PHS Live to look at 40-year history of immigrant rights movement
During the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, American churches challenged the authority of the federal government by sheltering Central Americans fleeing civil war and paramilitary death squads.
On Aug. 18, the Rev. John Fife and Mary Ann Lundy will discuss the movement during PHS Live. Amanda Craft, manager of Immigration Advocacy in the Office of the General Assembly, will share how the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is assisting immigrant communities today.
Click here at 4:55 p.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 18 to join the session. Register in advance here.
Fife and Lundy’s story goes back 40 years, to when Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church defied U.S. immigration authorities by declaring itself a sanctuary for people fleeing war in Central America. One declaration opponent immediately reported the church to the FBI.
Southside had no intention of hiding what it was doing. On Jan. 23, 1982, Fife, a pastor at the congregation, wrote to federal attorneys and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers informing them of the church’s plan to break the law and demanding an end to the deportation of refugees. On Jan. 24, in front of eight TV news crews, he read the church’s declaration.
Within a year, 1,600 Salvadorans would transit through Southside to safe houses around the country. Activists in Tucson and their network of supporters began to face surveillance, indictment and prosecution. Their movement in defense of the poor and the stranger against the United States’ unjust immigration enforcement, and against the U.S. war machine that provoked the migrants’ flight, would be called Sanctuary.
Sanctuary was a direct reaction to a crisis years in the making. In July 1980, 26 Salvadorans were stranded by their coyotes in the Sonoran Desert. Thirteen people died. St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Tucson and its pastor, the Rev. David Sholin, spearheaded support for the 13 survivors, raising $2,000 for their bond.
Compelled by this action, Sholin, Fife, Father Ricardo Elford and other organizers began holding Thursday night worship services outside the Tucson federal building, in protest of U.S. immigration policy and against U.S. support for death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua. They soon built a national network of supporters and raised $750,000 for bail and legal fees for migrants.
Doing Sanctuary outside the bounds of immigration law began informally. In November 1981 in Berkeley, California, an Immigration agent chased an undocumented man into a church. The local backlash led the INS director to order that no arrests be made in churches, schools or hospitals. Soon St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley began sheltering a Central American family. In Tucson, the Quaker activist Jim Corbett sheltered 21 Salvadorans in an adobe shack. Corbett turned to Southside for help, and for a year there was relative quiet.
In December 1982, “60 Minutes” aired a piece on the Sanctuary movement that acquainted U.S. audiences with the root causes of migration from Central America. At the same time, INS started an undercover operation, infiltrating the movement in Tucson, Nogales and Phoenix. Agents attended meetings and wore wires to record Sanctuary worker and migrant conversations in homes, churches and on the road.
Original Source can be found here.
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