Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who was born in El Salvador and was smuggled into the U.S. as a teen in the trunk of a car, is leaving Washington, D.C., to lead the Catholic Church in West Virginia, a state where Catholics and Latinos are a tiny slice of the population.
Pope Francis named Menjivar-Ayala, who became a citizen in 2006, an auxiliary — or assistant — bishop in Washington in 2023, making him the first Salvadoran bishop in the country. He has been outspoken about the plight of migrants ever since, more loudly since the crackdown and mass deportations of the Trump administration.
