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Law, Conscience, and the Sanctuary Movement
| Article
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10884 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
5,704 Words |
| Author
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Gary MacEoin
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How and why do U.S. citizens get into the sanctuary movement? I can tell you how and why thousands of mostly very conventional middle- and upper-middle-class women and men in a typically conservative Arizona city became involved.
Tucson, like most U.S. cities, welcomed substantial numbers of Cubans and South-east Asians in the 1970s, the churches and synagogues playing the dominant role in resettling and assimilating them. Its geographic proximity to the Mexican border had long made its residents familiar with the tide of undocumented Mexicans that ebbed and flowed through it--the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) benevolently turning its blind eye--with the rise and fall of demand for cheap, docile labor in citrus groves, cotton fields, restaurants, garages, and the sweatshops to which industry subcontracts production of electronic circuits and other parts with high labor content.
All this experience, however, had not prepared us for a series of events that began in July 1980 when a coyote (a professional smuggler), having collected his fees, abandoned twenty-six Salvadorans in the Arizona desert. Half of them had died of thirst and heat exposure by the time they were found. A crash program of medical and emotional aid was immediately developed by the churches and synagogues of Tucson where the survivors were taken.
As the survivors recovered and as we talked to them, we quickly were forced to see that we were dealing with something radically different from our perennial experience with Mexicans. Like most other North Americans, most people in Tucson knew nothing about El Salvador except that a few months earlier Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated during a religious service shortly after appealing to the president of the United States to stop sending arms that his government was using to kill its own people.
Now, however, we were getting eyewitness accounts that challenged all our assumptions and preconceptions. These people were telling us that their own government was harassing, imprisoning, torturing, and killing people who were simply asking for the elementary rights for free speech, freedom of associaton, a living wage, and a voice in the political system. The process involved death squads that worked in close cooperation with the armed forces and often consisted of off-duty members of the armed forces. Their targets included all suspected of seeking to promote peaceful reform. Those tortured and assassinated included priests, nuns, Protestants pastors, catechists, and other church workers who supported the just demands of the poor.
These were traumatic allegations, and most of us were by no means ready to believe that they were not at least grossly exaggerated. Our confusion was quickly compounded when the INS moved in to arrest the terrified survivors of the desert ordeal and prepared to ship them back to El Salvador. "Wait a minute," we said. "If what these people have said is true, we can't send them back to the 'tender mercies' of a regime of institutionalized injustice." We checked with immigration lawyers and learned that our legal system provides political asylum to persons who have a reasonable fear of being persecuted or killed if returned to their homeland. Russian ballerinas and Yugoslav tennis pros have received such asylum in circumstances that seemed much less life-threatening.
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