American Sanctuary Churches: A Future for Theism in the Age of Trump

“When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.  The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:  I am the Lord your God..” - Leviticus 19:33-34 and 24:22

A Historical Context to Trump’s America

On March 24^th, 1980, the assassination of human rights advocate and Archbishop Oscar Romero plunged El Salvador into 12 dark years of civil war, costing an estimated total of 75,000 lives by 1992. However to call it a civil war fails to capture the gross asymmetry of violence committed by both sides. Almost all of the killings and human rights violations were carried out by the ruling government, defending itself against the leftist guerillas attempting to seize power and restore justice. For centuries since Spanish colonization, a long line of brutal military dictatorships enriched a small oligarchy of white elites at the expense and exploitation of the native population, who were made to produce and export cash crops for their masters’ profit.

Right-wing death squads, trained and funded by the United States, did not discriminate between civilians and militants. Snipers and machine gunners opened fire on crowds of people attending Romero’s funeral. Helicopters strafed hundreds of peasants fleeing from the combat zones. Innocent families were dragged from their homes and shot. Women and girls under the age of ten were arrested, raped, tortured, then murdered. Entire communities were bombed, shelled, and burned, resulting in the massacre of thousands and the displacement of millions. Many of these refugees fled to the U.S. to escape the slaughter, only to find themselves face to face with Ronald Reagan. In December of 1980, President Carter cut off aid to El Salvador, albeit only after some national guardsmen arbitrarily executed four American women. But soon after Reagan assumed his position in  the oval office he continued to support the Salvadoran government. Immigration enforcement tightened severely, so much so that only 3% of Salvadoran asylum seekers were approved for entry, supposedly because they were considered “economic migrants.” Those who made it as far as the U.S.-Mexico border were herded into detention facilities, and deported by the thousands back to the nightmare they came from.

Although on a smaller scale, today’s story is much the same. Thousands of refugees flee the lingering effects of malicious U.S. foreign policy in Central America, only to find themselves face to face with Donald Trump. Detention facilities are filled with children, poor people are repelled by tear gas at the southern border, and individuals marked for deportation are loaded into planes headed back to the gang violence and neoliberal economic imperialism they came from. Keep the narrative, change the details, and you can repeat the same ugly pattern of oppression followed by racist self-exculpation every 30 years or so. Just pull aside your conservative neighbor and point to immigration policy in the 1980s, and they might acquiesce, “Yeah, that wasn’t too good.” But approach them one week later and point to that same policy happening right now, and they’ll rattle off Tucker Carlson’s propaganda as if it’s something novel.

Why people are so historically myopic in this sense, I cannot say. But one thing I am sure of is that this aspect of human nature will never change. All of history’s most ghastly acts had their supporters at the time, though many of those placard-waving dullards would blush with shame if shown the legacy they left behind. How many of us fools cheered on the invasion of Vietnam, and now sit quietly? How about the levelling of Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Syria? Again and again, the war machine crawls forward. Its democratic infantry can’t comprehend the irony behind singing Ozzy Osbourne’s anti-war lyrics, not caring to understand what they mean. Nevertheless, it leaves behind the moonscape of a drone stricken Third World for the next target. Maybe this time it will be Venezuela.

At least the Europeans are somewhat willing to accept refugees fleeing the wartorn mess that is Syria. In Trumpland, we refuse to take responsibility for the messes we create. Whether it’s in El Salvador, Venezuela, or any other Latin American country, economic and political failure is seen as a basic, ahistorical fact of life in the eyes of the North. It’s like we were all born yesterday with all of these resources just sitting around, distributed exactly how they are now. Why is Mexico poor and the United States rich? Well, because Mexico is poor and the United States is rich. It’s as simple as that.

But the real story is far more complicated. Take the Mexican campesinos, for instance. In recent decades they have largely been driven out of business by heavily subsidized U.S. agro-industrial exporters who can sell commodities at a much lower price than the domestic one. They simply can’t compete, and not because of some free market ideal, either. The U.S. government intervenes to artificially prop up its own producers, and together they dominate foreign markets. Mexico has been pressured to conform to the neoliberal orthodoxy of privatization and free trade which has opened the door to direct foreign investment by predatory transnational corporations who grind local businesses into the ground, then underpay their workers to produce cheap commodities for export. Mexican poverty rises, CEOs profit, and naturally people migrate north in search of economic opportunity elsewhere. Now the Obama administration, and even much more so the Trump administration, have stopped these people at the border and said, “Turn back around. You’re not welcome here.” And in the cases where they do manage to get in, they have been hunted down and deported.

Bruno’s Story

Samuel Oliver Bruno was shoved to the ground and handcuffed by ICE agents almost immediately after he stepped foot in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) building in North Carolina on November 29th, 2018. His son Daniel tried to hold onto him as he was dragged outside, but one agent grabbed the boy by the neck and pulled him off. After a few minutes of struggle with protesting community members who were there just in case something happened to Bruno, the feds forced him into a van with blackened windows and shut the doors. 

“They shoved me out the door and and into the van like a sack of potatoes, like I wasn’t a person. Like I was nothing,” Bruno later said. “The handcuffs were too tight; they were cutting into me. On the inside, I just remember being in pain. My arm was hurting from where they threw me to the ground and my wrists were hurting very badly. For days, there were marks from where they cuffed me.”

For three hours the van remained in the same spot, blocked from moving in either direction by Bruno’s courageous supporters, who sang hymns like “Amazing Grace” to him from outside the vehicle. But eventually the uncooperative protestors were arrested, and their beloved friend driven away with his distraught family left behind. That morning marked the start of a laborious trip for Bruno, one in which he spent hours recovering from the traumatic experience and fearing what they would do to him. “Once in custody, I never knew where I was going,” he said. “They would just tell me to pick up my things because I was being transferred. When I would ask them where I was going, they refused to answer.”

By the time he arrived at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, Bruno had been awake for about 48 hours in varying degrees of discomfort. On one six hour bus ride, he described it as being in a “cage,” where the air conditioner was directly above him so that he was forced to freeze for the duration of the trip. They barely fed him, too. “They gave me a little water and a few slices of bread with cheese,” he said. It was like a brief taste of Guantanamo Bay.

On his last night in Georgia, the feds were loading a group of handcuffed men into a plane. An officer called them up one by one to board, but when he called Bruno’s name, he said something was wrong and told him to sit back down. “He said they weren’t taking me,” Bruno recalled. “Another officer said, ‘No, I think he’s going to go, let’s throw him on the plane.’ They were laughing as they went back and forth like this, saying, ‘He’s going,’ “No, he’s not going.’ I believe they did this to traumatize me. To get my hopes up and make me think I wasn’t going to be deported. It was like a funny joke to them.” He was inevitably put on the plane, and flown to Brownsville, Texas, where they dropped him off halfway across an international bridge and made him walk the rest of the way to Mexico.

Bruno and his wife Julia arrived in the United States in 1994, and he began work as a drywall contractor. In 1999 they had their first son, Daniel, and in 2011 they returned to Mexico to stay with some sick family, but two years later, Julia was diagnosed with severe lupus and a heart condition. With inadequate medical services in their country of origin, the couple sought treatment in the U.S.; while his wife was granted humanitarian parole, Bruno was denied entry. Upon arrival in North Carolina though, she underwent life saving open-heart surgery, and three months later her husband was arrested at the border for attempting to cross illegally. Fortunately, he was granted a stay of removal due to the dire condition of his wife, who depended on Bruno’s income to pay for medication.

That was in 2014, during the Obama administration. Immigration policy has shifted with the election of Trump, who signed an executive order soon after finding his seat in the Oval Office which prioritized deporting undocumented immigrants like Bruno, people who never had an encounter with law enforcement but were considered criminals for crossing the border illegally. So in 2017, the DHS announced that, although Bruno had done nothing differently, they were invalidating his work permit and actively pursuing deportation, only for the arrest at the border in 2011.

On December 13th, Bruno took sanctuary in the basement of the City Well United Methodist Church in Durham, where he would stay hidden for the next 11 months. During that time, he became an integral part of the Christian community. Attendants of the church saw him there every day because he never left, and his contributions were enormous. He played guitar and prayed with congregants, attended Bible studies, and even did construction work for the church. The freshly painted walls and brand new prayer room can still be enjoyed by the faithful who worship there today.

The DHS was well aware of Bruno’s whereabouts, but they were restrained from snatching him up because of the unique setting where he was hiding. Immigration enforcement officials have to abide by the sensitive locations memo, which instructs them not to carry out an arrest, interview, or search in a sensitive location like a school, hospital, funeral, wedding, or religious institution, except in the case of an imminent threat to someone’s life or if they receive special permission from higher up the totem pole.

Staying in the City Well Church, Bruno thought he was safe from the authorities, and for the most part he was right. So when the USCIS asked him to come to their office to get fingerprinted, he thought it was just a required step in the process to apply for deferred action, which it was. He only found out that ICE was colluding with USCIS when several agents appeared from back rooms, literally tore him from his son’s arms, and dragged him back to Mexico. They lured him out of the one place they couldn’t legally seize him by promising a potential future without fear, a future where he could stay with his family. That day, he learned that you can’t trust any federal agency. After his deportation, the Durham mayor, some city council members, and supporters gathered in the Durham City Hall to ask the DHS Secretary to reverse Bruno’s order of removal. “I’m not giving up hope,” said city council member Javiera Caballero. “I’m hopeful we will get Samuel back.” What happened to Samuel Oliver Bruno was a travesty. A star community member, someone who worked and paid taxes, someone who lived in the area for over 20 years, someone who went to church and never committed a crime except existing, someone who was loved and adored by his family and community, got forcibly excised from his home because Betsy and Cletus in Mississippi voted for a senile reality TV show host who said he would make America white again.

A Role for Liberation Theology

The Sanctuary Movement began in 1980 in Tucson, Arizona, with two Presbyterian and Quaker churches coming together to provide legal and humanitarian assistance to Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. When, after two years, none of their clients were granted political asylum, Reverend John Fife of Southside Presbyterian Church declared his open defiance of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), thus making his church a sanctuary for Central Americans trying to hide from the boot of the state. Other religious congregations soon followed in Northern California, South Texas, and Chicago, eventually creating a network of over 150 congregations who sponsored refugees at the Sanctuary Movement’s height in the mid 1980s. They worked with activists in Mexico to smuggle refugees across the border, then provided them with food, medicine, shelter, and employment.

Members of the Sanctuary Movement drew inspiration and justification for their actions from many different sources. Some saw themselves as a continuation of the 19^th century Underground Railroad, while others had prior experience participating in the 1960s civil disobedience campaign against racial segregation. Even a few congregations had sheltered men resisting the draft during the Vietnam War. But more often than not, religious activists opened their holy books for guidance. The Bible is laden with immigrant-friendly scripture. Here are just a few examples of many:

“For the Lord your God...loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.  You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” - Deuteronomy 10:18-19

“The aliens shall be to you as citizens, and shall also be allotted an inheritance.” - Ezekiel 47:21-22

“Mark of the true Christian: “…Extend hospitality to strangers…” - Romans 12:13

Today, the Sanctuary Movement is still alive, and thriving in comparison to the Reagan-era. In just a few weeks preceding Trump’s inaugaration, the number of religious congregations that signed onto the movement doubled to 800, and rose to 1100 by January of 2018. But before you throw your hands up in celebration, remember that this number does not reflect the amount of immigrants being protected. As of the same date, there were only 36 public sanctuary cases across the country. Of course, the data are over one year old, and there may be more sanctuary congregations that aren’t so publicized. But regardless, the number is depressingly low. In all likelihood, churches have raped more children than they have harbored immigrants. Come on Christians, you can do better than this.

Doing Better Than This

While the Trump administration has not yet violated the sensitive locations memo, ICE has gotten bolder and more aggressive in their arrests. Just last month, they detained a parent who was dropping their kids off at Portland Public School. Guadalupe Guerrero, the school’s superintendent reportedly said about the incident, “Students shouldn’t come to school anxious that their mama or papa won’t be at home after school. Parents shouldn’t fear not being able to pick up their kids from school because of the potential to be detained.” In another case, a 10-year old Mexican girl with cerebral palsy who had been in the U.S. since she was three months old was detained by border patrol agents waiting outside her hospital room, then transported to a detention facility away from her parents. She was eventually set free, but not all are so lucky. And for the ones who get kicked out, going back to Latin America can be a death sentence.

You shouldn’t have to read Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation to make the moral assessment that our treatment of non-natives in the United States is cruel and unnecessary, to say the least. But for the 68% of white Evangelical Protestants who believe the U.S. doesn’t have a responsibility to accept refugees, making that moral leap without some divine permission is clearly too difficult. If you are a person of faith, you have read the scripture. You know what is expected of you, as a child of God. For just one minute, turn off the television with those angry voices trying to scare you with graphs of changing demographics and anecdotes of drunk driving fatalities. You know there is no real danger; of course crimes will be committed by every population of people on Earth. This is how evil, powerful men, some might call them the Devil, make you so overcome with fear that you lose sight of your good duties as a Christian, Jew or Muslim. Poor people fleeing from poverty and violence like that in El Salvador are not the threat. The real threat is white, not brown, and he is in Washington cutting your Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security right now.

But don’t listen to me. Take it from the Pope. For years, Francis has been pleading the Christians of the world to cease the persecution of and clasp hands with migrants and refugees, whether they are crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh, or venturing across Central America to the United States. In a homily given at Lampedusa, he said,

“In Spanish literature we have a comedy of Lope de Vega which tells how the people of the town of Fuente Ovejuna kill their governor because he is a tyrant. They do it in such a way that no one knows who the actual killer is. So when the royal judge asks: ‘Who killed the governor?’, they all reply: ‘Fuente Ovejuna, sir’. Everybody and nobody! Today too, the question has to be asked: Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours? Nobody! That is our answer: It isn’t me; I don’t have anything to do with it; it must be someone else, but certainly not me. Yet God is asking each of us: ‘Where is the blood of your brother which cries out to me?’ Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor soul…!’, and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged. The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference.”

This globalized indifference that Pope Francis speaks of is especially prominent in the developed West, where we can afford to be indifferent. While inequities exist within the United States, outside of our borders we are considered the global elite. Even our poor enjoy higher living standards than the average person in the developing world. We typically do not have to worry about starvation, or total economic collapse, or political repression, or ethnic cleansing, or civil war. But for many of our Southern neighbors, those things are realities.

I once spoke to a woman who grew up under the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s. She told me stories of constantly moving around, trying to make an exodus for her uncle, who was a target of the military junta. During that time and for long after, she told me, the Chilean people became politicized. They had to; they couldn’t escape it. Politics pushed its grimy hands into their lives, wrapped its fingers around their necks, and squeezed. Politics kidnapped them, tortured them, and slaughtered them. They couldn’t live their lives wittingly ignorant to the affairs of their government as millions of Americans so easily do now. They couldn’t just disappear into the basement with their video games and forget about the world; that luxury is unique to us. And of course the source of their terror, Pinochet himself, was propelled into power and subsequently supported by the CIA, the intelligence agency of a government that could only do what it did with the tacit approval of an indifferent population.

If the Chilean migrant arrived at your border in 1974, would you have turned them away? If the Salvadoran migrant arrived at your border in 1983, would you have turned them away? Then why, when the Mexican migrant, or the Guatemalan migrant, or the Honduran migrant arrives at your border now, do you turn them away? Why, when the migrant lives among you for 20 years and commits no crimes, do you root them out and deport them? Do not say, “It is not me who does those things. It is Trump! It is ICE! It is the government!” because you will be no different than the people of Fuenta Ovejuna who say, “It is everybody and nobody.” You share in the collective guilt of our nation, just like me, for the atrocities brought about by our representatives. And unless you are one of the reverends with a Samuel Oliver Bruno in your basement, you have no right to wipe the blood from your hands.

If you are a leader or member of a religious congregation who believes in the God of the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden, and not the God of Trump, and you wish to join the sanctuary movement, click this link for a list of resources to guide you and your community members.

And just in case you need it, click this link for a step by step guide on what to do if ICE agents come knocking on your door.