Were they illegals?
I have no idea whether they were legal, or not. They just didn't want to go inside the church, but they would drive their wives and chidren to Mass. This was in the Houston suburbs in the 1970s. Fr. Bader would go outside and round them up and make them come inside.
To tell you the truth, in those days in TX nobody seemed to care whether they were legal, or not. Most folks considered them to be illegal, even if they had lived there for generations already. That was about the time that TX passed a law requiring the schoools to educate them, even if they were illegal. Prior to that, they didn't allow them in the schools without proof of citizenship.