UC Students Support Refugee Havens : Effort to Aid Central Americans Conducted at Three Campuses

Despite a federal crackdown against similar efforts by Arizona ministers and churches, students at three University of California campuses have announced support for the sanctuary movement sheltering Guatemalan and El Salvadoran refugees in the United States illegally.

An Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in Washington said this week that students who become involved in hiding illegal aliens “aren’t above the law and could be prosecuted.” The spokesman noted that a federal grand jury in Arizona last month indicted 16 church-related activists for providing sanctuary or freedom from arrest to illegal immigrants from Central America.

Nonetheless, leaders of the growing campus sanctuary movement said this week that they will continue their fund-raising efforts to provide food, shelter and transportation for illegal aliens from El Salvador and Guatemala.

“We answer to a higher law,” said graduate student Deborah Allan, 32, leader of the sanctuary movement at UC Riverside.

“We believe these refugees have a legitimate right to seek asylum in the United States and are being denied that right,” said Brian Mof fat, 27, chairman of the sanctuary movement at UC Irvine, the latest campus to have a such a student group.

Similar activities are under way at UC Berkeley. Moreover, Allan said there will be a conference Feb. 9 on the Riverside campus to expand the sanctuary program to the California State University and community college systems.

So far the three UC campuses involved in the sanctuary movement have served mainly as fund-raising and political action centers. The only known illegal Central American immigrant on any campus was an unidentified Salvadoran woman who lived in a “safe house” near UC Riverside.

Allan said the woman talked to student groups on campus last spring and eventually moved back to Los Angeles with her two young children after about a month.

“We just provided her one long stop,” Allan said.

At UC Berkeley, graduate student Joan Cardellino said an undisclosed number of Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees are being housed by churches near the campus.

“We give our help to these East (San Francisco) Bay churches,” she said. “Our whole idea was not to house refugees, because the churches provide that service. But we’ve had campuswide food drives. We’re also doing education work on campus.”

The Berkeley graduate student government association, like its Riverside counterpart, passed a resolution designating the campus as a “sanctuary.” UC Irvine’s graduate student government plans a referendum on such a resolution later this year.

The effect of such resolutions is symbolic, according to the student leaders. The university has no power under the law to actually grant sanctuary to anyone.

The UC activists, like those arrested in Arizona, contend that the United States is violating international law by denying political asylum to refugees fleeing internal strife in Guatemala and El Salvador. The United States has said the immigrants are not true political refugees but are coming to this country simply for economic betterment.

Duke Austin, an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in Washington, said this week that immigration authorities simply enforce the law.

“It’s illegal for anyone to hide, protect or harbor any illegal (immigrant) from the federal government,” Austin said.

“We prosecute without regard to someone’s motives. Whether it’s a church group or the university of oompity oomph doesn’t make a difference. If people are conspiring to break the law, the federal government prosecutes. No one is above the law.”

University of California officials have kept a hands-off attitude toward the sanctuary movement, neither giving it official blessing nor condemning it.

Berkeley-based Ron Kolb, UC system director of communications, said Thursday that the university “will condone no violation of the law.” However, he said the UC students so far have been careful to keep refugees in residences off campus.

“The university reminds students that federal authorities say it is a felony to harbor illegal immigrants, and the university also stresses to the students that no university money, including student fees or university property, can be used (in sanctuary work),” Kolb said.

The students involved in sanctuary work, however, are permitted to meet in UC facilities. At the Irvine campus, the Sanctuary Club operates from the University Center building. And the Feb. 9 statewide conference will meet in Watkins Hall on the Riverside campus.