Albuquerque's Muslims asked to build a mosque. The answer came in threats, and then a gun.

Analysis filed Oct 21, 2026.

Record no. HR-0007
Logged: Oct 21, 2026
Platform and place: Facebook and public hearings, Albuquerque's North Valley, New Mexico
What: threats and anti-Muslim rhetoric aimed at the Albuquerque Islamic Center's planned mosque and school, and a July 22 armed confrontation at a Catholic parish whose pastor supported it
Status: one man charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; the threats against the Islamic Center are not publicly tied to anyone
Names: no private person is named here for speech under our standards

A Muslim congregation in Albuquerque wanted to build a mosque and a school on 3.6 acres off Second Street and Alameda. It bought the land from a local family. It filed the paperwork. It went to the county like every church, temple and Walmart before it.

What it got back was threats. Bad enough that the Bernalillo County Planning Commission had to postpone the hearing. When the hearing finally happened on July 1, opponents talked about traffic for a while, and then they talked about "Sharia law."

Three weeks later, a man was standing on the grounds of a Catholic church holding a gun. His offense, according to police, began with a priest who had said the mosque should be built.

The Hate Record keeps describing the same sequence because it keeps happening. Grievance first. Then dehumanizing language. Then unverified claims. Then "someone needs to do something." Then addresses. The North Valley ran nearly the whole thing in one summer.

The grievance was land use: noise, traffic, the character of an agricultural neighborhood. Those are real arguments, and plenty of people made them in good faith.

The language came fast behind it. The Albuquerque Journal reported that the hearing's arguments about traffic gave way to fears about "polluting future generations" and Sharia law moving into the neighborhood. CAIR condemned the rhetoric publicly.

Then the threats. The hearing was delayed after the Islamic Center received them. ANIA's monitoring of local Facebook pages logged calls to desecrate the site before a shovel had touched dirt.

Then someone did something.

Father Vincent Paul Chávez, pastor of St. Therese of the Infant Jesus on Fourth Street, used his one minute at the July 1 hearing to support the mosque. He said he hoped the fight was not about racism.

A local opponent recorded him, posted it to Facebook and urged followers to call the archdiocese and demand he be removed. The priest answered on his church's letterboard with her first name and last initial under the word racism. On July 22 she came to film the sign. When the parish facilities director asked her to leave, she called her boyfriend.

According to the criminal complaint, he took a gun from his vehicle, pointed it at the groundskeeper and the priest, and threatened to kill the groundskeeper. He told police he grabbed the gun but never pointed it at anyone. He is 72, and he is charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The woman has not been charged. Neither has anyone at the parish.

Nobody was shot. That is the good news, and it is not much. A mosque fight in a zoning room ended with a weapon drawn at a church, over a priest's one minute of public comment.

The couple's legal defense page says they have received death threats too, including against their families. That is also hate, and it is also wrong. Threats running in every direction is not a sign the fever broke. It is the fever.

The New Mexico Inquirer, a sister publication, has the full account of the people involved, by name: Katrina Griego Called St. Therese Too Woke. Then Came the Gun.

CAIR says it documented 17 incidents targeting mosques and Islamic places of worship across the country in May, June and July of this year. That is more than half of last year's entire total, and a 183 percent increase over the same three months a year earlier, when it counted six.

One of those months included May's attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, where three people were killed, among them a security guard who confronted the two attackers. In June, two Albuquerque Jewish organizations were vandalized. The people who hate one house of worship rarely stop at one.

Albuquerque's Muslims have been here before. In 2022, four Muslim men were killed in the city in the space of months, and the community lived in fear until an arrest was made. Nobody there needs a statistic to know what a threat against a mosque feels like.

A week after the gun, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Quaker leaders gathered inside St. Therese, holding red roses, to say this was not who Albuquerque is. Congregation Nahalat Shalom stood with the Islamic Center. The man whose family sold the land said plainly that he supports the mosque being built there. Archbishop John C. Wester said Muslims have the same right to worship freely as every other faith community, including his own.

The Planning Commission rejected the appeal. The mosque is going forward.

That is the answer the threats were supposed to prevent. They didn't. The congregation still gets its building. The Hate Record will be watching to see whether it also gets to use it in peace.

Method and disclosure: drawn from public reporting by the Albuquerque Journal, KOB, the Santa Fe New Mexican, Searchlight New Mexico, OSV News and Catholic News Agency; CAIR's public statements and its figures on incidents at mosques, which count reports CAIR documented, not verified crimes; the criminal complaint as reported by the Journal; and ANIA's read-only monitoring of public Facebook pages in Albuquerque in October 2026. The threats that delayed the June hearing have not been publicly attributed to any person, and nothing here suggests the people involved at St. Therese made them. Statements about July 22 are allegations; no one has been convicted. We contacted CAIR, which responded; the Albuquerque Islamic Center, whose listed email bounced; Father Chávez; and the couple through their attorney. The publisher, Pesach Lattin, is an Orthodox Jew and has no financial relationship with any party named. ANIA is a privately held, independent intelligence firm, not a government agency. Corrections and tips: [email protected] or 505 932 9060.