Inside the parish-led fight against a $123M ICE facility in Texas

SOCORRO, Texas (RNS and El Paso Matters) — In the 1980s, Maria Estella Padilla went door to door after Mass, organizing house meetings to bring running water and sewerage services to hundreds of thousands of homes along the Texas-Mexico border.

Today, at 82, she’s back to organizing her neighbors and fellow parishioners at La Purisima Catholic Church in an effort aimed both at stopping a planned immigration detention center and protecting the access to water that she and others fought so hard to win decades ago.

“We did it back then when we didn’t have the internet, when we didn’t have social media, but now they communicate quickly. It would be easier in a way to do it now than it was back then when we had to go door to door and take signups after Mass,” she said of her latest fight.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, then headed by Secretary Kristi Noem, announced a $38 billion plan to buy and retrofit 11 warehouses across the country to convert them into sprawling detention facilities to serve the administration’s mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants. (DHS spent $1 billion on buying the 11 facilities.)

That included three…