volunteer committee sustained by donations, told NPR the government started the construction before filing the lawsuit and is now trying to cover itself by seeking the property after the fact. The plain English word for what the administration is doing is desecration, and the country is owed the courage to use the word.
The statue overlooks the meeting of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. On Good Friday, tens of thousands of the faithful walk the path to the summit. Families have made the climb for three generations. The mountain is not a park. It is not a scenic overlook. It is a place of prayer. The diocese describes it as a holy site. To seize it for a wall is to seize an altar.
The government’s eminent domain suit comes with construction already underway. Helicopters, drones, Border Patrol agents on horseback, and SUVs patrol the area. Ground sensors and cameras are in place. Customs and Border Protection issued a statement that access to the shrine would not be affected because attendees enter from the U.S. side. The agency’s assurance does not address what the pilgrims themselves are saying: that the wall infrastructure and enforcement presence have already changed what it means to approach the mountain, and that the seizure of diocesan land at the base of the shrine is the government claiming dominion over what the church has held in trust. The legal fight, federal officials say, could take months. The construction is not waiting.
“I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” Jesus said. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The pilgrims who climb Mount Cristo Rey each year include the stranger, and many of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants, walking a path that connects them to family and to faith across the border the government is now fortifying. The Christ they are climbing to meet is the Christ of Matthew 25, the one who said the stranger is his own body. The wall the government is building at the foot of the mountain is being built between the body of Christ and the body of Christ.
The Torah commands the love of the ger — the resident alien, the stranger in the land — in more passages than any other commandment, warning Israel that they were once strangers in Egypt and must not oppress the stranger now. The seizure of land for a wall that divides families and nations is the vexing of the stranger written into infrastructure.
Pope Francis stood at Lampedusa in 2013 and named what the world had become: a globalization of indifference in which the suffering of migrants does not move us because we have become used to their deaths; seven years later Fratelli Tutti commanded Catholics holding public office to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate the stranger. Those of us who came up in the parish life of the Catholic-Right alignment of the eighties and nineties helped build the political consensus that made the border wall bipartisan, taught to name abortion as the priority and immigration as the policy question, and the distance between those two framings let the deportation machine operate without the sustained moral witness the issue demanded. The present cruelty does not cancel the prior years, and the prior years do not soften what is happening now. The Trump administration has crossed a threshold the country has not crossed before: the federal seizure of a Catholic pilgrimage site for border enforcement infrastructure while construction is already underway. The Diocese of Las Cruces, in its court filing, is standing on magisterial ground. The Free Exercise claim is not a legal maneuver. It is the church saying what the government is doing makes the practice of the faith materially harder, and the First Amendment forbids it.
A border policy that honored human dignity would recognize the right to migrate when staying means starvation, open a pathway for those already here who have been part of communities for decades, and protect those fleeing violence. It would not seize a mountain where Christ stands overlooking three nations and say the land is needed for sensors and barriers. The wall at Mount Cristo Rey is a monument to the proposition that security is worth more than prayer, that sovereignty is worth more than the stranger, and that the state’s claim on fourteen acres of diocesan property is worth more than the free exercise of forty thousand pilgrims.
Mr. President, the mountain is not yours to take. The Christ at the summit is the same Christ you claim. You can stop the seizure. You can recall the order. The door of return is open. The legal fight will take months, but the construction does not have to continue. The pilgrims are still climbing, as they have climbed for generations, because the mountain is not the government’s to take and the faith is not the government’s to burden. The Christ at the summit is still there. The question is whether those of us below — the ones who cast the votes, who hold the offices, who built the wall or remained silent while it was built — will meet him as he asked to be met, in the face of the stranger.