UC Riverside Session Discusses Defying INS, Sheltering Illegals : Students Vow to Expand Campus Sanctuary Efforts

In a session reminiscent of the campus anti-war movement of the 1960s, students and teachers from 14 colleges and universities convened Saturday at the University of California, Riverside, and vowed to expand campus involvement in the sheltering of Central American illegal immigrants.

“Our movement is inherently political,” said UC Riverside graduate student Lisa Duran, an organizer of the campus sanctuary program. “In the long term,” she added, “our work is against U.S. intervention in Central America.”

“This (sanctuary movement) is the most powerful gesture of protest that students can make. . . . It’s a political as well as a moral action,” added Ken Kloc, a graduate student at UCLA.

About 60 students and a few faculty members took part in Saturday’s “Campus Sanctuary Conference.” A key goal was to get more universities involved in what Kloc called “the underground railroad of the ‘80s.”

The student movement, already active at Riverside and UC’s Berkeley and Irvine campuses, is patterned after the church-based sanctuary movement, which shelters illegal immigrants fleeing violence in Central America, chiefly in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Last month, a federal grand jury in Arizona indicted 16 people active in the church-based sanctuary movement.

A U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in Washington said last month that university students could similarly be prosecuted if they conceal illegal aliens.

So far, only UC Riverside students claim to have actually broken the law by sheltering illegal immigrants. That was last May, when a Salvadoran woman and her two daughters lived for a few weeks off-campus in what the students called “a safe house.”

Students from the Berkeley and Irvine campuses said that their work up to now has involved indirect help to Central American immigrants.

Speakers at the convention said that students will not shy from actually hiding immigrants--even if it means INS raids and arrests of the students involved.

Those active in the sanctuary movement contend that the Reagan Administration should recognize Central American aliens as refugees fleeing political violence. The INS generally classifies the aliens as immigrants seeking better economic conditions and thus not eligible for political asylum.

A 45-year-old Pico Rivera minister who addressed the students said his church has shielded 28 illegal Guatemalan and El Salvadoran immigrants. The Rev. Fernando Santillana, pastor of the Pico Rivera United Methodist Church, said that 24 Los Angeles-area churches have been involved in the sanctuary movement for the last three years. He said the churches welcome the students’ help.

But he, like other speakers, warned that there is danger of arrest. Despite this, he said, morality is on their side. “It was people like you (students), with a vision of justice, who brought about an end to the Vietnam War,” he said.

Santillana said that the danger is so great in El Salvador that more than 400,000 immigrants--”99% of which are illegal”--have flooded the Los Angeles area in the last five years. “As recently as 1979, there were only 20,000 Salvadorans in our area,” he said. There are about 100,000 illegal Guatemalans currently in the Los Angeles area, he said.

The students and faculty at the convention represented UC campuses of Riverside, Irvine, Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz and UCLA. California State University students from Fullerton, Chino, and Fresno were registered, and there were delegates from several private schools, including USC, Pitzer, Pomona and Occidental. There were also delegates from the University of Colorado at Boulder.