Alien Smugglers : Sanctuary: A Refuge in the Bible

It seems an unlikely setting for the headquarters of a national conspiracy--two overstuffed rooms with cement floors squeezed between a Head Start preschool and the back door of the Southside United Presbyterian Church.

The chatter of children mixes with the ceaseless ringing of the telephones in the offices, which are shared by the Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force on Central America and the modest church. Volunteers have to dig deep among piles of mail, messages and newspaper clippings on their desks to find a copy of the 71-count indictment, brought last week by a federal grand jury.

In it, the U.S. government accuses the lanky pastor of Southside and 15 other religious and lay workers of felony charges of conspiracy, smuggling Guatemalans and Salvadorans into the United States and illegally transporting, harboring and shielding them from the law.

Denies Conspiracy

The Rev. John M. Fife, 45, pastor of the church, and his co-workers deny that what they have done was a conspiracy. They say that what began here was--and is--a religious movement that has come to be called sanctuary.

They admit to bringing Central Americans across the border, harboring them in their churches and transporting them elsewhere in the United States--often to Los Angeles. But, with the exception of the precise hours and routes they use to sneak Central Americans into the country, they say, there has never been anything secret about what they do.

And they have vocally encouraged others to do the same, for these people believe it is the federal government, not they, that is breaking the law, by refusing to recognize the fleeing Central Americans as refugees from their violence-torn homelands under international law. The U.S. government says they are economic immigrants seeking to better their lot and thus are ineligible for political asylum in this country.

Biblical Mandate

Fife and his sanctuary workers assert that they are following a biblical mandate to protect refugees fleeing from war and death. And they hope their trial will, in effect, give them an opportunity to put the government’s policies in the dock.

“We will take our message to the courtroom and into the homes of the American public,” said Philip Willis-Conger, one of the defendants.

Meanwhile, the work of smuggling Central Americans into the United States continued here this week, even as the indictments turned the glare of national attention on Tucson.

The spark that ignited the sanctuary movement in Tucson came in July, 1980, when 13 Salvadoran refugees died of exposure in the desert south of the city. They had been brought across the border by a professional smuggler, or “coyote,” who then robbed and abandoned them.

Galvanized by the tragedy, Fife, Willis-Conger, who is director of the Ecumenical Council task force, and retired rancher James A. Corbett, 51, a Quaker, began building a sanctuary movement linked across the country by an “underground railroad” similar to the one that smuggled fleeing slaves from the South to the North in the early 19th Century.

They claim the support of 150 churches and the volunteer labor of thousands of individuals. They say they have aided about 2,000 refugees in three years. All three are defendants in the case.

Joseph Weizenbaum, 51, rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, one of 14 sanctuaries in Tucson, insists that whether or not the defendants go to jail, the sanctuary movement will grow.

“It will continue because the need is there and because it is right. It would be a wound if they went to jail, but I just don’t believe it would kill it. When you put Martin Luther King in jail, it didn’t kill the civil rights movement. Leadership will come forth. Part of this is the magic of history,” Weizenbaum said.

Tolerant Base

Tucson, a desert city of 500,000--25% of whom are Latinos--represented in Congress by liberal Democrat Rep. Morris K. Udall, has been a tolerant base for the sanctuary movement.

If not every one here supports the work, there has been no organized opposition. Editors of the morning Arizona Daily Star and the afternoon Tucson Citizen say neither paper receives an unusual amount of mail for or against the sanctuary movement.

“It is doubtful that there is any feeling of embarrassment that this is the origin or focal point of the sanctuary movement,” said Jonathan Kamman, managing editor of the Star.

Kamman said that partly because of the large Latino population, and the proximity to the border, “there is probably a great deal of empathy if not support for the plight of the Central Americans heading north.

“I think there is probably a sense of the picaresque hero who is able to outsmart authorities of two countries and do it with the blessing of the church,” he said.

Vice Mayor Charles Ford said the City Council has never officially discussed the sanctuary movement.

“Tucson is next door to Mexico and historically there have been folks illegally coming to Arizona and Tucson. It is almost like a way of life,” Ford said.

Less Generous View

But the federal government does not take such a generous view. U.S. officials say that it is a crime, pure and simple, to smuggle people into the country and the government will prosecute anyone who does so, regardless of their motivation or base of operations.

“What I have to do is to prosecute a smuggling case and to try to contain it to alien smuggling issues under the law,” said Donald Reno, an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix who is handling the government’s case.

Reno said that the sanctuary workers appeared to be moving enough people into the country to make it worth the government’s while to initiate an investigation last spring. Four government informants infiltrated the movement by attending meetings in Phoenix, Tucson and Nogales, Mexico, with hidden recording devices. They also helped transport aliens.

The information they gathered is the basis for the indictment of 14 Americans and two Mexicans. The defendants face maximum penalties of five years imprisonment and fines ranging from $2,000 to $10,000. Twenty-five unindicted co-conspirators are named in the case.

Sanctuary workers argue that the government is violating their right to religious freedom and condemns officials for sending undercover agents into the church.

Reno answers, “The INS does not go into churches to apprehend illegal aliens, but there is a vast difference between that and being invited into a church to meet and to plan the harboring and transporting of aliens.”

In a motion filed with the indictment, the government is asking the judge to prohibit the sanctuary workers from using religious conviction, U.S. policy in Central America or international law on refugees as a defense.

The sanctuary workers felt betrayed and even a little stunned by the official announcement of the informants, even though they say they were suspicious of a couple of the informants and know that it is their own policy of openness that allowed them to infiltrate.

Several activists said that the first infiltrator appeared last spring, a fiftyish bald man who went by the name of Jesus.

“He seemed like a simple, nice guy,” said Katherine Flaherty, 33, a former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador and one of the indicted. “He came to our meetings and would talk too much and was always ready to do the driving.”

Sanctuary workers say Jesus told them he had a roofing business that gave him time to pursue other activities, and soon brought along a man he identified as his nephew and two other friends.

The nephew seemed like a “ne’er do well,” said Fife, and another man who turned out to be an informant seemed “like a hustler of a businessman.”

“I was damn sure he had never seen the inside of a church,” Fife said.

What to Do

By midsummer the long-time activists began to discuss what to do with Jesus and his buddies. And in September “we had real serious talks,” Fife said.

“They had taken a group of refugees to California and had asked a lot of questions the whole trip. Anybody who deals with refugees knows you don’t pry into their past because usually they have been traumatized. Everybody understands that and they had been around refugees long enough to know better,” Fife said.

The refugees also reported that Jesus and his friends had stopped to make telephone calls along the route.

But while the sanctuary workers grew increasingly suspicious, they also were torn by their commitment to be open to anyone who wanted to work in the movement and by their need for workers.

“This is amateur hour around here. My training is in theology, Phil’s (Willis-Conger) is in social work,” Fife said.

He said that occasionally some workers have wanted to operate with code words and more secrecy, but Fife has argued against it.

‘Like a Church’

“This is the church and we are going to operate like a church. We can’t operate like a coyote,” he said. He said that if the government wants to infiltrate, they will do so regardless of the group’s security.

“If they are going to do it, we are vulnerable. The important thing is that after eight months they found out we were telling the truth the whole time,” he said.

While sanctuary workers insist the church will remain open, they say they now have a natural tendency to be more guarded.

“We’re just trying to figure out the steps the government will take. We don’t want to make their job any easier for them,” Conger said.

“I had a woman in here today who was going to volunteer and for the first time I thought, ‘Hmm, who are you?’ It’s not like I’m going to screen everyone, but I’m going to pay more attention to my gut reactions,” said one full-time volunteer who asked that her name not be used.

In addition, 16 refugees in Tucson were relocated after the government detained 65 refugees nationwide as material witnesses in the case.

But none of this, the workers insist, not the indictments nor the paranoia nor their own legal defense, will keep them from doing the work they began three years ago.