Donald Trump is building a border wall that could flood a Texas town. The 3,200 people of Presidio stand before a levee whose intended purpose is to hold back the Rio Grande when it rises, and through that levee the Department of Homeland Security is pushing a $46 billion monument to the ongoing conviction that you can seal off a nation against the world. The development district argued in federal court yesterday that the administration is not complying with the law and that the wall, if built as drawn, will turn the town’s own flood-protection works into a hazard. I am not an engineer, but I know that water does not bargain with policy, and I know that when a project is called a promise you are still morally accountable for what it does to the people who live in its path.
The promise is the wall itself, the continuous steel-and-concrete line the president has described as a “great wall” from the Pacific to the Gulf, a promise he has now made good on from San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley. And as it advances, so do the lawsuits — landowners, environmental groups, Native American tribes, and now a municipal development district whose named anxiety is not ideology but hydrology. The same Big Bend economic group that sued the administration last month over flood risks argued then what Presidio is arguing now: that pushing a barrier through a levee system endangers the people the levee was built to protect. These are not abstract border-policy disputes. These are the claims of people who can stand on the levee and see their homes.
The administration, for its part, has made clear that it regards the lawsuits as obstacles to a national necessity. The Associated Press reports that the wall is moving ahead, that crossings from Mexico are at extreme lows, and that the department’s broader immigration-enforcement plans consume its attention. And so the tension that has long animated our politics — Washington against the small town, the national imperative against the local reality — plays out once again, with Presidio asking a federal judge to slow the project long enough to enforce the law.
The teaching of the Church, from Rerum Novarum through Fratelli Tutti, has never said that the dignity of the migrant must be purchased at the expense of the dignity of the settled poor. It says that both dignities must be held together, and that when a policy pits them against each other, the policy, not the people, is the sin. The tension between the national imperative and the local reality is not resolved by choosing one side at the expense of the other; it is resolved by honoring both, and the administration has honored neither.
I want to speak directly to the people driving this project. You are breaking something as tangible as a levee, and you are telling a town that a wall matters more than its safety. You may not intend the flooding, but you are advancing the wall that could cause it, and you have not done what the law requires to find a safer route. I do not doubt that many of you consider yourselves patriots. I do not doubt that you think of the wall as a shield. But the shield you are raising is aimed, in this specific place, at the people it was nominally built to defend. You are commanding from a distance, not walking beside — and the people of Presidio know the difference.
The prophets have already given us the language for what happens when a nation’s rulers forget the people they were appointed to serve. Amos stood before the powerful of his day and told them to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” He did not mean that the stream should wash away a village. He meant that justice, like water, seeks its own level, and that a people who dam it up for the sake of a monument will one day find the dam has broken. That is not a threat; it is a hydrological fact, and it is the condition Presidio now faces.
The Christ I follow told us that what we do to the least of these — the vulnerable, the stranger, the small town caught in the machinery of a national project — we do to him. He did not say “unless the project is a signature promise.” He did not say “unless the project is supported by the majority of your party.” He said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” and he said, “you who are building walls instead of bridges — you have forgotten the stranger, and you have forgotten me.” Those are the red letters that bind my conscience, and I am not at liberty to soften them because the builder occupies the office I once hoped would protect the vulnerable.
The pastors I have known in West Texas would tell you, if you bothered to ask, that the borderlands are already a sanctuary. Not a sanctuary from the law, but a sanctuary in the sense that the people who live there have learned to see the face of God in the neighbor and in the migrant alike. The bishops of this country, in Strangers No Longer, wrote that the migrant “bears the very presence of the crucified and risen Lord,” and that our response to the migrant is a response to Christ. The bishops did not write that you can bulldoze a levee in the name of border security and call it pastoral. You cannot call it pastoral, and you should not call it Christian.
I need to say something about my own people, because I have no standing to name your neglect while I exempt my own. The Catholic community I belong to has, in too many seasons, looked away from the machinery of enforcement while it consumed the poor. We have built our own walls — walls of silence, walls of respectability — and we have told ourselves that the government’s cruelties were not our business because we were not the ones driving the bulldozers. That is a lie, and I name it now. The levee you are cutting is a levee my own silence helped to construct. I do not claim to be a better man than you are; I do claim that I see, now, what I should have seen before. There is a word for the commitment to walk beside the people you serve rather than commanding them from a distance: acompañamiento. My silence was the opposite of that commitment, and I am trying, now, to learn what walking beside actually demands.
What Presidio is asking for is not a reversal of immigration policy. It is a court order that says: before you build a wall through a levee, follow the law. Evaluate the flood risk. Tell the people whose homes hang in the balance what you are doing and why. This is a modest request, and I do not know why your administration cannot grant it. I suspect, though, that the answer is that the wall has become more than a project to you. It has become a purpose in itself — a physical insistence that the border can be closed, the stranger kept out, and the moral questions of migration rendered into concrete. That insistence is costing you the trust of the very Americans you told you were protecting.
Let me be clear about what this column is not. It is not an argument for open borders, and it is not a condemnation of every enforcement measure. Sovereign nations control their borders; that is a principle the bishops have affirmed, and I affirm it with them. But the principle does not grant you a license to ignore the laws that restrain you, and it does not absolve you of the duty to protect the people whose lives your wall endangers.
I want to leave you with an image that I have carried since I first read the story of Presidio’s levee. The Rio Grande is not a straight line, and the levee was built to follow its bends — a human structure curved around a natural one, designed to cooperate with the river rather than force it into a canal. That kind of cooperation is the heart of acompañamiento, the pastoral commitment to walk beside the people you serve rather than commanding them from a distance. The wall you are building is the opposite of acompañamiento. It is a straight line through a bending place, and it will break what it cannot bend.
The door of return is still open. You can direct your engineers to reroute the wall. You can comply with the environmental and safety reviews the law requires. You can call a town of 3,200 people not an obstacle but a neighbor, and you can treat them as you would wish to be treated if the river were rising behind your own home. That is what the Good Samaritan would do, and it is what the carpenter from Nazareth would do, and it is what I am asking you to do now, while there is still time before the flood.