The Department of Homeland Security is reaching for the mountain. Forty thousand pilgrims have climbed Mount Cristo Rey each Good Friday for generations, ascending Sunland Park toward a twenty-nine-foot limestone Christ. Now the state demands fourteen acres of that sacred ground—not to protect it, but to pave it for vehicle barriers, security lighting, cameras, and sensors. We who were inside the Evangelical apparatus recognize the architecture immediately: the state requires a sacrifice from a religious institution, and the institution is forced to decide just how much of the altar it will surrender to the perimeter.
This is not an administrative land grab; it is a collision between two definitions of what counts as sacred space in American life. The Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces now faces the same machinery we have traced before—the administration that sued a Catholic diocese for border-barrier land here is now demanding Mount Cristo Rey’s pilgrimage route. As Ruben Escandon of the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee rightly charged, the government is “starting the construction” and only now attempting to “cover their behinds” through eminent domain. The procedural reply from Customs and Border Protection—that “access to the shrine will not be affected as all attendees enter from the U.S. side”—treats the ascent to the limestone Christ as a commercial transaction, not a holy climb. The same logic fuels the desecration of sacred Indigenous sites by steel and concrete. When the state frames the mountain as a commodity in service of the perimeter, it reduces faith to a gate pass.
Read the Bible’s plain language against that apparatus, and the text refuses to validate the wall’s theological armor. Amos 5:21–24 records God addressing a religious assembly that continues while the people ignore the stranger and the oppressed. “I hate, I despise your religious festivals,” the text says, “your assemblies are a stench to me.” The Hebrew word for assemblies, moed, names the appointed sacred time the pilgrims keep each year on the mountain. The prophet does not separate worship from politics: God despises the festivals when the state’s security architecture traps the vulnerable. Matthew 25:35—the red-letter check that the captured-operation reading cannot absorb—echoes the same reversal: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” The plain-language reading leaves no room for compression; the stranger is the person standing at the gate, and vehicle barriers are the direct refusal of the hospitality the text commands. The captured-operation reading twists “stranger” into a theological category to be screened by cameras and sensors, but the Bible does not rescind its demand when a fence is built around it.
We have seen this machinery deployed before, its parts seamlessly shifting hands. The apparatus that now demands fourteen acres of a Catholic diocesan shrine is the same infrastructure that, from the 1979 SBC conservative resurgence through the contemporary coordination of the Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and the Project 2025 drafters, has co-opted Christian language to cloak a political end. Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have documented the logic: the apparatus turns the faith into a weapon for border enforcement, then floods the holy ground with helicopters, drones, and SUVs. The wall does not make America more Christian; it enacts the exact inversion the prophets named, substituting vehicle barriers for justice and letting the festival become a stench.
Thousands of families and residents—April Fincher, Ramon Garcia, the pilgrims who ascend the mountain each spring—know the state’s security apparatus for what it is: a perimeter that demands the altar’s subordination to its own sacrament of sovereignty. The government claims the operation is necessary; it will install its cameras and assert its ownership. But for those of us who served the apparatus before reading what the apparatus was doing, the task is not to perform moral outrage on behalf of the institution that owns the land. It is to read the plain language we were raised with and acknowledge what it demands when the state erects a wall.
The prophets did not offer a theology of deterrence. They offered a theology of hospitality. If the church allows its holy sites to be reduced to real estate within a border enforcement grid, the state will eventually—and inevitably—demand the mountain itself. The Bible does not revoke that demand when a fence is built around it.