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Chapter two further examines the biblical tradition of radical hospitality that has been inspiring religious activists at the U.S.–Mexico border. It looks at the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s and at how clergy in the Tucson Sector challenged federal immigration laws by providing safe haven for Central American refugees fleeing from civil war. The chapter highlights key biblical passages and interpretations that have motivated religious activists in their quest to provide aid and hospitality to migrants and refugees, and at how the language and vision of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s has been adopted by current New Sanctuary Movement leaders and other immigrant rights groups across the country.

This ecumenical spirit of cooperation between Catholics and Protestants was evident in the Sanctuary movement. This chapter points out that in the 1980s faith-based organizations and more than 200 churches and several synagogues across the United States provided sanctuary or refuge to tens of thousands of political refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua who fled across the US–Mexico border. Viewing themselves as the new Underground Railroad, Sanctuary movement leaders provided support and assistance to these immigrants in direct violation of the US government. This movement laid the foundation for a revival of the Sanctuary movement in the Southwest in the late 1990s.

Throughout the Christian era, the church has been recognized as an institution providing sanctuary to those in need. In the contemporary era, sanctuary for migrants in the US has formally manifested itself twice: first in 1981 with the founding of the Central American Sanctuary Movement, and most recently in 2007 with the establishment of the New Sanctuary Movement. Both of these movements were motivated by faith and founded on political and religious principles to challenge US policies, educate Americans, and serve the needs of non-state-sanctioned refugees and undocumented migrants from Latin America who were either fleeing civil strife in their home countries and seeking refuge in the US or fighting deportation orders from the US government. This chapter introduces a third important, but less known, sanctuary movement, the transnational religious network that has emerged since the mid-1990s to challenge and question the morality of state border policies, and protect and serve migrants on the increasingly dangerous journey north from Central America and Mexico to the United States.

This chapter argues that Jones’s book-length poem Song for Anninho and novel Mosquito challenge death-bound theories of personhood through their narrational modes of flight, fugitivity, and sanctuary. It examines Jones’s depictions of historical and contemporary forms of sanctuary that organize the storyworlds of each text, including the seventeenth-century colonial Brazilian marronage community of Palmares, church sanctuary law, the North American Underground Railroad, and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement for unauthorized immigrant refugees. Responding to collapsed distinctions between fugitive and stateless personhood that have marked black Americans, indigenous persons, and other subjects of punitive jurisprudence in the hemisphere, Jones’s narrators identify themselves as refugees and fugitives who redefine sanctuary as a practice, not a place. In doing so, Jones’s narrators construct multiple extra-legal literary personae and other alternative modes of storytelling and archival memory that challenge the cultural logics underpinning taxonomies of legal personhood.

This chapter depicts some of the current debates and pressing issues around immigration reform and the treatment of refugees in the United States. It provides an overview of the Catholic Church’s teachings on immigration, which emphasize that all people have the right to emigrate when their lives are threatened or when they are unable to survive in their homelands. These teachings strongly mandate that all immigrants should be welcomed, assisted, treated with dignity, and given their basic human rights, regardless of their legal status. This chapter explores how American Catholics have responded to immigration concerns and crises. It documents the actions of the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, which defied immigration laws to help Salvadorans and Guatemalans who were fleeing civil war violence in their homelands. Sanctuary activists assisted these refugees across the border and protected them in churches and synagogues throughout the United States. The chapter concludes with a summary of the New Sanctuary Movement in the twenty-first century, which is focused on reforming immigration policy and preventing the deportation of members in “mixed-status” families.

This chapter examines how the Sanctuary Movement influenced the first city-level sanctuary declarations, as well as how these policies evolved from the 1980s to 2010s. Charting both shifts in the language of the policies themselves, as well as the political events leading to their passage, this chapter paints a picture of how conflicts over immigration enforcement and refugee policy have shaped modern sanctuary policies.

This chapter gives a bleak view of the possibilities for panethnicity that suggests that, perhaps inevitably, the interests of one or another national-origin group will take precedence over coalition. It is noted that Latinos have a tendency to prefer organizations that are based on their own groups, which makes it very difficult for Latino coalitions to develop and maintain multi-group organizations. This difficulty is due to the fact that Latino identity and organizational experience is single-group oriented. It also discusses the Sanctuary movement, which was not an “ethnic” movement but primarily a religious one.

The intended beneficiaries of sanctuary policies changed from refugees in the 1980s to undocumented immigrants in the 2000s. This chapter charts the shift in the tone and tenor of media coverage during that time. In the 1980s this coverage tended to emphasize how religion and morality influenced both the Sanctuary Movement and the cities that declared themselves “cities of refuge” in solidarity. By the 2000s, and particularly in the Trump era, the media have increasingly covered the partisan divides over the issue and debates over the role of these policies in increasing crime rates. This chapter also discusses the likely role this coverage has had on public opinion on the issue.

Although most of the churches that took part in the Sanctuary movement were Mainline Protestant or Catholic, this chapter shows that Pentecostal churches not only provided succor to Central American immigrants seeking sanctuary in the 1980s but even welcomed them into their ministerial ranks. This challenges the traditional view of Pentecostal faith-based action and forces scholars to expand their understanding of Latino political, civic, and social engagement. It is argued that Pentecostal and Evangelical churches serve as “micro public squares and transnational spaces” where people are constantly engaging in transgressive political behavior. There is evidence to indicate that social action has been a part of Latino Pentecostal outreach ever since Susie Villa Valdez attended the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles around 1906 and sometime thereafter began work in the “slums” of Los Angeles and migrant labor camps throughout Southern California.