In July 1980, a group of Salvadoran migrants crossed the border between Mexico and Arizona. They walked over a remote mountain range and halfway across a wide desert valley in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. There were more than two dozen of them—people who had left behind lives and jobs to come to the United States.
Note: This episode originally aired as two episodes in 2017.

The migrants had hired guides to lead them on their journey through one of the most desolate areas of the Sonoran desert. But the heat proved too deadly and they hadn’t anticipated how far they would have to walk. Around a dozen of them died the first day out.

The survivors were eventually found huddled in the sparse shade of some scrub brush. They were delirious and suffering from intense dehydration and heatstroke. U.S. Border Patrol agents brought them to a hospital in Tucson. It was there that a Reverend named John Fife of Southside Presbyterian Church first encountered the migrants and began to learn more about why they had crossed the border.
These migrants had fled from El Salvador’s civil war. For decades, the country had been ruled by a series of oligarchs and corrupt military leaders. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, left-wing revolutionaries began to grow in power and influence, and the military responded by trying to crush the resistance. Death squads targeted union leaders, community organizers, and other people they suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas. Many civilians were caught in the middle of this violence.

Similar conflicts were unfolding in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans were trying to get away from these dangerous and bloody civil wars. They were fleeing their countries, making their way up through Mexico, and crossing into the United States.

Rev. Fife and his congregation began to help these Central American migrants. Their efforts would mark the beginning of a new — and controversial — social movement based on the ancient religious concept of “sanctuary,” the idea that churches have a duty to shelter people fleeing persecution. There’s been a lot of talk about “sanctuary” in the news recently and the modern movement in the U.S can trace its roots back to Fife.
Fife’s first inclination had been to work within the rules of the immigration system to help the migrants seek asylum.
Since 1980—when Congress passed The Refugee Act — the U.S. has asked people to meet a number of requirements in order to qualify for political asylum. Applicants must establish that they have a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home country, based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. They also have to prove their government is actually involved in the persecution or that it can’t control the groups that are.

While the standards for asylum are straightforward, establishing one’s eligibility can be a challenge. The process relies heavily on a single person’s testimony about what they’ve been through, and there is seldom physical evidence to support the claims.
Despite the challenges of qualifying for asylum, Rev. Fife and his church—with help from some legal aid organizations in Tucson—began arranging legal assistance for the Central American migrants. They started visiting detention centers and helping people fill out the appropriate paperwork. They arranged for lawyers to represent them in court.
But Fife found that, in many cases, even when migrants met the requirements for asylum, they were not getting it. He began to wonder what was behind these decisions to deport people who seemed to be making valid claims about the dangers they faced back in their home countries.

Central Americans hoping for asylum faced significant hurdles. Just as they began turning up at the U.S.-Mexico border in the late-1970s and early-1980s, tens of thousands of refugees from other places — like Cuba and Iran — were also seeking refuge in the United States. The government was overwhelmed with applications.
Most Central Americans had also historically come to the U.S. for jobs—not because they were fleeing political persecution. The government was inclined to view them as economic migrants.
Asylum policy also intersected with foreign policy in complex ways. Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981 to 1989, saw Central America as an important front in the Cold War and the fight against communism. He argued the region was so close to the U.S. that the country’s national security required it to stop communist movements from flourishing there.
The U.S. had a long history of supporting Central American governments that aligned with its economic and foreign policy interests. Because the U.S. government considered the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala to be political allies in the fight against communism, it was reluctant to acknowledge that these governments were involved in the persecution of their own people.
Under Reagan, almost all Salvadoran and Guatemalan border-crossers were classified not as political refugees but as “economic migrants.” Under that designation, many failed to qualify for asylum and were sent back to their home countries. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, fewer than 3% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who applied for asylum were approved. In that same period, the approval rate for Iranians was 60%. For Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, it was 40%.
This political climate put Rev. Fife and his congregants in a tough position. They didn’t want to encourage the migrants who were seeking help at their church to report to Immigration when they knew it was almost certain they’d be deported.
This was the quandary Fife was in when a man named Jim Corbett got involved. Corbett was a Quaker, and as the refugee crisis in Tucson continued to grow, his religious faith compelled him to take action, and he wanted Fife and his congregation to get involved.

Corbett pointed to the church’s failings in protecting Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s. Corbett did not want to repeat that mistake. Instead, he wanted to emulate the actions of some Christians in the 1840s and 50s, when church people helped move runaway slaves across state lines and through the underground railroad to safety.
Corbett had already done some border runs on his own, picking up Central American migrants in Mexico and helping them cross the border to safety in the United States. But soon Rev. Fife and a handful of others started helping him. At first, they used Corbett’s property to shelter the migrants, and then they started using the church as temporary housing.
Soon, on any given night, the church would have dozens of people sleeping in the main gathering space. Church members at Southside Presbyterian provided food, clothes, English lessons, medical care, and access to immigration attorneys. The migrants were still undocumented and faced possible deportation. But the church provided access to resources, guidance, and a place to stay.

In deciding to take the refugees into their church, the congregation was drawing on a long history of other houses of worship doing the same. In Greek and Roman history, people who were threatened with persecution could find protection in temples. When the Roman Empire became Christian, churches took on the same function. The concept of “sanctuary” can also be found in medieval canon law and British common law. More recently, churches had sheltered conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s view was that churches in the sanctuary movement were harboring undocumented immigrants who had crossed into the country illegally. Religious institutions in the U.S. do not have special permission to harbor people who are breaking the law. And, as it turns out, the government was keeping an eye on the sanctuary movement’s growing operation.
Despite potential legal ramifications, Fife thought that by going public the church could generate attention and gain support. They invited a few other churches across the country to join them in a public announcement — and in March of 1982, they hung a huge banner on the front of Southside Presbyterian Church that said, in Spanish, “this is a sanctuary of God for the oppressed of Central America.” They held a service and publicly welcomed a new family from El Salvador to join the other refugees who were staying at the church. And they staged a press conference to explain exactly what the “sanctuary movement” was and what their goals were.

As word spread, a network of religious sanctuary spaces began to form. By the mid- to late- 80s, hundreds of churches and synagogues across the country had declared themselves sanctuaries. And those religious spaces were in turn connected to a network of churches that extended down into Mexico and Central America.
One of the government’s criticisms of the sanctuary movement was that it lacked the expertise and resources to evaluate potential refugees. But Rev. Fife argued that they had a vast network of priests and pastors in Central America who could help them vet potential migrants.
The government, however, wasn’t swayed by the religious motivations of participating churches. In 1984, the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), a predecessor to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), launched a full-scale investigation into the sanctuary movement.
Their goal was to collect enough evidence to indict the leaders of the movement and to stop churches from sheltering migrants. The government believed that sanctuary volunteers were using religion as a cover to push a radical political agenda and to undermine immigration laws. INS decided to investigate the sanctuary movement using the same tactics they might use against any criminal smuggling enterprise. To this end, they enlisted undercover agents to infiltrate and gather evidence.

The main undercover informants were named Jesus Cruz and Salomon Graham. Both were former smugglers who had been caught bringing undocumented people across the border. They agreed to work with the INS in exchange for payment and for having the charges against them dropped.
Cruz and Graham, along with a couple of other agents, spent ten months undercover. Their methods would eventually come under public scrutiny, because they had not just infiltrated the sanctuary movement— they were also secretly recording meetings, conversations, and in some cases, church services.
In January 1985, sixteen leaders of the sanctuary movement were indicted, including Jim Corbett and Reverend John Fife, the two founders of the movement, as well as a number of other priests, nuns, and congregants. They were charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to violate federal law as well as harboring, transporting, aiding, and abetting illegal aliens.
The sanctuary leaders assembled a team of lawyers to assist in their defense. Attorneys chose two primary arguments to defend the sanctuary movement.

The first argument stemmed from religion. Many religions have a distinct imperative to assist people who are fleeing some form of violence and oppression. The defense planned to argue that the sanctuary workers were merely acting in accordance with their faith. They also believed the religious rights of the sanctuary workers had been violated by the government agents who’d infiltrated their churches and made secret recordings.
The second part of the defense’s argument revolved around the legal framework of asylum. The law provides that people fleeing certain specific kinds of oppression or violence have a right to asylum.

This was all happening in the context of a major shift in U.S. refugee policy. Before 1980, the U.S. approach to taking in refugees had been expressly political. It gave preference to refugees fleeing communist countries and countries in the Middle East. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law. This legislation was supposed to create a more equitable system by adopting a more humanitarian, non-ideological definition of a refugee. It drew on criteria developed by the United Nations, which identified a refugee as anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
Even though this new criteria was in place when President Ronald Reagan came into office, the lawyers for the sanctuary movement believed the government was not following its own law. They thought INS was turning away large numbers of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who should have qualified as refugees. Between 1983 and 1986, the approval rate for Salvadorans and Guatemalans seeking asylum was under 3 percent. The defense attorneys for the sanctuary movement organizers felt like they had a strong case to make against the U.S. government.
But the defense’s entire legal position was wiped out when the federal judge hearing the case ruled that they were prohibited from saying anything during the trial about a number of subjects: United States refugee law, international refugee law, conditions in El Salvador, conditions in Guatemala, or religious faith.
The prosecutor and judge had effectively reduced the case to a simple yes-or-no issue: had the sanctuary workers engaged in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented people into the country? There was to be no discussion about context, history or motivations.
Over the next several months, the prosecution laid out its case, relying heavily on testimony from their undercover informants. The defense team tried to undermine those accounts in cross-examination, raising questions about context and motivation when they could. But when it came time for them to present a case, they rested, without bringing any witnesses to the stand.

The jury deliberated for more than 48 hours across the span of nine days. On May 1, 1986, six months after the start of the trial, the jury reached a verdict. Three of the sanctuary workers were acquitted of all charges, including Jim Corbett. Eight were found guilty, including Rev. John Fife.
The judge gave out surprisingly lenient sentences. No one got jail time. Everyone who had been convicted got five years probation.
Not long after the criminal trial ended, a group of churches and refugee rights organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the government. They alleged that the government had engaged in discriminatory treatment of asylum claims made by Guatemalans and Salvadorans. In 1990, the government settled the lawsuit, giving people from these countries temporary protected status and work permits. After this victory, the sanctuary movement started by Rev. Fife and others began to wind down.
But even though the churches were slowing their work, the whole idea of sanctuary was spreading. College campuses, cities, counties, and states began to declare themselves sanctuaries—and not just for refugees fleeing persecution, but for undocumented immigrants more broadly. However, what “sanctuary” actually means varies from place to place and depends on context.

In some places, police aren’t allowed to inquire about a person’s immigration status (or to give that information to the federal government). In other places, all residents are promised access to city services regardless of their immigration status.
President Donald Trump talked a lot about “sanctuary cities” during his campaign and has pointed to murders committed by undocumented immigrants as evidence that sanctuary cities should not exist. He’s threatened to punish self-declared sanctuary cities by stripping their federal funding and, under his direction, the Department of Homeland Security is gearing up to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants. In response, churches, local governments, and other institutions are preparing to resist.
In 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memo saying that some “sensitive locations” including houses of worship, hospitals, and schools require special consideration by immigration officers, meaning the government would not prioritize deporting people from those places. But that practice isn’t codified into law and it could easily change.
Recently, there have been reports of ICE agents targeting undocumented people in places like hospitals and schools. Churches might also be vulnerable. It remains to be seen what role institutions and municipalities will play in the coming years, tangled up in an issue that will almost certainly land back in the courts.
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