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.
That is an appalling example of prejudice and willful ignorance, which doesn’t surprise me-I’ve never lived in or near Houston, which was at that time more like cities in some other state in the collective ignorance and bigotry seen there. The uninformed there call all Hispanics “f’ing Mexican”, but have repeatedly elected a representative who actually said America put astronauts on Mars-Sheila Jackson Lee...
Mexicans are people from Mexico, not Texas-people who consider native Texans of Hispanic/Latino/Mexican ancestry anything but Texans are insulting people who have been here since this was New Spain, and could be treated to tar and feathers by native Texans of any ethnicity in southwest Texas ranch country where my family has been for a couple of centuries-we are Texans, and have been for far longer than any other ethnic group here...