Houses of Worship Protecting People from Deportation and Supporting Latino Communities — The Revealer

The following excerpt comes from Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (New York University Press, 2024) by Gina M. Pérez. The book explores the work of the new sanctuary movement and faith-based activism within Latino communities in Ohio.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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On September 5, 2017, Edith Espinal entered into sanctuary in the Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio. On that bright morning, she stood before microphones in the parking lot leading to the entrance of the Clintonville neighborhood church, surrounded by her family, faith leaders, community activists, immigrant rights advocates, and members of the Columbus Mennonite Church and other faith communities who stood with her as she publicly entered into a church that would be her home for more than three years. As a longtime resident of the city, this immigrant rights activist, community member, and mother in a mixed-status household had tried unsuccessfully for years to regularize her citizenship status. Her decision to publicly seek sanctuary in a church was not one she made in haste. But the urgency of the moment—the shifting immigration enforcement landscape and rising anti-immigrant and white nationalist sentiment—led her and others across the nation to embrace a centuries-old strategy of turning to sacred spaces and houses of worship for protection, and in her case specifically, to shield her from deportation. During the press conference, Pastor Joel Miller of the Columbus Mennonite Church announced, “Today, we are welcoming Edith into sanctuary in our church building.” As Pastor Joel continued his comments, he described Edith’s long history of living and raising a family in Columbus. “Edith is a neighbor. Edith is a mother. Edith is a child of God who sought refuge in our country many years ago and now wishes to remain united with her family in this city which has become her home.”

By focusing on family, faith, and community, Pastor Joel was telling the story of what grounds Edith had in the local community, which also resonated with the experiences of a growing number of people seeking public sanctuary in churches across the country in 2017. Her strategy was concomitant with an increasing number of cities, counties, states, and even college campuses declaring themselves sanctuaries following the 2016 presidential election. The late Columbus-based community activist Ruben Castilla Herrera, for example, emphasized the significance of Edith’s entering into sanctuary to affirm the city’s commitment to immigrants when he somberly observed, “Today, Columbus, Ohio, truly became a sanctuary city, because sanctuary comes from the people.” Edith and her daughter, Stephanie, emphasized the importance of keeping families together and the ways sanctuary is a collective response to a shared experience of precarity. “I’d like to thank you for being here to listen to our story,” Edith somberly declared through an interpreter. “I’m fighting to keep my family united.” Stephanie conveyed the grief of the moment, one shared by so many other undocumented families, when she emotionally proclaimed, “I don’t want her to go or to leave us at all. It’s not just us. It’s more families that get separated every day. My mom means everything to me.”

While Edith Espinal’s was one of the most visible public sanctuary cases between 2017 and 2021, her story is part of a longer history of faith-based organizing and sanctuary practices in the United States that primarily include, but are not exclusive to, undocumented migrants. As many scholars have documented, sanctuary movements in the United States have involved organizing to support conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, Central American refugees in the United States during the 1980s, and, most recently, the New Sanctuary Movement beginning in the mid-2000s, which has focused on aiding undocumented individuals and families faced with deportation, often after residing for many years in local communities. These efforts have drawn on ancient Western traditions of sanctuary that, as anthropologist Linda Rabben has observed, have involved “social groups and individuals who mobilize to provide sanctuary often outside the law and at great risk.” In this way, invocations of sanctuary have emphasized appeals to a higher transcendent authority to justify the decision by communities of faith to offer refuge, safety, and protection to those who are most vulnerable to state power. Such evocations also affirm commitments to align one-self with others to challenge state power and to potentially endure state-sanctioned punishment and harm as a result.

Following the 2016 presidential election, sanctuary was clearly in the air. There were calls for sanctuary campuses, sanctuary cities, sanctuary streets, and, as the Quakers put forth succinctly and powerfully, “sanctuary everywhere.” This language of offering sanctuary to people in need suffused organizing and service work across the country. In Northeast Ohio, for example, faith communities, activists, community leaders, and service providers employed the language of sanctuary to characterize their responses to what felt like unrelenting instances of family separation, displacement, and increased economic and social vulnerability due to immigrant detention, natural disasters, and economic and political crises within Latina/o communities. Following Hurricane María’s devastating impact in Puerto Rico in September 2017, people quickly mobilized to collect food, water, medical supplies, clothes, and money to send to the island and to help resettle hundreds of Puerto Rican families. In cities like Lorain, Ohio, just twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, Latina/o community members, faith leaders, and service workers framed their responses and support for Puerto Rican newcomers as providing refuge for displaced families facing unimaginable loss and uncertainty.

These same community members mobilized, once again, in June 2018 following workplace raids at Corso’s garden center in Sandusky, Ohio, where 114 workers were detained and faced deportation and family separation.