The Future of Sanctuary

The Future of Sanctuary

Sanctuary activists face new challenges under Trump’s second term—but their work has always entailed great personal risk.

In the summer of 1984, a caravan of vehicles full of religious activists sped across the United States. Moving from Tucson to Los Angeles to Denver and finally ending in Detroit, this self-styled “Sanctuary Freedom Train” was transporting a Salvadoran family of four that had fled their war-torn country and arrived in the United States seeking political asylum. Raul and Valeria Gonzalez had escaped with their two children after Raul, a teacher, had been arrested and beaten by government soldiers and threatened with worse if he were to continue his literacy work among the country’s poor. The Gonzalez family found refuge in Detroit’s St. Rita’s Catholic Church, where people of faith had pledged to offer sanctuary to migrants who had been unduly denied asylum by the American government. Once settled in his new temporary home, Raul became an organizer himself, inviting congregations across the country to join a national movement for migrant justice. As he noted a year after disembarking the Sanctuary Freedom Train, “solidarity is doing whatever is needed to stop the suffering of others.”

Over the last forty years, immigration and refugee justice activists have adopted and adapted the practice of sanctuary as a form of solidarity, sheltering undocumented individuals and families who have exhausted all legal recourse to remain in this country. What began as a faith-based movement has grown into an all-encompassing effort to transform cities, schools, and other public spaces into locations free from the specter of an ever-encroaching detention and deportation apparatus. The municipalities that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities”—a term first embraced by activists in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1980s—have adopted a number of different policies, the most important of which are noncooperation agreements, which limit how authorities within a given jurisdiction can work with federal immigration enforcement. Whether it’s in a church pew or on a city street, advocates of sanctuary have embraced a communal ethic of radical hospitality toward those forced to the margins of society. Their work evokes the words of Jim Corbett, a founder of the 1980s sanctuary movement: “Individuals can resist injustice, but only in community can we do justice.”

The re-election of Donald Trump has presented a wave of new obstacles for sanctuary activists. In just the first few weeks following his inauguration, Trump moved to make good on campaign promises to make life untenable for refugees, visa holders, and undocumented residents alike, signing executive orders that declared a national crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border, expanded the number of people who are deportable, and constrained the country’s asylum laws. He’s found ready allies among Republicans in Congress, who have taken up the charge of rooting out sanctuary policies by calling the mayors of Boston, Denver, New York City, and Chicago...