(The Hernandez family staying at the Church of the Advocate in 2018. Image source: Sydney Schaefer / File Photo)

The following excerpt comes from Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (New York University Press, 2024) by Gina M. Pérez. The book explores the work of the new sanctuary movement and faith-based activism within Latino communities in Ohio.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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On September 5, 2017, Edith Espinal entered into sanctuary in the Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio. On that bright morning, she stood before microphones in the parking lot leading to the entrance of the Clintonville neighborhood church, surrounded by her family, faith leaders, community activists, immigrant rights advocates, and members of the Columbus Mennonite Church and other faith communities who stood with her as she publicly entered into a church that would be her home for more than three years. As a longtime resident of the city, this immigrant rights activist, community member, and mother in a mixed-status household had tried unsuccessfully for years to regularize her citizenship status. Her decision to publicly seek sanctuary in a church was not one she made in haste. But the urgency of the moment—the shifting immigration enforcement landscape and rising anti-immigrant and white nationalist sentiment—led her and others across the nation to embrace a centuries-old strategy of turning to sacred spaces and houses of worship for protection, and in her case specifically, to shield her from deportation. During the press conference, Pastor Joel Miller of the Columbus Mennonite Church announced, “Today, we are welcoming Edith into sanctuary in our church building.” As Pastor Joel continued his comments, he described Edith’s long history of living and raising a family in Columbus. “Edith is a neighbor. Edith is a mother. Edith is a child of God who sought refuge in our country many years ago and now wishes to remain united with her family in this city which has become her home.”

By focusing on family, faith, and community, Pastor Joel was telling the story of what grounds Edith had in the local community, which also resonated with the experiences of a growing number of people seeking public sanctuary in churches across the country in 2017. Her strategy was concomitant with an increasing number of cities, counties, states, and even college campuses declaring themselves sanctuaries following the 2016 presidential election. The late Columbus-based community activist Ruben Castilla Herrera, for example, emphasized the significance of Edith’s entering into sanctuary to affirm the city’s commitment to immigrants when he somberly observed, “Today, Columbus, Ohio, truly became a sanctuary city, because sanctuary comes from the people.” Edith and her daughter, Stephanie, emphasized the importance of keeping families together and the ways sanctuary is a collective response to a shared experience of precarity. “I’d like to thank you for being here to listen to our story,” Edith somberly declared through an interpreter. “I’m fighting to keep my family united.” Stephanie conveyed the grief of the moment, one shared by so many other undocumented families, when she emotionally proclaimed, “I don’t want her to go or to leave us at all. It’s not just us. It’s more families that get separated every day. My mom means everything to me.”

While Edith Espinal’s was one of the most visible public sanctuary cases between 2017 and 2021, her story is part of a longer history of faith-based organizing and sanctuary practices in the United States that primarily include, but are not exclusive to, undocumented migrants. As many scholars have documented, sanctuary movements in the United States have involved organizing to support conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, Central American refugees in the United States during the 1980s, and, most recently, the New Sanctuary Movement beginning in the mid-2000s, which has focused on aiding undocumented individuals and families faced with deportation, often after residing for many years in local communities. These efforts have drawn on ancient Western traditions of sanctuary that, as anthropologist Linda Rabben has observed, have involved “social groups and individuals who mobilize to provide sanctuary often outside the law and at great risk.” In this way, invocations of sanctuary have emphasized appeals to a higher transcendent authority to justify the decision by communities of faith to offer refuge, safety, and protection to those who are most vulnerable to state power. Such evocations also affirm commitments to align one-self with others to challenge state power and to potentially endure state-sanctioned punishment and harm as a result.

Following the 2016 presidential election, sanctuary was clearly in the air. There were calls for sanctuary campuses, sanctuary cities, sanctuary streets, and, as the Quakers put forth succinctly and powerfully, “sanctuary everywhere.” This language of offering sanctuary to people in need suffused organizing and service work across the country. In Northeast Ohio, for example, faith communities, activists, community leaders, and service providers employed the language of sanctuary to characterize their responses to what felt like unrelenting instances of family separation, displacement, and increased economic and social vulnerability due to immigrant detention, natural disasters, and economic and political crises within Latina/o communities.  Following Hurricane María’s devastating impact in Puerto Rico in September 2017, people quickly mobilized to collect food, water, medical supplies, clothes, and money to send to the island and to help resettle hundreds of Puerto Rican families. In cities like Lorain, Ohio, just twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, Latina/o community members, faith leaders, and service workers framed their responses and support for Puerto Rican newcomers as providing refuge for displaced families facing unimaginable loss and uncertainty.

These same community members mobilized, once again, in June 2018 following workplace raids at Corso’s garden center in Sandusky, Ohio, where 114 workers were detained and faced deportation and family separation. In the days and weeks following the raids, faith and community leaders, activists, and service workers in Lorain organized food and clothing drives, collecting diapers and baby food, offering free legal advice about immigration, and even helping parents complete affidavits detailing instructions for care for their children in the event that they were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In press conferences, public speeches, and daily conversations, organizers and service providers framed their responses to detained migrants and their families as being similar to their approach to meeting the needs of migrants post-Hurricane María. As Victor Leandry, executive director of El Centro de Servicios Sociales in Lorain, observed about the children of detained parents, “These kids are going to need our help. This is not a new problem. Yes, it’s getting worse, but it is an ongoing problem.  Right now there are children taking care of children in Norwalk [Ohio, because their parents have been detained]. And just like we did after [Hurricane] María, [El Centro] will take care of people in need and find ways to help the community.”

Linking the fates of people displaced by Hurricane María with families ripped apart by immigration detention is a prescient, if grim, reminder of a shared precariousness defining the lives of many Latinas/os in Northeast Ohio. Organizations like El Centro have a long history of working with faith communities, social workers, mental health providers, and community activists to address the broad range of needs of people whose daily lives are constrained by draconian immigration policies, (un)natural disasters, economic dislocation, and punitive policing. And while, as Victor Leandry notes, these are not new problems, neither are the resources people draw on as they collectively respond to the challenges they face. Indeed, these long histories of organizing and struggle are precious resources that sustain and animate community responses today.

On the surface, organizing to relocate families fleeing natural disasters and supporting families ripped apart by deportation might not seem to fall within a shared framework of sanctuary. But drawing on my ongoing ethnographic work in Latina/o communities in Northeast Ohio—as well as reading the work of scholars, journalists, artists, community activists, and service workers—I argue that what binds these responses and experiences together is a commitment to become what Ruben Castilla Herrera referred to as “sanctuary people.” In a lecture at Oberlin College in the fall of 2018, Ruben discussed the intersectional organizing work that he and his fellow activists were involved in, including supporting people like Edith Espinal in public sanctuary through organizations like the Columbus Sanctuary Collective. But his work also included efforts to address racial profiling and the impact of police violence in Black communities and other communities of color in Columbus; supporting the integration of asylum seekers in the city; working with migrant workers throughout Ohio; and organizing with others to make Columbus a sanctuary city. All of these efforts, he argued, were key to making stronger, safer, and inclusive communities, and required all of us to become sanctuary people.

This book employs Ruben Castilla Herrera’s notion of sanctuary people to shed much-needed light onto myriad organizing efforts and resistance strategies that a diverse group of people employed following the 2016 presidential election. It examines the role that faith communities in Ohio have played in the development, proliferation, and strengthening of sanctuary practices and other forms of organizing connected to Latina/o communities and Latin American migrants. By focusing on efforts to help those affected by immigrant detention and Puerto Ricans displaced

in the wake of Hurricane María, this book reveals the ways faith com- munities, activists, and community leaders are creating new strategies to address the increasingly precarious contexts in which Latina/o people live, and how they are imagining and enacting new forms of solidarity. It also analyzes the distinct alliances, relationships, and ways of knowing and being that faith-based activists have employed to create places of safety. In doing so, this book seeks to center the role of faith-based organizing in these communities, contributes to a growing scholarly literature documenting these efforts, and reveals what Puerto Rican journalist Mari Mari Narváez describes as the need to “build a more horizontal society, a place for everyone to live and work and love in.”

Based on four years of ethnographic work, this book documents how for many, immigrant detention, natural disasters, and race-based violence are often viewed as intertwined experiences. In this context, practices of offering sanctuary and refuge bind up the diverse yet overlapping experiences of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Central American families in moments of precarity, uncertainty, and vulnerability, and also point to the ways their shared precarity is connected to African American and other communities facing state-based violence and exclusion. By focusing on these seemingly disparate experiences, I argue that becoming sanctuary people requires building meaningful relationships and coalitions across differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, religion, education, and citizenship status to strengthen and support Latina/o communities in a moment of uncertainty, danger, and hopeful possibilities.

Gina M. Pérez is Professor in the Department of Comparative American Studies in Oberlin College. She is the author of Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 47 of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Faith-Based Activism and the Sanctuary Movement.”