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n recent weeks, concerns about the Trump administration’s policies of family separation and child detention have sparked a firestorm of media attention and a powerful public outcry. In response, the administration has become increasingly vocal and radical in asserting the legitimacy of its actions and rhetorically assassinating any claims to refuge or protection individuals and families in detention offer in their defense. Or to be more precise, the defense that legal teams and community workers offer on behalf of those in custody. Other than a few wrenching recordings of children in detention, it has been very, very difficult to hear directly from any of the people subject to the administration’s policies.

As images of children in cages circulate online and in the media, alongside stories of toddlers being cared for by other children and siblings being prevented from hugging or helping one another, calls have increased for some kind of UN intervention or sanction from Canada, which is a signatory to a Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States. At the time of writing, no such action was forthcoming.

Rather, the greatest condemnation of the administration’s actions and the most intense work on behalf of the detainees has come from religious authorities, including the US Conference on Catholic Bishops, leading civil liberties advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and grassroots organizations such as RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services).  On 13 June 2018, Cardinal DiNardo, President of the US Conference on Catholic Bishops condemned moves by the Trump Administration to restrict asylum for women fleeing domestic violence as well as for people fleeing gang violence, restrictions clearly intended to curtail movement from Mexico and Central America. In pointed terms, the Cardinal denounced the policy of separating families. He declared:

Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma. Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together. While protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety. Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.

A week later, on World Refugee Day, Pope Francis lent support to this intervention saying simply, “"I am on the side of the Bishops' Conference…It's not easy, but populism is not the solution."

Clearly disturbed by the criticism from the US Conference on Catholic Bishops and others, Attorney General Jeff Sessions used the Bible to justify the administration’s policies. In a speech in India two weeks ago, Sessions insisted:

“Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution…I would cite you to (sic) the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.”

In response, critics cited other Biblical passages to counter his claims to moral authority. They have used Leviticus 19:33-34 and 24:22:

“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.”

Additionally, they have cited passages from Deuteronomy (10:18-19: “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.”). Most recently, six hundred members of the United Methodist Church, accused Sessions (who is a member), with violating their institution’s religious principles.

This debate over religion and state responsibilities has historic precedents. One could point to the founders’ debates over the separation of church and state in the US constitution as well as more recent conflicts over the care and protection of people arriving in the United States in search of refuge. In the early 1980s, the level of state and paramilitary violence in Central America was horrifying. With support from President Ronald Reagan and his administration, the Duarte regime in El Salvador and military regimes in Guatemala and Honduras waged brutal campaigns against their left-leaning opponents. Stories of death squads, murder, torture, and “disappearances” were common. In the face of poverty and terrible political violence, migrants began to make their way to the United States to seek refuge but were largely refused on the grounds that they were economic migrants, not refugees. By 1982, estimates suggest that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was deporting migrants to Central America at a rate of about 1,000 a month. The American government did not believe the claims arriving migrants were making about the dangers they faced back home. It rejected their asylum claims at an astonishing rate. At the same time, the Reagan administration continued to send millions of dollars to oppressive regimes in a determined effort to suppress communism in the Americas.

Over thirty years have passed since refugees from Central America first started to make their way to the United States in significant numbers. Still, we continue to see federal authorities waging a war of rhetoric, and more, against unwanted migrants by charging greed over need, and condemnation over compassion. These tactics were largely successful in Reagan’s America. However, two events occurred in 1980 that sparked awareness about the terror that was being unleashed. The first was the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador on 24 March 1980. Romero was killed inside a church as he said mass to gathered congregants. His murder in a religious sanctuary, for which no one was ever convicted, disturbed many, particularly those who were who were sympathetic to the powerful liberation theology movement emerging in Latin America. The murder of four American missionaries in El Salvador later that year also upset a growing number of concerned citizens in the United States and Canada. The other event that galvanized people into action was the discovery of a group of abandoned Honduran and El Salvadoran migrants in the Arizona desert in the summer of 1980. Of the twenty-six people who had initially payed human smugglers, so-called “coyotes”, thousands of dollars for safe passage into the United States, half died of heat and dehydration when their leaders got lost and abandoned them.

In what is now a well-documented story, a sanctuary movement emerged first in Arizona before becoming a loosely organized national coalition. Inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition of providing sanctuary from blood-feuds and other crimes until proper punishments or solutions could be developed, individuals such as Jim Corbett, a Quaker and rancher from Tucson, invited Central Americans into their homes, and religious communities, to provide food, shelter and legal support in their fight against deportation. Moreover, sanctuary providers did more than passively wait for people to present themselves for refuge, they actively ensured the safety of fleeing migrants by transporting them across the border from Mexico in a bid to save vulnerable people from human smugglers. In doing so, sanctuary providers broke federal law against unsanctioned human transportation across borders.

In March 1982, after months of working underground, Jim Corbett and fellow sanctuary providers, including Reverend John Fife of the Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson, went public along with the leaders of seven churches in California to declare that they would continue to help transport, and then shelter, refugees fleeing violence in Central America. Issued on 24 March, on the second anniversary of the killing of Archbishop Romero, the declaration of sanctuary also called on the United States to reform its immigration practices. Outside of the Southside Church, two banners flew. One said “La migra no profana el santuario” (Immigration, do not defile the sanctuary) and “Este es el santuario  de Dios para las oprimidos de Centro América” (This is God’s sanctuary for the oppressed of Central America) (Cunningham, 1995).

Reverend John Fife later recalled:

We couldn’t stop. We’d already made the decision when we got involved in that whole effort that the life-and-death needs of the refugees overrode any other set of risks what we might encounter here in the United States. The conclusion we came to is the only other option we have is go give public witness to what we’re doing, what the plight of the refugees is, and the faith basis for our actions (Ignatius Bau, 1985: 11).

The “new Underground Railroad” drew moral authority from the Bible and from the liberation theology movement in Central America, which emphasized solidarity with the poor (Golden and McConnel, 1986).  Yet the traditional practice of sanctuary, as it operated in Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt and later in Medieval England had never really been translated to the American context (McSheffrey, 2017; Napier, 1985). Historic sanctuary practices had dedicated specific sites, such as shrines, altars, and churches, as sites of refuge. In the Bible, there were six cities of refuge where criminals could be sheltered until penance or punishment was determined. Only someone who had committed premediated murder could be denied sanctuary. Otherwise, the sanctuary was to be inviolable for a period of time.

Although some described the United States as a whole as a place of sanctuary, elaborating the Pilgrims’ migration story into a sanctuary one, the reality was that sanctuary practices as described in the Hebrew Bible and later in Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt never existed in North America. There were certainly notions of refuge and protection among settlers and Indigenous peoples but they did not reflect the formal, and legally enshrined sanctuary practices of previous eras. As a result, the sanctuary movement of the 1980s interpreted moral responsibility and obligation in a new way, one that met the needs of the time. It was largely a religious response to what church leaders and their congregations believed was unwarranted and indefensible state policies and it spread rapidly. By 1985, there were over two hundred churches in thirty states declaring that they believed the stories migrants were telling them about life in Central America and, moreover, they believed they were worthy of protection.

In outlining the history of the 1980s sanctuary movement in the United States, there is more to be said than the simple fact that there are historical parallels to what happened then and what is happening now (especially in terms of the contemporary sanctuary city movement). As in the 1980s, we are seeing a conflict between church and state and once again that conflict is being borne out in part over the question of who has the moral authority to determine how migrants and refugees are to be treated. In May 1984, INS Director Richard M. Casillas declared, “I burn, seethe and boil that the religion of my choice has placed its imprimatur on a crusade to destroy my country, advocating a breakdown of our laws” (Ignatius Bau, 1985: 75). With this statement, Casillas was asserting the right of the state to determine what was best for the country, but the sanctuary movement saw otherwise.

The sanctuary movement of the 1980s was a direct challenge to the moral and legal authority of the United States government. Though it was a relatively small movement, it was also profoundly destabilizing for its presence pitted religious and secular authorities against one another, conjuring up the historic power conflicts between church and state. Until the state ultimately emerged as the ultimate power in Medieval Europe, the church had held supreme moral authority and this power was reflected in the designation of the church as a sanctuary space, a space that couldn’t be violated so that criminals could answer for their misdeeds to a higher God.

The tradition of religion as mediator, either through individual actions or through the designation of sacred spaces endured well into the seventeenth century when a short statute issued in 1624 declared:

“And Be it alsoe enacted by the authoritie of this present Parliament, that no Sanctuarie or Privilege of Sanctuary shalbe hereafter admitted or allowed in any case” (Ignatius Bau, 1985: 157).

Sanctuary as it was practiced in Biblical times, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt and Medieval England came to an end. It was reinvented in the 1980s and it is this “new sanctuary movement” that provides an opening to reflect on what is at stake in the present moment.

As with any media storm, the issue at the heart of all the attention provides an opportunity to ask questions of the larger historical processes and contingencies that have led us to a place where children are separated from parents in the name of deterring access to refuge and where there is profit to be made in running detention centers. For instance, the deliberate policy of separating families is born of a racist, imperial mindset that says certain human lives are less valuable than others. As Indigenous scholars and activists have noted, there is a long history of colonial states brutally separating Indigenous families with horrible consequences for the people involved and the generations that follow. It is a practice that continues in the present.

The other ongoing historical process that has been revealed in recent weeks is the continued conflict over the place of religion in a secular society particularly with regards to the question of determining who is deserving of protection. The state may have become paramount, but it has never held unilateral authority to dictate the moral conscience of its citizens. Indeed, the history of the modern-state is one where power has been called to account by religious authorities, as evidenced by the 1980s sanctuary movement. Attorney General Jeff Sessions used a passage from the Bible to defend the policies of the Trump Administration but these policies are not Biblically inspired, they are entirely in the realm of the secular. They are the product of a government determined to establish its own version of the rule of law. The principled defense of migrants and refugees from religious leaders in recent weeks is a visceral response to the present moment but it is also a response that emerges from the long history of religious and secular contests over community obligations and moral authority.

It is not clear that those who are intervening hold the same moral sway as previous generations. After all the scandals that have beset the church over the years, does it still mean something if Catholic Bishops in the United States or the Pope in Rome takes a stand against a perceived injustice? Over the past three decades, we have seen notions of sanctuary practices in the United States evolve from ones with religious overtones to a much more secular movement, involving cities, states and university campuses. Where is the place of religion in all of this? Or, more pointedly, who now holds the moral authority to take the Trump Administration to task? It will be important to observe how this discussion evolves for the place of moral authority in modern governance issues, particularly with regards to refugees and migrants, seems more critical than ever. Laura MadokoroMcGill University, laura.madokoro@mcgill.ca McGill University is on land that has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations.  

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References

Cunningham H (1995) God and Caesar at the Rio Grande: Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Golden R and McConnel M (1986) Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad. New York: Orbis Books.

McSheffrey S (2017) Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Napier D (1985) Hebraic Concepts of Sanctuary and Law. in: MacEoin G (ed), Sanctuary : A Resource Guide for Understanding and Participating in the Central American Refugees’ Struggle, San Francisco : Harper & Row.