On the morning of November 4, 2026, Alberto Medel Ortega, a priest of the Diocese of Xochimilco, went to the passport office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Coyoacán to renew the document that identifies him as a Mexican citizen; however, what should have been a mere procedure turned into an experience of pressure, intimidation, and discrimination because of his status as a clergyman.
This is how Father Medel himself recounted it in a post on X addressed to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. The facts, in summary, amount to the excessive demands by staff that he remove his clerical attire in order to take the photograph and capture biometric data for the required procedure.
Always according to the clergyman’s own account, he respectfully refused, arguing that his face remained visible and that his clothing corresponded to his state of life as a minister of worship, invoking Articles 1 and 24 of the Constitution, which protect religious freedom and prohibit any form of discrimination.
After an initial refusal, a supervisor consulted higher authorities and, initially, the photograph was allowed. However, later, a female official, who did not identify herself by name or position, backed by the presence of a police officer in a clearly intimidating manner, peremptorily ordered him to remove his clothing if he wanted to obtain his passport.
The legal basis? A simple sheet from an internal regulation of the ministry that prohibits photographs with “religious symbols.” Father Medel requested the legal basis in writing and stressed that no internal regulation can prevail over the Constitution or over human rights.
Finally, under pressure that the document would not be processed otherwise, he was forced to comply. He himself described it as humiliation: “Today I was the object of discrimination, my human rights were violated, and I was humiliated by clear expressions of anticlericalism and Christianophobia.”
This episode is not a simple counter error. The Regulations on Passports and the Identity and Travel Document, published on August 5, 2011, in the Official Gazette of the Federation, establish in Article 14, section IV, as a general rule that the photograph be taken “with the head uncovered,” without glasses, in color, and with a white background.
That provision has a legitimate purpose of identification and security. However, its rigid and extensive application to any religious symbol, even when the face remains fully identifiable, conflicts with the fundamental right to manifest one’s beliefs through external signs.
Precisely that conflict was resolved by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. In Amparos in Review 499/2024 and 418/2025, the Full Court granted protection to two Mexican women who profess Islam and who had been required to remove their hijab for the passport photograph.
In the corresponding press release (No. 281/2025), the Court noted that the violation did not stem directly from the text of the regulation, but from the rigid interpretation by the authority in demanding, without exception, that the head be uncovered, even though the hijab covers only the head and leaves the face completely visible.
The SCJN concluded that it is possible to harmonize the purpose of security and identification with the protection of religious freedom: the general rule remains, but it must be applied in such a way that, exceptionally, when a person states that they must wear a religious garment or attire that does not prevent their proper identification, such as the hijab, they are allowed to appear with it in the photograph. The jurisprudential thesis was published on July 3, 2026 in the Semanario Judicial de la Federación.
The same agency and the same type of procedure admitted, by recent and public judicial mandate, the use of the hijab when the face is identifiable. However, at the passport office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Coyoacán, an internal provision written on a sheet of paper was invoked to force a Catholic priest to remove his clerical attire, symbols that also do not conceal the face or hinder biometric identification. Father Medel himself pointed this out in his complaint: a favorable provision for Islamic women had recently been promoted. The difference in treatment is not explained by technical security criteria, but by selective application.
This ambivalence exposes the hypocrisy of a bureaucratic system that, under the banner of secularism, imposes internal rules that are harmful to fundamental rights. The right to believe and to manifest religion through external symbols was recognized by the Court itself in the hijab case. Applying that same standard unequally—tolerance toward one symbol and hostility toward another—reveals ideological, not legal, criteria. A preference is observed for certain religious manifestations that fit into contemporary narratives of “tolerance,” while the expression of the majority Catholic tradition is repressed or made uncomfortable. The result is a secularism that is not neutral; it is selective.
One may ask, with the same logic, what happens with religious women who wear a veil, mantle, or habit that allows their state of life to be identified. If they are also required to remove part of their attire for an official photograph, the same violation of human rights would be incurred. Consistency requires that the criterion be uniform: whenever the face is fully visible and identification is not compromised, the external religious symbol must be respected, regardless of the confession.
Mexico drags along a laicist secularism that should have been overcome long ago. The secularity of the State implies the non-confessional nature of institutions and equality before the law, not the eradication of religious signs from public space or the subordination of citizens to the ideological criteria of officials.
An identification photograph is not an act of proselytism nor a criterion of secularity. Conditioning the issuance of a document that is a citizen’s right on a clergyman removing the clothing that manifests his state of life constitutes, instead, the clearest and most condemnable expression of an intolerant secularism. Internal regulations are not above the Constitution or human rights. The case of Father Alberto Medel Ortega demonstrates this crudely: when the clerical collar is treated as an obstacle and the hijab as a protected exception, equality before the law ceases to be a principle and becomes a selective concession that privileges the entire woke discourse.
The subsequent response of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs also left much to be desired: “I have instructed that his photograph be taken again with his ecclesiastical attire and that his passport be issued. At @SRE_mx, religious freedom is fully respected. We will review the conduct of the staff and the internal provision that was applied.” But the official never offered apologies; he corrects the individual fault, but does not erase the evidence of the criterion applied in the first instance. Although this case may be anecdotal, it is not minor, and a review of the condition of secularity of the Mexican State would be obligatory. As long as the offices of the government of Mexico continue to operate with internal regulations that contradict the jurisprudence of the Court and the constitutional text, episodes like this will continue to be possible in a laicist Republic that claims to be tolerant but, deep down, is selective in discriminating.