99% Invisible - Sanctuary

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

A deadly desert crossing leaves survivors seeking refuge—and sparks a movement that defied the law and redefined the idea of sanctuary in America. This is the story of how faith, courage, and resistance collided with one of the biggest immigration battles in modern history.Note: This episode originally aired as two episodes in 2017.Sanctuary Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This week, Donald Trump returns to the White House, and he's promised, on day one, to begin carrying out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Trump plans to mobilize federal and local law enforcement to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the country. But already he's facing pushback from cities and states across the country that have declared themselves sanctuaries and say they won't cooperate. This is a fight we've had many times before and back in 2017 during Trump's first term we aired a two-part series exploring the origins of the sanctuary movement. We thought this would be a good week to revisit that story. Here it is. In July 1980, a group of Salvadoran migrants crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona.

They walked over an isolated mountain range and halfway across a wide desert valley. There were more than two dozen of them, people who'd left behind lives and jobs to come to the United States. They'd hired some guides to lead them on the journey. Reporting our story this week is Delaney Hall. And those guides had brought them to a largely uninhabited part of the border. It was a vast, empty, and fatally hot stretch

of the Sonoran Desert. The temperature the next day got up to around 112, 115 degrees out there. It was deadly. This is John Fife. He's a Presbyterian minister from Tucson, which is a couple of hours from where the migrants crossed. They were in the middle of the most desolate and deadly area of the desert. And I think out of the group of 26, 12 of them died the first day out.

The survivors were eventually found delirious and suffering from intense dehydration and heat stroke. Some of them had stripped off their clothes. Border Patrol agents brought them to a hospital in Tucson, which is where Reverend John Fife met them. And they asked some of us who were pastors to provide some pastoral care for the survivors who were traumatized beyond understanding.

And they began to tell me why they'd fled El Salvador. At that point, Reverend Fife had lived in Tucson for more than 10 years, leading a small congregation at a church called Southside Presbyterian. He didn't know much about Central America, or what was going on in countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador around this time. Not only ignorant, but I couldn't have put El Salvador on a map.

I knew it was somewhere between Mexico and Panama, but that was the extent of my knowledge. So I had a lot to learn and a lot of catching up to do. The people of El Salvador are caught in a web of terror trapped between the military forces of the Irina government and the guerrilla forces of the FMLN. No one is safe in this civil war. El Salvador's civil war had been decades in the making. Since the early 1900s, the country had been ruled by a series of oligarchs and corrupt military leaders.

They maintained control by repressing large segments of the rural population. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of left-wing guerrilla groups began to grow in power and influence. The military responded by trying to crush this resistance. Death squads targeted union leaders, community organizers, and other people they suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas. That included priests and nuns. Lots of civilians were caught in the middle of this violence.

Thousands of people were disappeared, murdered, or displaced. Today the Salvadoran people continue to suffer as a persistent pattern of brutal human rights violations grips the nation. And El Salvador wasn't the only country where this was happening. Similar conflicts were unfolding in Nicaragua and Guatemala, where authoritarian governments were facing pressure from left-wing rebels. This is the history Reverend John Fife started to learn about when he met the Salvadoran migrants who'd nearly died in the desert near Tucson. Well, basically, they were telling me why they'd fled El Salvador, about threats from

death squads, killings of members of their family or close friends, that sort of thing, and the reason why they'd had to flee. He didn't know it then, but Reverend Fife was witnessing the beginning of something big. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans were trying to get away from these dangerous and bloody civil wars. They were fleeing their countries, making their way through Mexico, and crossing into the United States. So a major migration of refugees occurred along this border during that 10-year period beginning in 1980. Reverend Fife's church sat less than 100 miles from the border, and it would be completely swept up in this crisis. Eventually, Fife and his congregants would give shelter to hundreds of Central Americans.

They'd be joined by a network of churches across the country, all opening their doors and giving migrants a safe place to stay. This would mark the beginning of a new and controversial social movement based on the old religious concept of sanctuary, the idea that churches have a duty to shelter people fleeing persecution. More than 6,000 people have signed up to provide sanctuary around the country. The sign today cracks down on so-called sanctuary cities. The modern sanctuary movement in the U.S. can trace its roots back to Reverend Fife.

Today we're going to look at how it began and why it caused one of the biggest showdowns between church and state in recent memory. After that first encounter with the Salvadorans at the hospital, Reverend Fife began to see more and more Central Americans arriving in Tucson. Some of them would come to his church and ask for help. And at first, his inclination was to work within the rules of the immigration system. I was pretty naive at that point. And I went to the immigration office here in Tucson,

met with the director, and said, we're seeing refugees who are fleeing for their lives. What do we need to do to protect them? And he said, well, we have good political asylum law in the books. And if they're deserving of political asylum, if they're refugees, they'll get political asylum. Asylum, you apply for if you are within the United States and have a well-founded fear of persecution. I'm talking law here.

This is Ruth Ann Myers. I was district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for Arizona in 1984 and a couple years later they added Nevada. Since 1980 when Congress passed the Refugee Act the US has asked people to meet a number of requirements in order to be granted political asylum. They have to establish that they fear persecution in their home country based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. They also have to convince immigration that their government is actually involved in their

persecution or that it can't control the groups that are. If someone shows up in the U.S. and they can meet those requirements, they're supposed to be able to stay. But it's not always that simple. Meyers used to interview people seeking asylum, and she says it could be tough to establish a person's status. It relied heavily on a single individual's testimony

about what they'd been through. It depends on the individual. It depends on what they say and how they say it. And if they have any backing. So basically it was my decision based on my experience and what the person said, because as you can understand, there was very little physical evidence of this. Despite the challenges of qualifying for asylum,

Reverend Fife and his church raised some money and organized legal assistance for the migrants. They started visiting detention centers and helping people fill out asylum applications. They arranged for lawyers to represent them in court. But it began to seem like even the people who met the requirements for asylum were not getting it. Like even in cases where there was physical evidence. I can remember taking in a guy who had been tortured in El Salvador. And we flew in an Amnesty International doctor who testified that, yeah, this guy's been tortured. I'm an expert on the physical effects of torture. And the immigration judge would order him deported the next day.

Reverend Fife began to wonder what was behind these decisions to deport. Central Americans hoping for asylum faced some significant hurdles. For one thing, just as they began turning up along the U.S.-Mexico border in 1980, tens of thousands of refugees from other places like Cuba and Iran were also seeking refuge in the United States. The government was overwhelmed with applications. Most Central Americans had also historically come to the U.S. for jobs, not because of political persecution.

The government was more inclined to see them as economic migrants. And on top of that, there was the Cold War. — Mr. Speaker, distinguished members of the Congress, honored guests, and my fellow Americans. — In 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a special televised speech before Congress. In it, he outlined his concerns about the civil wars flaring up in Central America. Central America's problems do directly affect the security and the well-being of our own people. Reagan saw Central America as an important front in the Cold War, a region so close to the U.S. that our national security required us to stop communist movements from flourishing there. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington Washington where we're gathered tonight.

Just a few years earlier, in 1979, a socialist revolution actually did happen in Nicaragua. The Sandinista National Liberation Front had ousted a U.S.-backed dictatorship, which had ruled the country for decades. At the time of this speech, the Reagan administration was sending aid to Contras fighting the new socialist Sandinista government. And the U.S. was also doing its best to suppress similar left-wing movements in El Salvador and Guatemala,

which meant backing the authoritarian governments that still had a grip on power in those countries. In summation, I say to you that tonight there can be no question the national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America. Thank you. God bless you. So here's how this all connects back to Tucson and the deportations that Reverend Fife was

seeing. Because the U.S. government considered the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala to be political allies in the fight against communism, it denied these governments were persecuting their own people. Under Reagan, almost all Salvadoran and Guatemalan border crossers were classified not as political refugees but as economic migrants. That meant they didn't qualify for asylum. They got sent back.

Ruth Ann Myers, the former INS director in Arizona, says immigration officers followed policy set by the government, which has broad discretion when it comes to asylum decisions. The immigration officers, whether it be enforcement or the asylum officers or whatever, were not making up their criteria or the law. This all came from Congress.

The result of this policy was stark when it came to Salvadorans in Guatemalans. Between 1983 and 1986, fewer than 3% of Salvadorans in Guatemalans who applied for asylum were approved. In that same period, the approval rate for Iranians was 60%. For Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, it was close to 40%. In that same period, the approval rate for Iranians was 60%. For Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, it was close to 40%. Back in Tucson, that put Reverend Fife and his congregants in a tough position. They didn't want to encourage migrants to report to immigration when they knew it was almost certain they'd be deported.

So they held a series of meetings to figure out what to do. And that's when Jim Corbett started showing up. It's hard to describe Jim because he was a unique figure. Jim Corbett died in 2001. But back in the 80s, he lived on the edge of Tucson. He raised goats, and he knew a lot about philosophy. He was also a Quaker. And as the refugee crisis in Tucson continued to grow, Jim's religious faith compelled him

to take action. He'd started letting refugees stay at his house and in some of the ramshackle trailers scattered around his property. So Jim starts coming to meetings at Southside Presbyterian Church where they're discussing the deportations. And after one of those meetings, Jim comes up to Reverend Five. And his contention at that point to me was, John, I don't think we have any choice under the circumstances except to begin to smuggle people safely across the border so that they're not captured and detained

and deported. My response was, how the hell do you figure that, Jim? And he explained. Jim explained that they needed to consider two moments in history. The first was back in the 1800s, when church people, a lot of them Quakers, helped move runaway slaves across state lines and through the Underground Railroad to safety. And he basically said, we have to conclude from history that they got it right. Those were the folks who understood and got it right. Then Jim pointed to the church and its failure to protect Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s. Many Jews were detained and deported back to Germany, where they were

killed. Jim argued that Christians should have done more to protect them. And he said, they failed. They failed completely. As people of faith, as the church. And I said, yeah, you're right. And his punchline was, John, I don't think we can allow that to happen on our border in our time. And after a couple of sleepless nights, I went back to him and said, yeah, you're right. I cannot be a pastor of a church here on the border and not do what you're asking. So sign me up." At this point, Jim Corbett had already done some border runs on his own, picking up migrants

in Mexico and helping them cross the border into the United States. But now Reverend Fife and a handful of others started helping him. At first they'd bring people across and put them up at Jim's house, but it quickly became clear they needed more space. So once again, Jim came to talk with Rev. Fife. He wanted the church to start hosting people. That was a question that the whole congregation had to deal with. And that's not an easy choice for people to make. They talked and prayed and then voted to let Central American refugees stay at the church. Soon, on any given stay at the church.

Soon, on any given night, the church would have dozens of people sleeping in the main gathering space. Church members would provide food, clothes, English lessons, medical care, and access to legal advice. They'd help the refugees strategize about what to do next. It wasn't as if the migrants were entirely safe. They were still undocumented and faced possible deportation, but they had access to resources, guidance, and a place

to stay. The congregation at Southside was drawing on a long religious tradition when they decided to take the refugees into their church. It's actually an ancient tradition of temples and churches and synagogues and sacred sites of indigenous peoples that goes back as far as any history we know about. In Greek and Roman history, people who were threatened with persecution could find protection in temples. When the Roman Empire became Christian, churches took on the same function. The concept of sanctuary can also be found in medieval canon law and British common law.

And as nation states evolved in Europe, some of those nations legally recognized the right of churches to shelter people. More recently, churches sheltered conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. But even though Reverend Fife was drawing on a long religious tradition, he and his congregants were still harboring undocumented immigrants who crossed into the country illegally. And as it turns out, the government was keeping an eye on their growing operation. Well, what do we do under those circumstances? And the only conclusion we came to was, well, the only choice we have is to go public

with what we're doing. They thought maybe by going public, the church could generate attention and public support. They invited a couple of other churches to join them in a public announcement. And in March of 1982, they hung two huge banners on the front of the church. They said in Spanish, this is a sanctuary of God for the oppressed of Central America, and immigration, do not profane sanctuary of God.

They held a service and publicly welcomed a new family from El Salvador to join the other refugees who were staying at the church. And they staged a press conference to explain exactly what the Sanctuary Movement was and what their goals were. So yeah, we made some national news. In the American Southwest, the Sanctuary Movement has become a highly emotional issue. Supporters of that movement, mainly church people, helped refugees from central to central... All members of the so-called Sanctuary Movement that offers aid, comfort, and shelter to illegal

aliens... About 200 churches across the United States have joined the Sanctuary Movement, vowing to violate the laws if necessary. As the movement gained visibility, it became more controversial. But the federal government contends conscience is not a good excuse for violating the law. Our objection to any such movement is that it takes law into its own hands. Despite these government objections, the movement continued to grow. More and more churches and synagogues started to get in touch with Reverend Fife. They'd call us and say, can you send us a family?

We're going to declare sanctuary. A network started to develop, which meant Reverend Fife and Jim Corbett had to figure out how to safely transport refugees across the country to the churches that could support them. So Jim and I basically sat down here with a map of the United States and said, okay, who do you know in Albuquerque and who do you know in Denver and who do you know across the United States so we could move people? And we literally in one afternoon figured out an underground railroad and we modeled it on the old underground railroad. By the mid-1980s, hundreds of churches and synagogues across the country had joined the sanctuary movement. Almost every mainstream church denomination had gotten involved, including Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists. Sanctuary volunteers came from a wide variety

of political viewpoints, including conservative. But everyone shared a belief that churches needed to respond to the Central American crisis. These American churches were connected to a network of churches that extended down into Mexico and Central America. So migrants could plug into this network and make their way north. Some would find shelter in Mexico,

others would continue into the US. That's exactly what Patricia Barceló did. My name is Patricia Barceló. I am a refugee from Guatemala, and I have lived in the United States since 1985. Patricia grew up in Guatemala City, and her parents were union organizers during the Civil War, which made them a target of the government. They labeled my dad and my mom as being involved in subversive acts and wanting to overthrow the government.

And that was enough for them to kill you, disappear you, or do whatever they wanted to do to you. At one point, Patricia's dad disappeared for many weeks. He'd been kidnapped by the military or the police. Patricia's family never learned exactly who. He came home being the shadow of a man that he was because he was so skinny and, I mean, bony. He had a beard so long. He didn't look anything like my dad. But he'd made it back. And with him, he read a horrible story of torture and things that had been done to him that were just inhumane.

At that point, Patricia's parents fled to Mexico City, leaving Patricia and her sister with their grandmother. Her parents said they'd be in touch when they had a plan. For two years, nothing. And then a letter from her mother. And the letter said, you know, bring the girls to the border, bring them to this park in Chiapas and I will be there waiting.

Patricia and her sister crossed the border from Guatemala into Mexico and met their mom at a designated park. They learned that she'd met some Quakers involved in the sanctuary movement. The Quakers told the family to head to northern Mexico where they were met by a Catholic priest named Father Ricardo Elford. He worked closely with Reverend Five. He wanted to know what had happened in Guatemala. He wanted to know why we were wanting to come to the U.S. He said, you know, just tell me, you know, what went on, because we want to bring you. We just want to know what we can do for you. And my mom told him everything that happened, that the two, and then he said, everything

is going to be okay. Father Elford was vetting the family. He was making sure they qualified as refugees. As the sanctuary network had grown, they'd had to develop a more formalized process. This was partly to ensure their limited resources went towards helping people who were most in need. It was also to try and ensure

they weren't putting volunteers at risk or bringing someone dangerous into the US. One of the government's criticisms of the sanctuary movement was that they lacked the expertise and resources to evaluate potential refugees. The government worried they might be helping criminals enter the country, or communists who wanted to undermine the US government. Here's Reverend Fife again.

I would just kind of smile and say, you don't understand the church. We have the best intelligence system in the world. As I understand it, what you say is you have five CIA agents in El Salvador right now. I have thousands. They're called priests and pastors. And all I have to do is pick up the phone and call them, and they'll give me the whole family history. Once Father Elford was satisfied that Patricia and her family actually met the requirements for refugee status, he arranged for them to be brought across the border into the US.

We got picked up very early in the morning in this yellow truck. And we were thrown in the back right under lots of sleeping bags. And they told us that no matter what, we couldn't pop our heads up. We just had to stay underneath. The family crossed into Douglas, Arizona

and then headed to Tucson, where they stayed at St. Michael's Episcopal, another church in town that had declared sanctuary. After living there for six months, they moved into a house and started the long process of applying to stay in the US. It took them more than six years of legal wrangling to receive asylum. Patricia still gets emotional thinking about what the sanctuary movement did for her and her family.

I remember my parents talking about this and saying, you know, who would do this? Who would risk their lives, you know, their good lives here in the US for people like us? But as the movement grew bigger and more visible, the whole endeavor became riskier. Well, quite frankly, I never thought we were going to get away with this. I mean, the first time I went to the border to do a crossing, 1981, sometime, I had to get comfortable with the fact that we weren't going to get away with this, that the government was going to come after us. And it was only a matter of time. John was right. It was only a matter of time, and the religious motivations of the sanctuary

movement didn't get much sympathy from the government. That's after the break. We're back with an episode that first aired in 2017, not long after Trump first took office. We're revisiting that story now because, well, he's back and the history from the 1980s is relevant once again. Here's producer Delaney Hall. By the mid-1980s, the sanctuary movement had become very visible and also very controversial. Here's a report that aired on NBC around that time. In the eyes of the congregation at St. Mary's Church, they are heroes. In the eyes of the federal government, they are criminals who smuggle aliens into this

country illegally. The government didn't like that churches were openly defying immigration law in harboring undocumented immigrants. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, contended that many of these people didn't have legitimate asylum claims. The agency's stance was that many of these migrants had come to the U.S. to find jobs, not because they feared political persecution. A refugee from El Salvador.

The administration contends he and others like him have come here for economic reasons. But the young man listed other reasons for fleeing his homeland. Killing, repression, misery, and hunger. The U.S. government found itself in a tough situation. They could allow the churches to continue openly disregarding the law, or they could launch an investigation into the movement and risk public disapproval by targeting sympathetic church workers. In 1984, the government launched an investigation into the sanctuary movement.

They called it Operation Sojourner, a biblical term for traveler or wanderer. The goal was to collect enough evidence to indict the leaders of the movement and to stop churches from sheltering migrants. Shortly after the government launched its investigation, a couple of new volunteers approached members of the sanctuary movement, asking if they could get involved. Their names were Jesus Cruz and Solomon Graham. I thought they don't fit the usual sanctuary volunteer profile, right? They look a little tough and a little too experienced on the border for the average volunteer we're getting.

This is Reverend John Fife. And Fife said that even though Cruz and Graham seemed a little different somehow, it was his policy to welcome all who said they wanted to help. They had crucifixes around their necks, and they presented themselves as folks who'd heard about the sanctuary movement and wanted to be a part of it. So we welcomed them and included them in. — Cruz and Graham began attending meetings and helping transport Central American migrants

through the sanctuary network. — They would drive folks from Tucson to Phoenix, or from Phoenix to Albuquerque, or from Phoenix to LA. So they would drive legs on the Underground Railroad. But as it would turn out, Cruz and Graham were not ordinary volunteers. They were undercover informants. The government had hired them to infiltrate the movement and gather evidence. Cruz and Graham were both former smugglers.

They'd worked on the border as guides, bringing people into the country illegally. Then they'd been caught by immigration. And they'd reached an agreement that if they would infiltrate us and inform the government about what we were doing, that they would not only pay them, but drop the charges against them. The INS had decided to investigate the sanctuary movement using the same tactics they might use against any criminal smuggling enterprise. The agency wasn't swayed by the religious motivations of people like Reverend Fife. Here's Alan Nelson, the then Commissioner of INS, speaking with ABC in 1985.

— If you and I are meeting in a church building to plan to rob a bank and open with a prayer and close with a prayer, I don't think many people would say this is a church service that should be protected. — They have the right to think what they want. Anybody does. That doesn't exclude them from obeying the wills of the United States. — This is Ruth Ann Myers. She became the INS district director for Arizona in 1984. She didn't oversee the investigation into the sanctuary movement,

but she was briefed on it when she arrived at the Phoenix office. Yeah, I was totally surprised. In my experience, I had no knowledge before of a church breaking the law and harboring illegal aliens. Smuggling and harboring. Meyers says the case was pretty straightforward. These people were breaking the law, the law of the United States. I'm in favor of legal immigration, but not illegal immigration. I think we have the right to have our laws

and to enforce them and decide who comes into this country and who doesn't. Cruz and Graham, along with a couple of other government agents, spent 10 months undercover, gathering evidence against the sanctuary workers. Their methods would eventually come under public scrutiny, because they hadn't just infiltrated the sanctuary movement. They were also secretly recording meetings, conversations, time is about 8 p.m.

For God will deliver the needy when they cry for help. These undercover methods struck some people as offensive and overreaching. Here's Anthony Lewis, then a professor at Harvard Law School, speaking to ABC News in 1985. Oh, it's the methods that bother me. ABC News in 1985. The state was infiltrating and secretly surveilling churches, in a country where the separation of church and state is a deeply held ideal. We reached out to two agents who were involved with the case, and both declined to speak

to us. The people overseeing the investigation at INS thought these methods were justified. They saw the movement as more political than religious. Yes, there were many that thought it was under the guise of the church. Meaning, the sanctuary workers were using religion as a cover to push a political agenda and undermine immigration laws. And it's true that some sanctuary volunteers were vocally critical of the American policy in Central America. Some expressed support for the left-wing movements developing there. In fact, there was a divide within the movement itself about whether their work should be

motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns or political ones. That debate got to the point where we decided to have a gathering and try to resolve it. But two weeks before that meeting was supposed to happen, the government indicted 16 of the sanctuary workers in Tucson, including Reverend Fife. On January 14th, 1985, federal agents swept down, arresting 63 Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees across the United States and handing out indictments

to 16 leaders of the sanctuary movement. That morning, Reverend Fife was sleeping when he heard someone banging on his front door. And so I got up and I went to the door and there were two border patrol agents there. His immediate concern was for the refugees that were staying at Southside Presbyterian Church right across the street from his house. The only thought that occurred to me was, I got all these vulnerable people over in the church. I need to keep these guys occupied.

So I invited them in, made coffee, stalled every way I could. He read through the entire indictment the officers had handed him, trying to buy some time. My charges were pretty clear, and they were pretty typical of everyone. They were a number of counts of conspiracy to violate federal law, harboring illegal aliens, transporting illegal aliens, and aiding and abetting illegal aliens. And everyone had different counts under each of those categories. Eventually, the Border Patrol agents went on their way, and Reverend Fife and the other leaders of

the Sanctuary movement were left with a daunting situation. They faced an impending high-profile trial in which they'd be facing off with the federal government. And the charges against them were serious. If convicted, they could spend years in prison. They got to work assembling a team of lawyers to defend them. So there's two bases, as I see it, for sanctuary. It's very simple, really. This is James Brosnahan, one of the defense lawyers.

The first is religion. And many churches, many religions have as a distinct imperative that you are to assist people who are on the road and who are fleeing some form of violence, oppression. It's the teaching of Jesus. The defense thought there was an argument to be made, that the sanctuary workers were just acting in accordance with their faith. Not only that, the lawyers believed the religious rights of the sanctuary workers had been violated

by the government agents who'd infiltrated their churches and made secret recordings. And that's intimidation of people who are pursuing their Bible studies in a church. The second part of the defense's argument had to do with asylum law. The law provides that when a person shows up at the border and they are fleeing certain specific kinds of oppression or violence, they have a right to come in. And when that is true, and that can be established

in an immigration court, that person is entitled to stay in the United States. That's asylum. As the defense team researched the laws, they started to believe that their clients hadn't really violated the law at all. They thought the U.S. government had. I did research both how the United States government was handling asylum applications from people from Central America, and I also researched international law. This is A. Bates Butler III, another lawyer for the sanctuary volunteers.

And I was appalled by what I discovered about how the United States government was systematically, it seemed, denying asylum applications from Central America. This was all happening in the context of a major shift in U.S. refugee policy. Before 1980, the U.S. approach to taking in refugees had been expressly political. It gave preference to refugees fleeing communist countries and countries in the Middle East. In 1980, President Carter signed the Refugee Act into law. The law was supposed to create a fairer system by adopting a more humanitarian, non-ideological

definition of a refugee. It used the criteria developed by the United Nations, which identified a refugee as anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. Even though these new criteria were in place when Reagan came into office, the lawyers for the sanctuary workers believed the government was not following its own law. They thought INS was turning away large numbers of El Salvadorans and Guatemalans who should have qualified

as political refugees. Butler had been skeptical of the sanctuary movement when he first learned about it, but his research had changed his mind. And so I moved from a position of, well, this is all fine and dandy and this is the religious thing to do, but it's illegal. I moved from that position to it's lawful to help these people and it is the religious thing to do, but it's illegal. I move from that position to it's lawful to help these people and it's the United States government that is violating the law.

-♪ God of reign... The defendants and their supporters marched to the federal building in Phoenix for the first round of arraignments this morning. The charges, transporting aliens illegally, harboring them, and conspiracy. Inside the courtroom, the defend transporting aliens illegally, harboring them and conspiracy. Inside the courtroom, the defendants pleaded not guilty. They were released without bail.

Their trials were set for April 2nd. The sanctuary people say those trials will be a major test of religious freedoms in this country. This afternoon in Tucson, more arraignments. After months of preparation, the defense team was feeling confident. They thought they had sympathetic clients, a good amount of public support, and compelling legal arguments.

Here's Reverend Fife again. Our position was, oh, we welcome the opportunity to make that case in court. And we think we're going to win in a slam dunk. But then, very early on, the defense team faced a major setback. and we think we're gonna win in a slam dunk. But then, very early on, the defense team faced a major setback. The lead prosecutor for the government was a lawyer named Donald Reno Jr.

And one of his first moves was to file a series of motions, asking the federal judge who was hearing the case to limit the arguments the defense could make. And then the federal judge who was hearing our case ruled that we couldn't say anything in our defense during our trial about five subjects, United States refugee law, international refugee law, conditions in El Salvador, conditions in Guatemala, or our religious faith. So that wiped out our entire legal position. I mean, what was left? Nothing was left. And the way my attorney explained it was, well, federal judges in criminal prosecutions have enormous power to exclude evidence that they believe is not

relevant to the charges that are being filed against the defendant. The judge had effectively reduced the case to its most basic level. Had the sanctuary workers engaged in a conspiracy to smuggle and harbor undocumented people? Yes or no. There was to be no discussion about context, history, or motivations. One of the defendants was a man named Jim Corbett. Along with Reverend Fife, he'd helped to found the sanctuary movement. Corbett died in 2001, but in an archival interview, he described the situation that the defense

team found itself in. He said it was as if a man was driving late at night in freezing weather. His car breaks down, so he goes to a nearby house. And breaks in, and then is discovered and brought to trial. And the judge rules out any evidence that would indicate that it was 40 below, his car had gone bad, he had stopped, went to the only house in the area, and entered it. Without understanding the context, Jim thought there was no way the jury could understand why the sanctuary workers had decided to shelter Central Americans. Now, in terms of the necessity defense, we're talking about something very similar with

people fleeing torture and murder in a very different context. But to rule out the ability to refer to that necessity simply makes a mockery of the law. The judge, named Earl Carroll, died in early February of 2017. We requested an interview with prosecutor Donald Reno Jr., but he's still an active litigator for what's now known as immigration and customs enforcement. The agency declined our request to speak with him. But he was featured in a news report from 1985, and he described the sanctuary movement as, quote,

an alien-smuggling conspiracy. The defendants induced, encouraged, smuggled, transported, and harbored illegal aliens. The government says that's not much different from drug smuggling. Over the next several months, the prosecution laid out its case against the sanctuary workers, relying heavily on testimony from their undercover informants. Reno characterized the sanctuary movement as a smuggling operation, pure and simple. The defense team tried to undermine those accounts in cross-examination and to sneak

in details about context and motivation when they could. But in most ways, their hands were tied, and when it came time for the defense to present their case, they declined to put anyone on the stand. without questioning a single witness, jury deliberations could begin next week. It is alleged that the sanctuary... The jury deliberated for more than 48 hours, spread over nine days. On May 1st, 1986, 16 months after the indictments and more than six months since the start of the trial, the jury filed into the courtroom to read the verdict.

Of the 11 sanctuary workers who went to trial, three were acquitted of all charges. Eight were found guilty, including Reverend Fife, which hit Bates Butler, the lawyer, really hard. After the jury came in, I was so disgusted... ...with the system... ...that I had worked in for so long. I didn't want to be a part of it. And we were so upset that our government

and our court system had cast aside our clients with their moral positions, and that we felt like the government and the courts were bankrupt, the system was bankrupt. But the other defense lawyer, James Brosnahan, had known there were significant hurdles they needed to overcome. You know, juries are very good, but they come into the box with their own attitude. And the attitude is people just can't come over the border.

If you're going to do that, that, you gotta pay the price. Ruth Ann Myers of the INS thought the verdict was fair. The people that worked in the sanctuary movement did not present those people to immigration offices. They smuggled them into the US. They gave them, quote, sanctuary in their churches. They did not follow the law. Next came the sentencing by the judge. We really were worried that the judge was going to put him in prison. My attorney told me, take a toothbrush in your hip pocket when you go to sentencing, because they want you bad. So I had made arrangements with the congregation and with my family and everything, expecting to go to prison.

And much to our astonishment, he sentenced all of us who were convicted to five years probation. The judge gave them relatively lenient sentences, considering they'd been convicted of, in some cases, felonies. We were relieved at that point. I think, I don't know what he thought, but I thought that if he gave these nice people a jail term, it would be awful public opinion on that. And I think he had some sense that that might be true. Many of the sanctuary workers, including Reverend Fife, went back to their communities and continued

their work in the sanctuary movement. Churches continued sheltering people. Volunteers continued helping people across the border. Many of the sanctuary volunteers had made clear in their closing arguments in the trial that they wouldn't stop doing the work. The government may have sentenced John Fife and seven other sanctuary activists but it has hardly silenced them nor stopped them from a cross-country crusade.

And at that point did the government just back off? I mean they must have known that you were continuing to do exactly what they'd just tried you for? Right. They backed off us here in Tucson, but they tried one more trial. In New Mexico, the government charged a man and a woman who were part of the sanctuary movement for transporting undocumented immigrants. And the jury in that case found them not guilty. And at that point, we knew that the movement had grown to the point where juries would no longer convict sanctuary workers. Not long after the criminal trial had ended, a group of churches and refugee rights organizations

filed a class action lawsuit against the government. They alleged, among other things, that the government had engaged in discriminatory treatment of asylum claims made by Guatemalans and Salvadorans. In 1990, the government settled the lawsuit. They agreed to give everyone who was here without documents from those countries temporary protected status, work permits. And they agreed to a whole series of reforms of the political asylum process. So we essentially began to wind down the

sanctuary movement. But even though the churches were slowing their work, the whole idea of sanctuary was spreading. College campuses, cities, counties, even whole states began to declare themselves sanctuaries. And not just for refugees fleeing persecution, but for undocumented people more broadly. This accelerated through the 1980s and has continued up to today. But what exactly sanctuary means varies from place to place. Anything you want.

That's part of the problem. And each city is probably a little bit different. Once again, lawyer James Brosnahan. Usually the local authorities, police, sheriffs, will not assist in the deportation of undocumented people. In some places, police aren't allowed to inquire about a person's immigration status, or to give that information to the federal government. In other places, all residents are promised access to city services, regardless of their

immigration status. These policies can be set in law, or they can just happen in practice. President Donald Trump talked a lot about sanctuary cities during his campaign, and he's pointed to murders committed by undocumented immigrants as evidence that sanctuary cities should not exist. He's threatened to pull federal funding from cities that identify as sanctuaries, and he's also promised to accelerate deportations. In response, churches are once again sheltering people.

I think a lot of congregations across the nation are struggling with what will it mean to be faithful to the mandates of our faith underneath this administration. This is Allison Harrington. She's the current pastor of Southside Presbyterian in Tucson, the church where the sanctuary movement began in the 1980s. She and her congregation provided sanctuary to a couple of people who were threatened with deportation during the Obama administration. They're now having conversations about whether that work will expand in the next few years. I mean, I can't ignore the fact that my predecessor, John Fife, was indicted for doing the work that I'm doing right now and that he was looking at 10 years in prison. I try not to think about that, but you can't ignore that. Since 2011, churches have had some protected status as sanctuaries. In that year, Immigration

and Customs Enforcement under President Obama issued a memo. It said that some sensitive locations require special consideration by immigration officers. The government has said we won't enter into those sensitive locations unless it's an extreme situation or we have higher levels of approval. And those sensitive locations are houses of worship, hospitals, and schools. But that practice isn't codified into law and could easily change. Recently, there have been reports of immigration agents targeting undocumented people in hospitals and schools.

Churches might also be vulnerable. That's gonna have to be worked out through a number of institutional decisions as well as court decisions well into the future. What's gonna be the result? We'll see. No one knows. This two-part story was produced by Delaney Hall in 2017. The rerun was produced and mixed by Martín González. Original tech production by Shreef Youssef. Music by Swan Real and George Langford.

Thank you to Miriam Davidson, author of Convictions of the Heart, for letting us use tape of her interview with Jim Corbett. And additional thanks to Trent Purdy at the University of Arizona Special Collections and Jude Pardee. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney,

Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites. We're making a real go of it on Blue Sky. You can join us there as well as our own Discord server.

I spend a lot of time on the Discord server. There's a link to that Discord server as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.