The Chapel at the Border
MISSION, TEXAS—About a hundred parishioners gathered for Mass at a white adobe chapel built beside the Rio Grande in 1899. Father Roy Snipes, the parish priest, tolled the rusty church bell by hand, signaling the start of a welcome-home service for migrant farmworkers and “Winter Texans”—retirees flocking back to the Rio Grande Valley for another season of warm November mornings like this. But just as Snipes began to speak, an olive-drab military helicopter—part of President Donald Trump’s troop surge at the border—drowned out his welcome message. “Grandaddy would have never believed that,” Snipes said, his white cassock billowing. “It’s like a priest saying Mass in a war zone.” The military presence only foreshadowed what might be an even starker federal presence at the chapel: La Lomita stands in the proposed path of President Trump’s border wall.
Last year, more than 160,000 people crossed the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley, making the region a top priority for border-wall construction. Customs and Border Protection maps from July 2017 showed that the agency planned to build a wall segment just yards from La Lomita, which means “little hill.” At best, the” south of the wall, but north of the border itself. At worst, advocates feared that the chapel could be bulldozed. Then, on February 14, Congress funded 55 miles of new walls in the Rio Grande Valley, and for the chapel into the bill. For a moment, La Lomita seemed safe. But then President Trump declared a national emergency to unlock more wall-building money than Congress had allowed. Administration officials claimed that the congressional restrictions don’t apply to the national-emergency funds, leaving the chapel’s future again uncertain.
