On August 8, Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez moved into First & Summerfield Methodist Church in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. At the time, the historic building had no shower. So, as the church’s first resident in sanctuary, Reyes built one. It’s been a welcome addition, and a gesture of his gratitude.
A local group, Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), did all the prep work to get him in. “I didn’t know anything about the church. But now,” he says, “I think all the church members are angels. They are always thinking about me and what I need as if I were their son, as if this were my house.”
Reyes now lives in a cozy combined bedroom-living room-study created for his use. He also has access to the entire building, including an institutional kitchen and dining area in the basement, where his wife, Fanny, and their three children visit and come to share meals, and where community events are held. During rallies outside the church, he can step onto the front portico, behind a wrought iron fence, and speak to his supporters.
Still, Reyes’s world has shrunk since he took refuge here, just before federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities ordered him to return to his native Ecuador, which he hasn’t seen in twenty years. Reyes is seeking asylum in the United States, citing a well-founded fear of persecution if he returns.
Eino Sierpe
Marco Antonio Reyes (left) and son, Anthony Reyes, speak at a rally in New Haven
An immigration judge denied three emergency stays of removal. The case to reopen his asylum claim is now before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which usually takes six to nine months to make a ruling. If it’s not favorable, he will appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which could issue an emergency stay.
Reyes’s world has shrunk since he took refuge in the church, just before federal immigration authorities ordered him to go to his native Ecuador, which he hasn’t seen in twenty years and to which he's afraid to return.
Reyes is one of two residents from different countries given sanctuary this summer in New Haven churches. This small city (population 130,000) is home to a confluence of players—grassroots organizations, city and state officials, legal assistance groups, and communities of faith—that have created a welcoming place for the undocumented, both those seeking to live normal lives and those threatened with immediate deportation.
A resident of Meriden, Connecticut, about a half-hour drive away, Reyes came to New Haven due to the efforts of ULA, which advocates and organizes for immigrant rights. He marvels at the reception he’s received: “Since I am not from New Haven, to have so much support, the people of New Haven have been very generous and kind.”
New Haven claimed national leadership of the movement in July 2007, when it became the first city in the country to issue resident ID cards without regard to citizenship.
Thousands of residents—native born and not, documented and not—snaked around the block outside City Hall to get their IDs. That roll-out was preceded by a general order from the chief of police that, with some exceptions, residents were not to be interrogated about their immigration status when interacting with police. It was the first of its kind in the state. Before that, the undocumented were known as “walking ATMs” because they were unable to open bank accounts and so carried their pay in cash and were often robbed. At least one was murdered.
John Jairo Lugo, a Colombian immigrant who co-founded ULA, recalls the group’s origins in 2002, “when we got together as a community and brainstormed how to make New Haven a model city in the treatment of immigrants.” Group members discussed ending racial profiling of immigrants, creating a policy (enacted in 2006) of police noncooperation with ICE, and translating public documents into Spanish.
“We got together as a community and brainstormed how to make New Haven a model city in the treatment of immigrants.”
Unidad Latina en Acción, Lugo says, made common cause with Junta for Progressive Action, a venerable New Haven-based Latino service organization. “And then as both organizations we got together and had a meeting with [then Mayor] John DeStefano [Jr.], so we’re the ones who convinced them that it was a good thing for the city and also for the community.”
John Jairo Lugo, co-founder of Unidad Latina en Acción.
DeStefano, who was mayor of New Haven from January 1994 to January 2014, agrees that the momentum for change came from the bottom up. “The advocacy of Junta and ULA and Saint Rose of Lima on behalf of immigrant populations has been extraordinary,” he says. DeStefano recruited Kica Matos, Junta’s executive director, to join his administration to implement the ID card program. “Grassroots support made it easier for me to play the role I played because so much of the community who I worked for thought it was an important thing to do, and we had the ability, by virtue of our offices, to do something good and important.”
Matos, who worked at City Hall from 2007 to 2010, says she and DeStefano received hate mail and death threats for promoting the ID cards. “Hate groups were active and descended on New Haven because they had a sense if we were able to do this it could be replicated in other cities and we were opening the door to new ways to welcome immigrants and to have lives filled with dignity and be part of the community.”
Saint Rose of Lima, a church in New Haven, is home to parishioners from eighteen Latin American countries, predominantly Mexico and Ecuador. They filled the city’s aldermanic chambers twice in support of the ID card, which was something they saw as a critical need.
Immediately after the city’s Board of Alders approved the ID card program (using an outside grant, not city funds, to minimize taxpayer opposition), ICE carried out a raid that led to the arrest of thirty-two undocumented immigrants in the city’s Fair Haven section. The raid took place with no notice to or collaboration with the city’s police department, which opposed it.
But, after several months, things quieted down and DeStefano believes the ID card paved the way for the Connecticut General Assembly to approve driver’s licenses for undocumented drivers in 2013.
In 2017, the word “sanctuary” has taken on new meaning, and new urgency.
“I started to work on the sanctuary movement when Trump was elected,” says Pastor Héctor Otero of Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal, a church in Fair Haven. As president of the city’s Hispanic clergy association, he talked with fellow clergy members, social activists, and a legal adviser to understand the concept.
“I am a man of faith, but I am also a man of law and order,” Otero says. “But I am trying to help people—that is my job.” He and other clergy had a meeting with the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, who explained the protocol for “sensitive locations.” ICE issued a memorandum in 2011 clarifying that certain locations—including houses of worship, schools, hospitals and other medical sites, and, perhaps surprisingly, demonstrations—are places where, barring exceptional circumstances, ICE agents would not execute an arrest.
“I am a man of law and order. But I am trying to help people—that is my job.”
Otero says his board voted unanimously to open the church’s doors for sanctuary, for those deemed to have a strong chance of winning at least a reprieve to work on their legal cases.
On July 20, Guatemalan immigrant Nury Chavarria arrived from her home in Norwalk, Connecticut. A single working mother of four, including a disabled child, she had been in the United States for twenty-four years, and had no criminal record.
The community united behind her, holding rallies in the empty lot next to the church. After just a week and some high-powered legal maneuvering, an immigration judge in Hartford issued a temporary stay of removal, and Chavarria returned to her family and her job, while her legal team continues trying to get the court to reopen her case.
When Chavarria entered the church, her attorney opposed the move, fearing it would hurt her case, and requested help from the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School. Under the supervision of professors Michael Wishnie and Muneer Ahmad and others, law students have worked on individual cases and broken new ground in immigration law.
Back in 2007, after the ICE raid that swept up thirty-two immigrants, students at the clinic worked feverishly with community advocates. Wishnie said they managed to locate the thirty-two arrestees and return all but one to their families and community in Fair Haven. He added that clinic students also represented arrestees who chose to fight their deportation cases, winning all except for one case that is still pending.
Other students represented eleven arrestees in a federal civil rights action against ICE officials that was settled for $350,000 and immigration relief. The clinic students also helped successfully defend the city’s right to keep the names of ID card holders out of the hands of an anti-immigrant group.
Immigrants also receive help from Apostle Immigrant Services in Fair Haven and New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which represents immigrants in deportation proceedings and other cases. The agency runs monthly legal clinics for families fearing deportation, providing basic immigration law information, as well as information about standby guardianship and power of attorney. Explains agency attorney James Bhandary-Alexander, “The most important question is what will happen to my kids if I’m detained or deported.”
The Reverend Paul Fleck, a Methodist minister from adjacent Hamden, helps connect immigrants in need of sanctuary with activists and faith communities. “I want to emphasize that a sanctuary city or town is different from sanctuary as a faith community,” he says.“‘Sanctuary city’ means noncooperation with law enforcement. ‘Sanctuary’ as a concept means creating a safe place for the immigrant to be welcomed into our midst.”
So far, Fleck says, six congregations throughout Connecticut have signed on to provide physical sanctuary to those in need, while several others have agreed to provide support services, such as food and visitation.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Herbert Brockman leads Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden. He says his contacts at the National Sanctuary Movement, which keeps tabs on the movement nationwide, told him that no other state has shown the level of political commitment to the issue as Connecticut.
Numbers from Church World Service, an ecumenical organization that supports refugee and immigrant rights and helps coordinate the sanctuary movement, tell the larger story. In the first eleven months after the November 2016 presidential election, the group says, thirty-four people entered public sanctuary in twenty-three states. Twenty-eight of them were still there at the end of this timeframe; six received relief from deportation, and one person was deported upon leaving sanctuary.
Brockman, while a proponent of public sanctuary, sounds a note of caution. “Sanctuary is not solving anything,” he says. “It’s postponing. If we accept someone it’s because, based on experts, we believe they have a good case and need time to make that case.”
A “good case” would be someone, for instance, with no criminal record, strong community ties, and verifiable concerns about persecution should he or she be deported. But Lugo, of ULA, bristles at the division of undocumented persons into “good immigrants” and “bad immigrants.” He says the whole system is rotten, and everyone should have a chance to stay in the United States.
The relationship of the activist community with New Haven’s current mayor, Toni Harp, is somewhat rocky. While Harp has supported current policies and her office has published a guide for parents of public school students with critical information should a parent be detained, the activists want her to move the fight forward, not rest on the city’s laurels. They note that a number of cities have moved ahead of New Haven in providing those protections, including Hartford and neighboring East Haven, which have enshrined their pro-immigrant policies in city ordinances.
After a push from the grassroots, the mayor appointed a task force of activists, service providers, and city officials, to discuss possible action steps. At a rally for Marco Reyes, Harp stated loudly and clearly, “New Haven will remain a sanctuary city!”
She adds, in an interview with The Progressive, “What I mean by saying it is that we are a city that welcomes everyone and we provide educational services and police services without regard to immigration status.”
Reyes says the mayor’s support “definitely provides those in sanctuary with a greater feeling of safety.”
On October 12, a press release from the Department of Justice indicated that Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, and Cook County, Illinois, were all in violation of a federal law that bars government entities or officials from preventing others from sharing “information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” The Trump Administration has threatened to cut federal funding for grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to jurisdictions that are out of compliance.
The Trump Administration has threatened to cut federal funding for grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to jurisdictions that are out of compliance.
Officials in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have preemptively sued the federal government over their designations as “sanctuary jurisdictions.” Harp says her administration may engage in “some form of class action” against ICE but has not yet done so. She’s not worried about the feds cutting funds to New Haven, since the city is not on the list.
Wishnie of the Yale law clinic says the political environment in Connecticut has become much more supportive, with the state’s governor, both U.S. Senators, and the local Congresswoman all joining Mayor Harp in very visibly and vocally supporting the rights of the undocumented. “That should enable Mayor Harp and the Board of Alders to do more, but there’s a reluctance on the part of the mayor and the board. That’s why it’s especially disappointing that she has not taken more steps.”
Matos agrees with this critique, saying “most of the heavy lifting has come from the advocates.” On the other hand, she says, “Overall, the mayor and her administration have been supportive of our requests.”
Unidad Latina en Acción’s Lugo says the next step is for advocates to meet individually with all thirty members of the Board of Alders to try to convince them to craft an ordinance putting New Haven’s policies into law, which would provide more protection than an executive order that could be withdrawn by a future administration. Several of the board members have expressed support.
The sanctuary movement continues to grow, person by person. On October 9, the date that Sujitno Sajuti, an Indonesian scholar and teacher who’s been in the United States since 1981, was told by ICE that he had to leave the country, the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Meriden welcomed him into sanctuary.
Melinda Tuhus is a freelance journalist based in New Haven, Connecticut.