Maria Chavalan Sut was unexpectedly awakened early one morning in late summer 2016 by an explosion from a homemade bomb tossed on the roof of her Guatemala City home.
“The police didn’t even show up to make a report,” says Chavalan Sut, who quickly evacuated her four children before the resulting fire gutted her home.
Chavalan Sut believes she was singled out because she belongs to an often-targeted Maya indigenous group and the culprits coveted her property. So, after the fire, she put her children in safe hands and fled to the United States, seeking asylum.
But Chavalan Sut, who is forty-five, never got the chance to present her asylum claim in immigration court because she was not notified of her hearing date, says her lawyer, Alina Kilpatrick. Faced with an order to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office for deportation in September 2018, Chavalan Sut instead sought sanctuary in the Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The church is among a growing number of congregations giving safe haven to undocumented immigrants since Donald Trump took office. Its members have rallied behind Chavalan Sut, who risks being grabbed by ICE and put on a plane to Guatemala if she ever steps off church grounds.
“I just want the opportunity to have my case heard, a decision to be made, so I can be free,” says Chavalan Sut. She is one of forty-six undocumented immigrants living in the safety but uncertainty of public sanctuary, up from just five public sanctuary cases at the time President Donald Trump was elected, according to Church World Service, which keeps tabs on these cases.
Immigrants in public sanctuary are protected under a 2011 ICE memo that says houses of worship—churches, synagogues, and mosques—are “sensitive locations,” off-limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents except in exigent circumstances.
While ICE has not gone into these sanctuaries, it has been pressuring some of those inside with hefty fines. In late June, Chavalan Sut was notified that she faced a fine of $214,132 for not leaving the country as directed. The order has only stiffened her resolve. “I find it ironic that I fled extortion and violence there and still encounter it here,” she says.
But in October, ICE notified Chavalan Sut and seven others in sanctuary that it is withdrawing the fines. “ICE likely realized that they wouldn’t succeed in the courts, so they backed off,” says David Bennion, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer involved in opposing the fines.
ICE spokesperson Richard Rocha, in an email to The Progressive, says the agency will continue to pursue these cases “using any and all available means.”
In November 2018, another sanctuary beneficiary, Samuel Oliver-Bruno, was nabbed when he left CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, to get fingerprinted for a humanitarian parole request in nearby Morrisville. He was tackled and put in handcuffs by waiting ICE agents, says Isaac Villegas, a Mennonite pastor who was one of twenty-seven supporters arrested at the scene, after they surrounded the car that ICE agents had put Oliver-Bruno in. Oliver-Bruno was then deported to Mexico, forced to leave his wife and son behind in Durham.
“Samuel was my neighbor,” says Villegas. A sign with the words “Samuel’s Seat, Keep Praying” is on the chair where he sat at CityWell Sunday services.
Under Trump, “sanctuary” counties, cities, and states have proliferated. They have attempted, by enacting laws and adopting policies, to prohibit local law enforcement from engaging in various collaborations and information sharing with ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Such efforts are separate from, but related to, the sheltering of undocumented immigrants in houses of worship. As the Reverend Abhi Janamanchi of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland, puts it, “When the values and principles of what girds a democratic society are not being practiced or are being eroded, institutions and communities do need to respond.”
The tactics of sanctuary have proven remarkably effective. During the first five months of 2018, after California’s 2017 state sanctuary law took effect, ICE made 41 percent fewer arrests at local jails than during the previous five months, according to a study, “Turning the Golden State into a Sanctuary State.” A big reason for the drop was that local jails are no longer supposed to provide immigration officials with the release dates of immigrants picked up on minor charges so that ICE can then detain them.
Nationwide, about 780 counties have adopted ordinances or policies that limit their involvement in immigration detention, says Lena Graber, senior staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Meanwhile, about 1,100 religious institutions have committed to backing immigrants in sanctuary. Some of these congregations are willing to house the families on a long-term basis. Many more provide volunteers and financial assistance.
As of early fall this year, 175 congregations had become part of the “Sacred Resistance,” meaning they are willing to open their houses of worship to immigrants, says Jennie Belle, a community organizer for Church World Service. Each congregation sets its own ground rules.
Trump’s threatened roundup of undocumented immigrants in July and ICE’s raids in Mississippi the next month, resulting in 680 arrests, are reminders of why sanctuary is needed.
The Reverend Noel Andersen, national grassroots coordinator for Church World Service, says the nation’s policies toward immigrants are “about discriminating against certain people because of their ethnicity, their language, their heritage—so we as faith communities are called to really push back against that and make a moral stand.”
Besides being causes for their congregations, these public sanctuary cases have spawned support networks in states including North Carolina, Texas, and Colorado, as well as the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
In Colorado, immigrants in sanctuary took the lead in drafting the “People’s Resolution,” which calls for immigration reform. The effort was popularized by a 2018 sanctuary caravan of immigration activists who crossed the state.
Jennifer Piper, interfaith organizing program director for the American Friends Service Committee in Colorado, says these immigrants wanted to dispel the myth that they have a pathway to citizenship. “They wanted to make visible through their own cases the barriers facing so many other people as well,” says Piper, who has long been involved in sanctuary issues.
Jeanette Vizguerra did just that when she held a news conference last June at the Denver church giving her sanctuary.
“All of the charges against me—for traffic tickets, for working to provide for my family. But when will we see charges for the deaths in detention, for the deaths on the border?” she asked. “When will we see charges against this administration for depriving people in detention of medical care right now—and not giving a full accounting to the American people of what’s happening?”
The North Carolina Sanctuary Coalition, which formed in 2018, has become what coordinator Rachel Baker calls a hub of organizing, with more than twenty churches and an equal number of activist groups belonging.
One of its strategies is to get state elected officials to meet with those in sanctuary to understand their plight and those of many other undocumented immigrants.
“It is the United States government that continues in violation of United States refugee law to deport undocumented Salvadorans and Guatemalans back to death squads and torture chambers and massacres.”
“As churches are coming together and stepping up, that makes a strong announcement of how we are seeing the world,” Baker says. “Right now, it’s so unjust. Our immigrant neighbors are being targeted. They have been here so many years, working, building their families and their lives.” She adds that the estimated 325,000 undocumented immigrants in North Carolina play a significant role in the state’s economy.
Sulma Franco, an LGBTQ activist who fled Guatemala in 2009 because she was threatened with violence, tells how sanctuary—and the organizing of public opinion around such cases—can make a vital difference. When ICE tried to deport Franco in 2015, the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin gave her sanctuary. She says that a campaign to reopen her case—“Let Sulma stay!”—soon got about 3,700 signatures.
In August 2015, after almost three months in sanctuary, Franco was granted a stay of deportation by an immigration judge that led to a new look at her case—a change the thirty-two-year-old Franco chalks up to public pressure.
“It was the sanctuary movement—the campaign, the public, the community, all of that—that allowed me to win,” says Franco, who co-founded the Austin Sanctuary Network and is now applying for permanent legal status. Many other undocumented immigrants—living in the shadows at homes and undisclosed shelters—are also trying to avoid Trump’s draconian immigration dragnet.
In fact, the undocumented people in public sanctuary put a face on the struggles and perils experienced by countless other undocumented immigrants. “They are standing up for themselves and for their communities,” says immigration lawyer David Bennion. “That’s what is remarkable in the Trump era, where we see ICE really aggressively going after undocumented immigrants.”
Sanctuary—providing safe haven—has a long history, which in the United States took shape around the Underground Railroad’s sheltering of escaped enslaved people in pre-Civil War days.
The need for sanctuary took on renewed relevance—this time with protecting immigrants—during the early 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans fled the violence of rightwing governments and death squads.
With the Reagan Administration backing these governments, the claims of persecution made in U.S. immigration courts were routinely denied. In 1984, for instance, the approval rate for Guatemalan and Salvadoran asylum cases was less than 3 percent.
Religious institutions stepped in to shelter and protect these vulnerable immigrants from deportation.
“What we said was that it is not the church providing sanctuary that is violating United States law,” says John Fife, who, as pastor of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, played a key role in launching the sanctuary movement. “It is the United States government that continues in violation of United States refugee law to deport undocumented Salvadorans and Guatemalans back to death squads and torture chambers and massacres.”
In 1985, Fife and fifteen other activists faced federal charges related to smuggling and transporting undocumented immigrants. Eleven went on trial in federal court, where the judge refused to allow testimony about the defendants wanting to save refugees from political violence. Eight were convicted and received probation.
The issues raised by the defendants were addressed in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of more than 500,000 Guatemalans and Salvadorans in the United States, alleging a discriminatory asylum system. It led to a 1991 settlement that granted new asylum interviews and protections for many.
A common thread in sanctuary cases is that the immigration system is hostile to immigrants, especially by failing to explain what is expected of them and being unforgiving if they miss a court hearing.
“When they get caught at the border, they are not given any instructions at all,” says immigration lawyer Jessica Rodriguez Bell. “They’re handed a piece of paper and sent on their way and told they’ll get something in the mail.” Chavalan Sut, who fled Guatemala with just the clothes on her back, tells how after she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in November 2016, she looked for a Border Patrol agent and said, “I need your help.” That led to her being detained for about a month before she was allowed to travel to Richmond, Virginia, to await her court hearing.
ICE had Chavalan Sut’s address, says her lawyer, Alina Kilpatrick. The “Notice to Appear” that she received in December 2016 just said the date and time of her court hearing in Arlington, Virginia, were “to be set.”
As required, Chavalan Sut checked in with a nearby ICE office in Fairfax, Virginia, in late January 2017 and was told to come back a year later. When she did, ICE told her she had missed her July 13, 2017, court hearing in Arlington. Chavalan Sut says that was the first she heard of that court date. From then on, she was on a fast track to deportation.
Sanctuary not only provides safe haven but can also serve as an avenue to advocate for much-needed immigration reform.
While Chavalan Sut remains in sanctuary in a Virginia church, Kilpatrick has asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to reopen the case on grounds that she was denied due process.
Another sanctuary beneficiary, Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, was scheduled to be put on a plane back to El Salvador—a country she fled in 2005 after being threatened, she says, by a group of criminals, including one with a machete.
Gutierrez Lopez, who is now forty-one, was taken into custody by Border Patrol on December 11, 2005, without ever being able to claim asylum in court, says her lawyer, Jasmin Tohidi. When Gutierrez Lopez was released later that day, she was given a document that mentioned she had to appear in immigration court in Harlingen, Texas, on January 10, 2006. Gutierrez Lopez, Tohidi says, didn’t realize what this was directing her to do; when she failed to appear, the judge issued a deportation order.
Eight years later, police in Virginia noticed that the vehicle her boyfriend was driving was registered to her and found the deportation order, which Gutierrez Lopez did not know existed. By then, she had established a new life, with three young children. ICE gave her stays of deportation, monitoring her with periodic check-ins. But all that changed under Trump. ICE ordered her out of the country by December 10, 2018.
Gutierrez Lopez bought a ticket to El Salvador, as ICE told her to do, but instead of going to Dulles International Airport, she sought sanctuary in the Cedar Lane church.
“I can’t go back to El Salvador,” says Gutierrez Lopez. “Three members of my family have been killed by gangs. If I go back, I’d face the same thing.”
Her fear is well-founded. Between 2013 and 2019, more than 100 Salvadoran deportees from the United States were harmed after being returned to their homeland, says Elizabeth Kennedy, an independent researcher who has prepared a report on this issue for Human Rights Watch.
Some were murdered. Others were raped, became victims of state torture, or simply disappeared, says Kennedy, who relied on a variety of sources, including interviews with survivors and their relatives. Her conclusion: “The fears [deportees] have are real and are realized if they are returned.”
Jeanette Vizguerra, who is in sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver, Colorado, fled Mexico in 1997 after, she says, a bus her husband was driving was taken over by gang members, who pointed a gun at her husband and robbed passengers. She and her daughter were on the bus.
The family settled in Denver, where Vizguerra found work as a janitor and soon became an organizer with SEIU Local 105. She made clear to her coworkers that all janitors in the union—documented or not—should be treated the same. She says, “A piece of paper should not determine your worth.”
Vizguerra’s case highlights how sanctuary not only provides safe haven but can also serve as an avenue to advocate for much-needed immigration reform. Her legal battle with ICE was triggered by a traffic stop in 2009 and was complicated by a 2012 visit she made to her dying mother in Mexico.
“I am determined to fight for my dignity, to fight for the right to be with my children,” says Vizguerra, who is forty-seven. In 2014, she helped establish the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, which has five congregations willing to house immigrants needing safe haven and fourteen others committed to giving support.
Vizguerra took sanctuary at First Unitarian during the early weeks of the Trump Administration because she feared she would not get a renewed stay of deportation. She then publicized the plight of herself and others with a February 2017 op-ed in The New York Times, explaining that she “sought sanctuary in the church because, like that of millions of other immigrants, my future in this country was thrown into doubt.”
Time magazine included her on its list of 100 most influential people in 2017.
Vizguerra left sanctuary after eighty-six days, when she received a two-year stay of deportation. That happened after U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, introduced a bill to provide relief for Vizguerra.
With her stay of deportation slated to expire, Vizguerra—fearing arrest—returned to sanctuary this past March. She and her supporters are exploring various legal avenues to allow her to live freely in her adopted country.
“I’m here for the long haul,” Vizguerra says.
Sidebar - Faces of Sanctuary
Antonio Shain Cisneros
Minerva Cisneros Garcia
Minerva Cisneros Garcia, who is forty-three and from Mexico, lives in Winston-Salem and was in sanctuary in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Sanctuary proved to be a big help to Garcia, who fled Mexico nineteen years ago to escape the violence of drug cartels and give a future to her then five-year-old son, Eduardo, who is blind.
Garcia found full-time work at a factory and raised three sons. She was told by ICE in May 2017 that she had to be out of the country by the end of the next month. “This is not the America that I thought it would be,” she says. She found sanctuary in the Congregational United Church of Christ. And that gave her time to rally support and for the courts to take another look at her case.
A “Save Mother of Three from Deportation” online petition, organized by Garcia’s supporters, generated 28,687 signatures. In October 2017, after about three months in sanctuary, an immigration judge vacated her deportation order, allowing her to leave the church. With the case reopened, another immigration judge this past May granted Garcia permanent residency.
Eduardo, who is twenty-four, graduated from the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh and was hired by the Industries for the Blind in Winston-Salem.
Susan Hanson
Rose Sabido
Rosa Sabido, who is fifty-five and from Mexico, first came to Colorado in 1987 and has been in sanctuary since June 2017 at the Mancos United Methodist Church in the southwest corner of Colorado. It’s in rural Montezuma County where Trump carried 60 percent of the vote in 2016.
The website Rosa Belongs Here has popularized her story, with supporters organizing events and activities, such as vigils, to help her.
“I realized that I was not going to be able to go anywhere,” Sabido says. “Then I was sort of overwhelmed by so many people caring for me and visiting, offering all kinds of help and company.”
Sabido first came to the United States on a visa to be with her mother and stepfather, who settled in the Coloradan city of Cortez, near Mancos. Ever since her mother became a permanent resident in 2001, Sabido has been trying to adjust her status. But she found herself under a deportation order in 2002, says her lawyer, Jennifer Kain-Rios.
In Cortez, Sabido often worked at two jobs and bought two food trucks that are now parked idly at her home. After granting Sabido six stays of deportation, dating back to 2011, ICE under Trump denied—without explanation—another stay in 2017. That prompted Sabido to seek sanctuary.
“I have so many dreams,” Sabido says. “Right now, I can’t pursue my dreams anymore because I don’t know the future.”
Sally Padgett
Miriam Vargas
Miriam Vargas, who is forty-three and from Honduras, has been in sanctuary in Columbus, Ohio, since June 2018.
She fled Honduras in 2005 to escape gang violence that directly threatened her, says her lawyer, Jessica Rodriguez Bell. She settled in Columbus and let immigration officials know her whereabouts—but says she never received a letter with further instructions.
When Vargas missed a 2009 immigration court hearing she says she did not know about, the judge issued a deportation order. She was initially granted stays of deportation by ICE. But that ended in June 2018, when she was told by ICE she had to leave later that month.
On short notice, the Reverend Sally Padgett, pastor of the First English Lutheran Church in Columbus, learned that Vargas would be torn away from her two young U.S.-born children.
“When I heard her story, I felt I had to do something,” says Padgett, who gave up her office area so that Vargas could have living space for herself and her children.
“She is just a person trying to live her life,” Padgett says.
Vargas has a simple message for President Donald Trump: “How would he feel if his family was separated?”
Hilda Ramirez
Hilda Ramirez and son Ivan, who are thirty-two and thirteen and from Guatemala, are in sanctuary at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, where the members of the congregation have formed committees to look after their needs and advocate for them.
ICE was trying to pressure Ramirez to leave sanctuary—sending her a notice in June that she faced a fine of $303,620 for failing to depart the United States. But Ramirez says she was never given a fair shake in her asylum case, beginning with her initial credible-fear interview, when there was no one there to translate the questions into her native tongue, Mam, a Mayan language.
Ramirez lost her asylum case and appeal. She is seeking to reopen her case, based on new evidence showing threats to her safety in Guatemala. Her lawyer, Stephanie Taylor, says Ramirez “seeks asylum based on violence and threats she experienced as an indigenous Guatemalan woman.”
The pastor of this church, the Reverend Jim Rigby, notes that U.S. foreign policy has been so destabilizing and exploitative that it has created a culture of violence that Ramirez fled.
“We can’t destroy another country and then act as if it’s not our responsibility,” he says.