Sanctuary
In January 1982 Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson gathered to discern whether it would establish itself as a sanctuary for people fleeing political violence in El Salvador. After five hours of discussion, largely derailed by one vocal opponent of the idea, the vote was called: 79–2 in favor. The congregation would declare itself a sanctuary on the anniversary of the assassination of St. Oscar Romero, March 24. One of the action’s opponents immediately reported the church to the FBI.
Southside had no intention of hiding what they were about to do. On the 23rd, their pastor John Fife wrote to federal attorneys and INS officers informing them of the church’s plan to break the law, demanding an end to deportation of refugees. At 10AM on the 24th, at a table outside the church building, in front of eight TV news crews, Fife read the church’s declaration. He then introduced Alfredo, a Salvadoran agrarian reform worker who had fled from the national army. Newsweek would describe Alfredo as a guerrilla.
Within a year, some 1600 Salvadorans would transit through Southside Tucson, making up half of one percent of all undocumented Salvadorans living in the U.S.
Over the next several years activists in Tucson and their network of supporters would face surveillance, indictment, and prosecution for shielding and transporting refugees and asylum seekers from Central America. Their movement, in defense of the poor and the stranger, against the United States’ unjust immigration enforcement, and against the U.S. war machine that provoked the migrants’ flight, would be called Sanctuary.
John Fife later said that the church didn’t come to its decision with a mass movement in mind. “I thought that what we were doing was in isolation here in Tucson. And basically it was in self-defense. We didn’t want to do it. It was all in response to Border Patrol and us scrambling to figure out what the heck to do now.” Sanctuary was less a strategy than an immediate response to a crisis that had been brewing for years.
On July 3, 1980 a group of urban Salvadoran refugees guided three coyotes attempted to cross into Arizona through the Sonoran desert. Two of the coyotes fled mid-day, abandoning the men and women to heat exhaustion. By nightfall one woman had died. By the second day, July 4, Border Patrol had found the party. Thirteen survivors remained of the original 26 migrants. One coyote had also died, only after apparently beating several of the migrant women to death.
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church (Tucson, Ariz.) and its pastor David Sholin spearheaded support for the thirteen survivors, raising $2000 for their bond. At Sholin’s request the Tucson Ecumenical Council organized a Task Force on Central America, which began educating its member churches. Sholin, Fife, Father Ricardo Elford and other organizers began weekly worship services every Thursday night outside the Tucson federal building, in protest of U.S. immigration policy and against U.S. support for death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The TEC soon built a national network of supporters, able to raise $750,000 for bail and legal fees for migrants.
In July 1981 the TEC began direct support for migrants within the confines of immigration law. Fife reflected on this in Sojourners in 1985, “If you hear from the INS that what those churchpeople ought to do is try to work within the law first, we did it.” They first bailed out Central American migrants who had been transferred to INS detention at El Centro, California. Conditions there were squalid. More than 400 people were locked in an outdoor “corral” built for 250. Daytime temperatures were over 110. TEC volunteers spent two weeks that summer bailing out detainees, and finding sponsors to shelter them during the asylum process.
The legal path would prove unsustainable. INS was deporting thousands of people daily, most of whom never learned that they had the right to legal representation and the right to remain in the U.S. during the asylum process.
Doing sanctuary outside the bounds of immigration law began informally. In November 1981 in Berkeley, California, an Immigration agent chased down an undocumented man into a church. The local backlash led the INS director to order that no arrests be made in churches, schools, or hospitals. Soon St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley began sheltering a Central American family. In Tucson, the Quaker activist Jim Corbett was sheltering 21 Salvadorans in an adobe house on his land. Corbett asked Southside for help.
Fife advocated a strategy of “public Sanctuary”. Publicity would garner sympathy for migrants and develop enmity for government agents, and the INS knew it. One agent assigned to surveil the Tucson group wrote about the religious workers’ “ploy” to “demonstrate to the public that the U.S. government via its jack-booted gestapo Border Patrol Agents think nothing of breaking down the doors of their churches to drag Jesus Christ out to be tortured and murdered.”
Fife said in a 1990 interview that Southside aimed to beat the government to the punch, “take the initiative, and we’ll go public. And then when we’re indicted at least we’ll have some interpretation. I think what I said was that they’ll have to play in our playground.”
For a year there was relative quiet. In December of 1982, 60 Minutes aired a piece on the Sanctuary movement that acquainted U.S. audiences with the root causes of migration from Central America. The program featured a mendacious appearance by assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who claimed that Salvadorans were “economic migrants” who did not face torture and murder back home. INS started an undercover operation, infiltrating the movement in Tucson, Nogales, and Phoenix. The agents were younger than most Sanctuary activists, “they drove Trans Ams, were available 24 hours a day to do transporting, and seemed eager to take days off work to drive Central Americans to safe houses.” INS agents wore wires to record Sanctuary workers’ and migrants’ conversations in homes, churches, and on the road.
In March 1984, TEC worker Phil Willis-Conger was stopped by Border Patrol, searched, and had his personal papers seized. These included Sanctuary contacts, maps to houses sheltering migrants, and strategy documents. A judge dropped Willis-Conger’s indictment, ruling that the seizure was illegal. But the event was the first notice to Sanctuary workers that they were under threat.
“There is but one leader here, and that leader is just beyond the reach of the immigration service.”
Finally in January 1985 a Phoenix grand jury indicted sixteen Sanctuary workers, including John Fife, for 71 counts related to transporting migrants, sheltering them, and conspiracy to violate immigration law. The trial began in November. The prosecution depicted the Sanctuary workers as a human trafficking ring, “masterminded” by John Fife. The defense countered in its opening argument that the workers were plainly adhering to religious obligations, and were organized only by God: “There is no command structure here, there is but one leader here, and that leader is just beyond the reach of the immigration service.”
Testimony about the conditions leading to any refugee’s flight from El Salvador was not heard by the jury, but select refugees were allowed to testify before the court. Among them was Francisco Nieto Nuñez, a doctor working among refugees inside El Salvador. He described his and his wife’s imprisonment and torture by the national police. While he was in prison, police came to his house, abducted his child from his spouse, and in front of him, submerged the baby’s head in water until Nieto signed a false confession.
Also called to testify were two Presbyterian co-conspirators, Kay Kelly of Southside Tucson, and Mary Ann Lundy, part of the Sanctuary group at Riverside Church in New York City. Both refused to testify, were held in contempt of court, and were sentenced to house arrest.
The trial ended in May 1986 with convictions of eight defendants out of the eleven. John Fife faced ten years in prison, others faced between 5 and 15. During the two months between trial and sentencing, the court received waves of messages urging leniency, including from 47 members of Congress. That July the defendants were sentenced to three to five years’ probation, suspended.
Fife would be elected moderator of the 204th General Assembly in Milwaukee in 1992. He continues to advocate for migrants, the poor, and the dispossessed, and was a founding member of No More Deaths / No Más Muertes. Mary Ann Lundy served in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Women’s Ministry Unit beginning in 1997, and would organize the feminist theological conference Re-Imagining in 1993.
Forty years later U.S. immigration policy has hardened, and even liberal leaders don’t think twice about shipping people back into mortal peril, a practice called refoulement. The principle of non-refoulement is enshrined in Article 33 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The principle of caring for people where they land is so sacrosanct in international law that even states that are not signatories to the Convention are nevertheless expected to adhere to Article 33. The U.S. is a signatory.
During the Trump administration the U.S. developed “third country” agreements with Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, which it used to deport refugees to the countries they fled from. The Biden administration has continued this policy, overseeing “stealth deportations” of people back to Venezuela.
From this vantage, the Sanctuary moment forms part of a continuous Christian bond of solidarity with migrants and the poor. In a 1990 sermon John Fife describes going to a palatial dinner at the Phoenician, a luxury hotel built by the felon and fraud Charles Keating, saying you don’t need to look out over a swimming pool inlaid in mother-of-pearl to witness our fundamental failure to care for our neighbors. “Just drive around the streets of this city. Just look at what people think is theirs, what belongs to them. That they believe they deserve as a reward for their labors. And then drive through the fence at Nogales and look at the suffering. Look at the hungry children in the face.”
Learn more:
HiIlary Cunningham, God and Caesar on the Rio Grande, 1995.
Ann Crittenden, Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and Law in Collision, 1988.
