Before Elvira Arellano was arrested by federal immigration officials on Aug. 19 outside Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Los Angeles, few Americans were aware of the New Sanctuary Movement and its efforts to shelter illegal immigrants in this country.
Arellano had taken refuge in a sanctuary church in Chicago about a year earlier, after a judge ordered her deported -- making her the first immigrant to do so since the 1980s. But Arellano's story was mostly ignored by the Spanish- and English-speaking media until she was arrested and subsequently deported to her native Mexico. (She had decided to risk arrest by appearing in public in L.A.) Her personal plight -- she left behind her 8-year-old U.S.-born son in Chicago -- spotlighted one of the movement's key issues: the separation of families because of deportation. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 3.1 million children of the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants are U.S. citizens by birth.
Arellano's case has served as a new rallying cry for immigration reform and has brought the New Sanctuary Movement into the forefront of the immigration debate.
The movement's roots go back to the 1980s, when civil wars ravaged many countries in Central America. Nearly a million victims of kidnapping, rape and other violence sought refuge in the United States, the majority of them arriving here illegally. Politicians in Washington resisted calls by human rights groups to give the displaced people protected status or to classify them as refugees so they could remain temporarily in the U.S. until the situation improved in their homelands. In protest, civic and religious groups -- St. John of God Catholic Church in San Francisco, the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson and Wellington Avenue Church in Chicago among them -- organized a grass-roots movement to shelter immigrants in churches on the assumption that federal authorities would not arrest people inside a church. Called the sanctuary movement, it became one of the most important organized acts of resistance in the latter part of the 20th century.
From its beginnings in 1982, the movement grew to include more than 200 churches, temples and synagogues, including Dolores Mission, Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church and the Proyecto Adelante of the United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. While only a small number of immigrants actually took refuge at religious sites, the public debates sparked by the sanctuary movement helped bring about several significant changes, including the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and the 1989 Central American Studies and Temporary Relief Act. These laws gave Central American refugees certain protection from deportation and created opportunities for them to legalize their status and become citizens.
