The Sanctuary Movement: Houses of Worship Shelter the Undocumented
The modern-day sanctuary movement is rooted in deeply held religious values of welcoming the outsider. With Trump in power, it’s taking on new relevance
By Dwyer Gunn
On a frigid Saturday night in January, Ingrid Latorre, a 33-year-old woman with dark eyes and long dark hair, kept a careful eye on her 14-month-old son, Anibal, as he toddled around the basement playroom of a red brick house in Denver’s Observatory Park neighborhood. Outside, the streets of the upscale residential neighborhood, which are full of children riding bikes during the day, were calm and quiet.
Bryant, Ingrid’s eight-year-old son, started telling me about his elementary school, a bilingual program in a suburb of Denver. Favorite subject? Math. Favorite sport? Soccer. Anibal joined the conversation, babbling as Bryant launched into a description of last year’s Halloween festivities.
“My mom found me a monster mask with eyes that light up!” he said with a grin. “We all went trick-or-treating together – my dad, my mom, Anibal, Shayla [the dog], and me. And we got so much candy!”
“Shayla got a lot of candy, too,” Ingrid said, dimples flashing, of the family’s stout English bulldog. “She went as a ballerina.”
Earlier in the day, about five miles north-west of Observatory Park, a crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at the Denver civic center to protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Latorre, who immigrated illegally to the United States from Peru when she was 17, didn’t attend. In fact, Ingrid hasn’t left the redbrick house on Columbine Street since 28 November 2016. On that day, she and Annibal officially entered sanctuary at this house of worship for the Mountain View Friends Meeting Quaker congregation.
For her own and her family’s sake, this is where she must remain.
In 2010, Ingrid was arrested for using a social security number that, she later learned, belonged to someone else – she had purchased the documents years before from a man who told her not to pay taxes to avoid attracting the attention of the government. Ingrid paid the back taxes she owed and took a plea deal that spared her from jail time but required her to plead guilty to a felony. Her lawyer assured her the plea would have no effect on her immigration status. He was wrong. That felony conviction means that Latorre is currently a priority target for deportation.
She plans to live at Mountain View, which as a house of worship is unlikely to be raided under current immigration policy, while she tries to reopen her criminal case and awaits a response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the stay of deportation application she filed on 25 November.
It’s very exciting to see how many people of faith are really called to action by the current climate
On weekends, Bryant and Eliseo, Ingrid’s partner, live with Ingrid and Anibal on the second floor of the church. During the week, Eliseo and Bryant live at the family’s home, 15 miles away, visiting at night when they can.
Since the election of Donald Trump last November, the ranks of the modern-day sanctuary movement, which was launched in the face of the Obama administration’s aggressive deportation policies, have swelled. According to a recent tally by Church World Service, there are now more than 800 religious congregations in the United States that are engaged in the sanctuary movement (not all serve as hosting congregations), up from about 400 pre-election.
“I think we’ll see that more and more congregations are going to try to create sanctuary spaces and try to stop these raids from happening,” says the Rev Noel Anderson, the Grassroots Coordinator for Immigrants’ Rights at Church World Service. “It’s very exciting to see how many people of faith are really called to action by the current climate.”
A few days later, a group of seven activists and volunteers from the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition gathered at Mountain View for an immigration action meeting. The men and women sat around folding tables in the house’s wide-open main floor, eating pizza with Ingrid and Anibal. The mood was grim. Earlier in the day, Trump had signed a series of executive orders targeting immigrants.
“Does anybody know how to withhold taxes in protest?” asked one attendee, an older woman with short hair wearing colorful glasses and a grey sweater set.
Letters of supports from a local school written to the family of Ingrid Latorre. Photograph: Matthew Nager for the Guardian
Maureen Flanigan, a petite 67-year-old with a neat bob of gray hair who is part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Denver, said she’d been engaging in “magical thinking” since the election. “I thought it wouldn’t happen,” she said, pulling her black puffer vest more closely around her and shaking her head. “And now it’s happening. And I just keep thinking about the people it directly affects, and I can’t stop thinking about that.”
The modern-day sanctuary movement, which is inspired by the movement of the 1980s, is remarkable for the breadth of its support in a time of deep partisanship and division in this country. Congregations from Catholic, Quaker, Unitarian, Mormon, Jewish, Episcopalian and Methodist faiths have all joined.
The Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition was founded back in 2014, just as the broader national movement was gaining strength, and comprises eight local religious congregations drawn from the Quaker, Unitarian and Catholic faiths. In 2014, the Coalition sheltered Arturo Hernández, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico with a family in the United States, for nine months at the First Unitarian Society of Denver. In addition to providing physical sanctuary, the Coalition also accompanies immigrants throughout their deportation and legal proceedings and advocates for more humane immigration policies.
“This is a faith-based response to a system that is inhumane and unjust and that harms people’s human and civil rights,” says Jennifer Piper, the interfaith organizer for Denver’s American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that coordinates the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition. “Religiously, it doesn’t break down on the fault lines that you’d think.”
To see the harm that would come to children and parents to be separated; that’s enough to say this is the right thing
Congregations of different faiths cite different theological reasons for participating in the sanctuary movement. The Unitarian Universalist faith, for example, is guided by seven deeply held principles. “We have seven principles, and one is that we believe in the worth and dignity of every human being,” says Flanigan. “And we believe there are reasons that people immigrate and migrate, and these are usually economic, and so we support people who have to do that for a better life.”
The Quaker faith, meanwhile, is built on six testimonies, or values. “Our support for immigrants’ rights comes down to what we call our Quaker testimonies of equality, community and integrity,” David Poundstone, a member of the Mountain View congregation, explained to me. “We believe that everybody is equal, and that we are all together as people. And the integrity of the family is very important – just to see the harm that would come to children and parents to be separated. That’s enough to say this is the right thing for us to be doing.”
Noel Anderson, an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, points out that religious teachings around migrants are often consistent across the US’s dominant religions. “There is, across Abrahamic faith traditions at least, this dictate to welcome the stranger, for you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt,” Anderson says. “What are faith communities if not sanctuaries?”
At the January action meeting, the members of the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition discussed a variety of topics: the status of Ingrid’s case, fundraising strategies for her legal fees, and the cases of a number of other immigrants. The group discussed whether or not the city needs a more robust rapid response system, in case Ice starts aggressively conducted raids. Jennifer Pipe teared up as she briefed the group more thoroughly on the newly issued executive orders.
Anibal, oblivious to the import of the conversation around him, rotated through the assembled volunteers, enticing them into playing with him. He tossed a teething toy on the floor and looked at Maureen Flanigan expectantly, grinning when she obligingly picked up the toy to hand back to him.
As the meeting wound to a close, Piper told the group that she and Ingrid had been discussing whether their current strategy, which rests on having Ingrid’s felony conviction downgraded to a lesser charge due to the bad legal advice she received at the time, is still the best way to ensure the family stays together.
“Will Ice still use discretion in cases with bad legal representation or hardship and suffering?” Piper asked, rhetorically. “I think we have to start asking those questions for all the folks we’re accompanying because the climate has changed so much. I think we need to start evaluating these cases in thE context of the climate we have now, not the climate we had six months ago.”
Your Editor Worships with them
