Sanctuary Movement

The sanctuary movement was a religious and political movement of approximately 500 churches of different Christian denominations in the United States, during the years of 1982–92, that assisted in the sheltering of hundreds of Central American refugees from Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) authorities. The movement originated along the U.S. border with Mexico in Arizona but was also strong in Chicago, Philadelphia, and California. It flourished [Page 799]among Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, although various denominations of Jews, Quakers, and Mennonites were also involved.

The national sanctuary movement was originally conceived in 1981 by the collaborations of Rev. John Fife of the Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and Jim Corbett, a retired Quaker rancher. They were responding to an influx into the United States of Central American refugees who needed political asylum but were being deported by the INS. Corbett became involved with the Central American refugees in May 1981 after a friend picked up an El Salvadorian hitch-hiking refugee in the Nogales, Arizona, area. Fife became involved after a news story broke of a professional “coyote” (the Spanish name given to those commercial smugglers who help aliens cross the United States-Mexico border for a fee) abandoned a group of 26 El Salvadorians in the Sonora Desert of Arizona in summer 1980. Half of the refugees died of dehydration, and the other half were placed in detention by the U.S. Border Patrol and processed for deportation. For many people, this story was their first encounter with the INS's treatment of undocumented aliens, and also with the violent political culture of Central America and the U.S. government's support of repressive regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador.

Fife's church started a weekly prayer vigil for the refugees, and the prayer meetings soon transformed into a gathering for immigration lawyers and refugees. In the spring of 1981, the Tucson Ecumenical Council (TEC) created a Task Force on Central America and began to raise money to bail refugees out of detention and to fund paralegals to help with the asylum application process. Yet, after $750,000 in bonds and $100,000 in legal expenses were raised and spent, the TEC declared the efforts futile.

Corbett and Fife began to challenge others to do more than help after refugees were arrested and to be more proactive. Noting that they had worked with the INS in a cooperative manner and exhausted all existing avenues, they began to advocate that church members should take in refugees and protect them from arrest. At first, refugees were taken into members' homes, but soon after church members were transporting refugees away from the border, from the border into the church, and even across the United States-Mexico border.

In the fall of 1981, a group of churches, including the University Lutheran Chapel from Berkeley, California (a sanctuary church for war resisters during the Vietnam War), the Sather Gate Churches, composed of Berkeley pastors, and others, gathered together to form the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. In November 1981, St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley secretly sheltered a refugee family, Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson publicly declared it would be a sanctuary, and University Lutheran Chapel publicly welcomed a refugee family into the church.

...