The origins of the Sanctuary Movement

By Carl Lindskoog
A large array of buttons with various political messages connected to Latin American solidarity movements, many of which echo the simple message of one button, “U.S. out of El Salvador.”
Collage of three posters with various messages related to El Salvador. The middle poster includes an illustrated Vietnamese man and an illustrated Salvadorian man flanked by sky full of helicopters.
These three posters from the 1980s display activist organizations opposing U.S. intervention in El Salvador. (2015.0066.17, 1984.0796.108, and 1984.0471.18)  

When you look at these posters, what do you see? They all mention El Salvador and date from the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. They call for peace (an image of a dove, demands against war). One urges “all of us” to see ourselves as connected to Salvadorans. One links the devastation of the Vietnam War to El Salvador and Central America, transferring public disapproval between the two. And one makes expansive calls, not only for the U.S. to divest itself from war in El Salvador, but to invest instead in “human needs,” like jobs, food, health care, and education, as well as equality for women, racial minorities, and queer people. Why were groups protesting the U.S. government for its actions in Central America? And how was such social justice organizing related to the creation of the Sanctuary Movement, a new campaign to offer protection and support for Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and others fleeing violent conflict in Central America?

In the early 1980s, people from El Salvador began appearing in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Among them were Leftist activists, members of Indigenous communities, and other citizens escaping violence and civil war in their homeland. Brenda Sanchez-Galan, a 20-year-old student, had fled to a displaced person’s camp in San Salvador after witnessing a massacre of teens near her home. Other camp residents were abducted and tortured; her closest friend—an expectant mother—was murdered in the camp. Ultimately, Sanchez-Galan continued north, seeking refuge for herself and her toddler in the United States.

Soon Guatemalans joined Salvadorans like Sanchez-Galan in making their way to the United States. Both groups fled mass violence and civil wars in their home countries, and both hoped to receive asylum in the United States. But the Reagan administration refused to recognize these rights because it backed the military regimes in both countries and often supported their violent counterrevolutionary programs. Blocked from entry, asylum seekers faced state violence and death at home.

White and pink plastic and metal hair barrettes shaped like flowers.
This pair of plastic and metal hair barrettes with floral design was found in a remote part of the Sonoran Desert near the Mexican border around 2009. The site where the barrettes and the picture frame below were found likely served as a way station for Central American asylum seekers traveling along the same route that brought others to the United States in the 1980s. (2015.3023.27)
A novelty picture frame decorated with the text “#1 Dad.”
A metal picture frame lettered with “#1 Dad.” This frame was also found in a remote part of the Sonoran Desert near the Mexican border around 2009. (2015.0070.25)

U.S.-based activists decided they needed to stand up for the rights of Central American migrants. If the U.S. government refused to allow the United States to become a sanctuary for those fleeing violence and war, activists and members of faith communities decided they themselves would offer sanctuary.

Faith communities were called to the movement by the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero and four American nuns—Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan. They also viewed deportations of refugees as a violation, both of their moral beliefs and of U.S. and international law. Other secular activists drew on experiences challenging the Vietnam War and mobilizing for civil rights to create solidarity with peace and Leftist movements in Central America. In March 1982, six churches—Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and University Lutheran Chapel, St. John’s Presbyterian, St. Joseph the Worker, St. Mark’s Episcopal, and Trinity Methodist near San Francisco—publicly declared that they would provide sanctuary for Central Americans. The Sanctuary Movement was born.

In the years that followed, hundreds of churches, faith communities, and organizations joined the movement, which aimed to provide sanctuary for Central Americans and to halt U.S.-backed violence in the countries they fled. Organizations like the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research, and Education Foundation (SHARE) closely partnered with sanctuary organizations to draw attention to violence in Central America. SHARE’s West Coast office was housed in University Lutheran Chapel, one of the original sanctuary churches, and University Lutheran’s pastor served as a board member of SHARE.

A poster showing an illustration of a battlefield, drawn in a child’s style, as well as the text “The suffering of the Salvadoran continues! The refugees need you. Will you help them? Please share.”
Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research, and Education Foundation (SHARE) was founded in 1981 in Washington, D.C. The organization worked with Catholic Relief Services and Mexican bishops to assist Salvadoran refugees in camps in Honduras. (2015.0066.45)
Activists used many strategies to raise public awareness about the plight of displaced peoples and the mounting human rights abuses in El Salvador and Guatemala. They created handmade posters and plastered them on buildings and walls. Concerned citizens made pins and distributed them at protests, demanding an end to U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Their statements—“Support Sanctuary for Refugees of Central American Wars” and “US Out of El Salvador”—reflect the goals and aesthetics of the movement. These cultural products represented the urgency of the sanctuary movement. Together, such objects provide clues of the rhetoric, symbols, and visual grammar of how activists in the movement communicated their concerns.
A large array of buttons with various political messages connected to Latin American solidarity movements, many of which echo the simple message of one button, “U.S. out of El Salvador.”
This unique collection of buttons contains political messages and traces vibrant social movements focused on U.S. foreign policy from the 1960s to the 1980s. (2018.0158)

In December 1990, finally relenting to pressure from the sanctuary and Central American solidarity movements, the George H.W. Bush administration announced it would halt automatic deportations of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers and give them fair asylum hearings. Peace agreements, the Chapultepec Accords in El Salvador in 1992 and the Guatemalan Peace Accords in 1996, ended wars that had driven many to seek refuge in the United States. Activists and faith communities that had built and sustained the Sanctuary Movement might have felt that their work was finished. Instead, they branched out, finding new ways to fight back against anti-immigrant initiatives and to counter new attacks on Latin America and its people.

Powerful anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise in the United States, driving the creation of new laws like the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). A new group of asylum seekers, this time fleeing a bloody military coup in Haiti, were blocked from entering the United States and denied the opportunity to seek asylum by the Bush and Clinton administrations. And new U.S. military and economic policies targeted Latin America, raising the specter of U.S. imperialism in the region once again.

In response, the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s swung into action. Just as sanctuary activists adapted strategies from prior movements, like those opposing the Vietnam War, organizers drew on their experiences during the 1980s to build new movements supporting migrants displaced by U.S.-supported political and economic violence. In 1993 and 1994, the National Sanctuary Defense Fund mobilized its members to defend Haitian asylum seekers as well as Chinese, Mexican, and other migrants. Gustav Shultz, pastor of University Lutheran Chapel and president of the National Sanctuary Defense Fund, for example, led a delegation welcoming exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to speak at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, in April 1994. According to Shultz, Haitians, like the earlier Central American refugees, faced “jail, torture, and murder” and needed support to stand up to a U.S. policy that was “racist” and “a clear violation of human rights.” Throughout the 1990s the Chicago Metropolitan Sanctuary Alliance exposed CIA responsibility and funding for human rights abuses in Guatemala and supported a growing campaign to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, which trained Latin American soldiers and military leaders responsible for some of the worst violence.

Sanctuary and Central American solidarity organizations supported labor and community organizations that resisted corporate globalization by opposing the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA dismantled economic policies that protected manufacturing class employees in the United States and Canada and agricultural workers in Mexico. This ultimately catalyzed massively widening inequalities within and among all three nations and ignited widespread protest against the World Trade Organization, which protects corporate interests and free trade, regardless of their negative impacts on human and environmental needs. When people resumed dangerous migration journeys through the Sonoran Desert, some of the same activists who had founded the original Sanctuary Movement in Southern Arizona launched new projects like Humane Borders and No More Deaths which worked to provide life-giving support for a new generation of migrants and asylum seekers.

Conference badge with the text “U.S. Trade Growth and Jobs Through Trade” and “Seattle 1999.”
WTO conference badge, 1999. As the badge’s record explains, the “1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial trade talks in Seattle became a battleground both inside and outside the convention center as protestors marched against global corporate interests and developing nations lobbied for their economic interests against established national powers.” (2012.0225.01)
Front and back of posters showing the initials “WTO” crossed out, paired with the text “Just say no!”
Protest posters used at the 1999 protest of the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. (2000.0115.01)

The activism of the 1990s and early 2000s sustained and broadened immigrant rights and anti-imperial campaigns, providing fertile ground for the emergence of the New Sanctuary Movement. It formed in 2007, in response to increasingly severe migrant detention and deportation policies driven by post-9/11 initiatives, like the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), that cast migration as a national security issue. Sustained and strengthened by their work in these intervening years, activists in the New Sanctuary Movement would play a vital role in defending immigrants from the increasing anti-migrant rhetoric and policies across the 21st century, including the criminalization of volunteers trying to save lives in the desert and the Sanctuary Movement itself.

One immigrant seeking the protection of the New Sanctuary Movement was Arthur Jemmy, who fled his home in Sulawesi, Indonesia, in April 2000, fearing religious persecution after an extremist group entered his Christian church during a worship service, decapitated the pastor, and burned the church to the ground. After entering the United States, Jemmy overstayed his B-1 tourist visa but received a stay of removal after self-reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after 9/11. In intervening years Jemmy maintained his required check-ins with the agency. But when, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, ICE detained four of his friends during their regular check-ins, Jemmy decided to take sanctuary in the Reformed Church of Highland Park, New Jersey. With support from the sanctuary church, Jemmy won a federal court ruling providing temporary immunity from deportation.

For Jemmy and thousands of others seeking secure lives or exercising their right to seek asylum, the work of the Sanctuary Movement remains as vital as ever.

Carl Lindskoog is an associate professor of history at Raritan Valley Community College. He is the author of "Sanctuary is Justice: Resilience and Ingenuity in the Sanctuary Movement since 1986" in Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980, and Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System.

This post is part of a series, The Politics of Sanctuary. Visit the series’ introduction to learn more and to explore other entries. The series has received funding support from the Smithsonian’s Latino Initiatives Pool and the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool.