At the southwestern rim of El Paso, Tex., a ridge rises from the desert. On its summit, the Sierra de Cristo Rey bears a 40‑ton limestone crucifix, visible for miles—a marker placed decades ago by a parish priest for the men at the mountain’s base who worked in the blistering heat of the nearby smelter.

This Ascension Thursday, Saraith del Valle Nieves Márquez, a young woman from Venezuela, and her father climbed the ridge from the Mexican side. They came as migrants, hoping for a chance to build a life in the United States. Near the summit, having just crossed into U.S. territory, Saraith missed a step, fell and died soon after.

Border Patrol agents allowed her father to be with her at the end. Then they took him into custody, held him in immigrant detention, and later returned him across the bridge into Ciudad Juárez. More than a month on, the family still waits for Saraith’s repatriation—delayed by layers of paperwork and administrative inertia. 

In El Paso, immigration enforcement officers stand at the international bridges to prevent migrants from setting foot on U.S. soil. Their presence—the patrols, the walls, the miles of razor wire—forces many to choose between turning back or crossing desert and ridgeline. Those paths are perilous; Saraith’s death is one among too many.

This June, the Supreme Court granted broad deference to the executive branch to continue policies that effectively bar vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers from reaching territory where they could request protection. The court also affirmed wide latitude for the administration to curtail Temporary Protected Status, relief that shelters many—among them, a number of Venezuelans—from return to danger.

Asylum and T.P.S. are both legal instruments intended to keep people from being sent into harm’s way. Dismantling them does more than intensify enforcement: It narrows lawful pathways and expands the population exposed to detention and deportation. The result is often measured grimly, in an arithmetic of bodies like Saraith’s.

The current campaign of mass detention and deportation has been relentless in its reach, sweeping up people with precarious status and those with none. Its toll is not confined to the border: Migrants have been sent to dangerous detention sites in El Salvador, returned to zones of acute instability such as Haiti, and suffered an alarming rise in deaths in ICE custody and in immigrant detention. In January, U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were also killed in widely condemned encounters with immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

Yet resistance has also taken shape. 

In January, the Twin Cities experienced a heavy deployment of Border Patrol and ICE personnel. The operation, dubbed Metro Surge, followed similar enforcement actions in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles and provoked a widespread community response: Residents recorded enforcement activity, offered mutual aid to affected families and filled the streets in protest. The backlash compelled federal officials to step back. Senior figures overseeing the deployment, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were removed.

Notably, religious communities played a conspicuous role in that pushback. Clergy and lay people of many traditions stood visibly in protest; services and vigils gathered grief into public witness and a suffrage Mass was celebrated for Alex Pretti in the wake of his killing. 

The moral voice of faith communities has become one of the clearest counterweights to harsh policy. Over the past year, the statements of Pope Leo XIV and the condemnation of mass deportations by the U.S. bishops have helped to reframe immigration as a Gospel concern. As Leo recently made clear during his visit to the Canary Islands, human dignity does not end at borders. 

At the ground level, the church has continued to provide legal services, offer pastoral care in detention centers, and publicly affirm the dignity of those affected by these policies. The moral framing provided by church leaders, paired with organized solidarity on the ground, has helped alter the calculus of power and reduce immediate harms for many families.

The recent Supreme Court rulings may have expanded the administration’s power to dismantle protections for migrants, but they should not be read as an endpoint. They can instead be a summons: Humane reform of our immigration system remains urgent. The United States needs a new immigration framework grounded in fairness, compassion, order and realism. Policy should protect human life and family integrity, enable orderly migration and reflect our shared responsibilities.

Saraith’s death on Cristo Rey is a small, devastating illustration of how law, geography and political cruelty meet. The cross atop the mountain overlooks neighborhoods stitched together by cross‑border life: schools, markets, workplaces and people seeking life and opportunity. The mountain remembers those who have come and those who were lost.

If policy is the architecture of our common life, then let it be built so that fewer families wait for a body to be returned, fewer children risk a fatal misstep and fewer families have to bear witness to avoidable loss. The moral and practical work of that reconstruction will require sustained civic pressure, the ongoing moral witness of faith communities and a public voice that refuses to treat human beings as collateral. 

The cross on Cristo Rey will remain; we must shape the world beneath it so that it marks not sorrow alone, but a renewed commitment to our common humanity. 

Dylan Corbett is the executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a Catholic research, advocacy and humanitarian action organization on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is also a former official of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development and of the Vatican’s Migrants Refugees Section.