13 Leaders of Sanctuary Movement Plead Not Guilty : Supporters, Illegal Aliens Gather in Tucson to Protest Charges of Smuggling, Conspiracy

Thirteen leaders of the church sanctuary movement pleaded not guilty in federal court Wednesday to charges of conspiracy and smuggling Salvadorans and Guatemalans into the United States as more than 1,000 religious and lay supporters gathered to protest their indictment.

“Obviously, the government has stimulated people’s interest in sanctuary,” said the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., pastor of Riverside Church in New York City and the keynote speaker at a conference here on the sanctuary movement.

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The sanctuary workers openly admit aiding and harboring Central Americans who are in the United States fleeing violence in their own war-torn countries. But they contend it is the federal government that is breaking the law by failing to recognize international laws that would classify the Central Americans as refugees.

The U.S. government contends that the Central Americans are economic immigrants ineligible for political asylum here.

The 13 defendants arraigned Wednesday--six in Phoenix and seven in Tucson--were ordered to stand trial April 2 in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. They were released on their own recognizance.

One of their supporters, Kenneth Kennon, noted that the trial will fall during Holy Week. He called the scheduling “poetic justice.”

A total of 16 defendants were named in the federal case. Two of them are Mexican citizens who have not yet been served with the indictments. Another, Katherine Flaherty, a former Peace Corps volunteer, sought a postponement of her arraignment until she could hire a lawyer.

Many of the defendants were declared unable to pay for their own trials and were given court-appointed attorneys by the federal magistrate, Raymond T. Terlizzi.

Meanwhile, in Corpus Christi, Tex., federal prosecutors rested their case at the trial of sanctuary movement worker Jack Elder, who is charged with transporting three Salvadoran illegal aliens last March.

The three Salvadorans testified that Elder, director of Casa Oscar Romero, a refugee halfway house in San Benito, Tex., gave them a six-mile ride to a bus station in Harlingen last March 12.

At the opening of the sanctuary movement conference in Tucson, Coffin said that supporters had come from across the country “to say, ‘God bless you,’ to the indicted and to say, ‘Yes, we will’ to Central Americans” seeking political asylum in the United States.

Coffin was loudly applauded when he quoted Henry David Thoreau as saying: “They are lovers of the law who uphold it when the government breaks it.”

In Washington, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service was quoted by United Press International as responding that sanctuary participants “have openly flouted the laws.”

“We are not focusing on the churches,” INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson said. “We were focusing on the smuggling.

“We have the laws of this country to carry out and I think it’s essential to do so,” said Nelson, who approved the indictments.

After the Tucson arraignment, the defendants held a press conference on the steps of the federal courthouse accompanied by a family of Guatemalan refugees who said they have been in sanctuary for a year.

A man whose face was covered with a red bandanna said he came to the courthouse “because we need to be near the ones who are detained. They are detained for us.”

The man, who identified himself only as Alfredo, 24, said that although he is in the country illegally he does not fear arrest.

“We have always been nervous,” he said. “We face a lot of danger in Guatemala. We are free here.”

The defendants said that they are required as a condition of their release not to break local, state or federal laws, but that they will continue to engage in their sanctuary work because it is the practice of their faith.