A centuries-old pilgrimage site in New Mexico has become the focus of a legal contest between the Diocese of Las Cruces and the federal government, as the Trump administration seeks to seize church-owned land at the base of Mount Cristo Rey to build additional border wall infrastructure.

The mountain, which straddles the borders of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico near the cities of El Paso and Juárez, is home to a 29-foot limestone statue of Jesus Christ that has drawn pilgrims for more than eight decades. Construction of the statue, envisioned by local priest Father Lourdes Costa, began in 1933, and the monument was formally dedicated in 1940.

A Mass, Not a Protest

On June 28, 2026, Bishop Peter Baldacchino celebrated Mass atop Mount Cristo Rey before a congregation of roughly 400 faithful. Diocesan officials were careful to frame the gathering as an act of worship rather than political demonstration. Deacon Jim Winder emphasized that the liturgy was intended for prayer and unity — to lift up both the Church and civil leaders — not to serve as a public rebuke of federal immigration policy.

Addressing suggestions that the diocese opposes border security, Winder was direct: “We’ve been accused of that, and it’s not correct.” He described the Mass plainly: “It wasn’t meant as a protest. It was a Mass. It was meant for prayer, to bring people together, to practice unity, to pray for the Church, and to pray for government leaders.”

The distinction matters. The Diocese of Las Cruces has not taken a position of blanket opposition to border enforcement. In 2021, church officials permitted federal immigration authorities to construct an access road and install motion sensors on diocesan land at the mountain’s base, an arrangement the diocese renewed in 2023. The conflict now before the courts concerns something more permanent: the government’s use of eminent domain to take that same property for border wall construction.

The Legal Battle

The federal government has moved to seize the diocesan land through eminent domain, a legal authority that allows the government to compel the sale of private property for public use. The diocese is contesting that seizure in federal court, arguing in part that a border wall through the area would impede access for pilgrims who travel to Mount Cristo Rey for prayer and religious observance.

A federal district court ruled in June that the government may proceed — a setback for the diocese, though the legal contest appears to be ongoing. The precise scope of the court’s June ruling was not fully detailed in available reports.

Mount Cristo Rey sits near the now-vanished community of Smeltertown, a former industrial settlement, and occupies a geographically unusual position surrounded on multiple sides by Texas and Mexico. Its status as a pilgrimage destination gives the land a religious significance that the diocese argues goes beyond ordinary property rights.

A Church in Tension With Federal Immigration Policy

The dispute in Las Cruces is one episode in a broader, unresolved tension between the Catholic Church in the United States and the immigration enforcement priorities of the Trump administration. Over roughly the past eighteen months, the U.S. bishops and multiple individual dioceses have publicly raised concerns about federal immigration enforcement, particularly its effects on families and on Church ministries that serve immigrant communities.

The Church’s engagement with immigration is rooted in a long tradition. Catholic social teaching, drawing on Scripture and articulated in documents from Rerum Novarum to Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, holds that nations have a right to regulate their borders while persons retain an inherent dignity that must be respected in the exercise of that authority. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls on prosperous nations to welcome migrants “to the extent they are able.” That teaching does not resolve every policy dispute, but it shapes how the Church approaches them — including, apparently, how a diocese in the New Mexico desert responds when the government seeks to take its land.

The history of Catholic ministry to immigrants in this country is long and deep. Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who built hospitals and orphanages for Italian immigrants in New York, stands as one of the Church’s most celebrated examples of that witness. The Diocese of Las Cruces, in a very different context and by very different means, appears to be drawing on the same inheritance.

The legal proceedings over the Mount Cristo Rey land are continuing. The diocese has not indicated whether it plans to appeal the federal district court’s June ruling.

Category: Social Teaching