Believing that many undocumented Salvadorans and Guatemalans who come to the United States are refugees and that the U.S. government is violating their right to protection, faith communities are helping them avoid capture. This belief is usually based on personal acquaintance rather than hearsay. Most sanctuary volunteers would like to believe the rigged studies and twisted statistics that the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) churn out. We don't relish the risks and personal costs that go with the protection of undocumented refugees, but those government papers are no response to the shattered seventeen-year-old who turns up at a church door in Tucson, his arms and torso spotted with tell-tale round scars. They fail to address the young woman, pregnant from having been gang raped by Mexican immigration officers, who pleads for help from an overworked priest in a Mexican border town. Nor do they conjure away her undersized seven-year old, who has decided to quit talking but says as much as we want to hear with the pictures he draws of soldiers mutilating a form that represents his father. In the same way that television coverage added a startling visual dimension to our understanding of the human cost of the Vietnam War, the refugee presence adds a personal dimension to our awareness of the suffering caused by U.S. sponsorship of military rule in Central America. Bureaucratic ploys used to shape public opinion concerning unfamiliar foreign affairs are worse than deceptive--they are obscene--when used to deny the presence of violated people who are right here among us.
Starting with sanctuary as a direct response to the arrival of Central American refugees, which leads to a concern about what is happening in Central America, we can cut straight through the tangle of polemics that is generated when the relation is inverted. Then we can attend to the crucial church-state issues that are involved. Clarity about these issues is essential to the fashioning of an accommodation that respects the institutional integrity of both the church and the state.
Some Red Herrings
Bureaucracies can spin out distractions faster than we can disentangle ourselves. Rather than getting bogged down with this sort of thin when there are important questions of social philosophy to consider, I will just briefly pass over come administrtationnarguments that could distract those who lack personal contact with the situation. The administration attack on sanctuary usually evades or glosses over the human rights and humanitarian law questions that are involved:
·Are Salvadorans or Guatemalans who are being returned to their homeland by the U.S. government facing conditions of armed violence, government repression, or persecution that violate their rights to life and liberty? ·Has the administration of refugee law been politicized to reflect a cold war ideology that discriminates against refugees from right-wing tyranny? ·Do INS intimidation, deception, concealment, mental torture, or bail bond prevent or discourage eligible refugees from seeking and defending their right to asylum?
The continuous gross violations of Salvadorans and Guatemalans human rights have been better documented than has been the case with any other first asylum refugees who have arrived in the United States during recent decades. Using the UN Refugee Protocols narrow definition, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Mexico City has found that more than half of all the Salvadorans it has interviewed do, in fact, have a "well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a
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