Despite Prosecutions, Sanctuary Movement Is Still Vital, Growing, Its Activists Insist

A year after eight members of the sanctuary movement were placed on probation for helping to smuggle Central American aliens, they still see the movement as vital and growing. Their prosecutor sees it as dead.

The verdict “was the death knell for the sanctuary movement” and its sympathizers, said Donald M. Reno, a special assistant U.S. attorney, but as the government’s point man on the defendants’ appeal he remains deeply involved.

The Rev. John M. Fife, a Presbyterian minister who helped found the movement, points to its continued growth, its international recognition and the honors it has been given by religious, academic and other groups for its human rights work.

Although the government sought to characterize the sanctuary movement as criminal and to discredit it, Fife asserted, “The opposite occurred.”

Sentences Suspended

In July, 1986, Fife, along with Roman Catholic priests Anthony Clark and Ramon Dagoberto Quinones and Sister Darlene Nicgorski were given suspended sentences and placed on probation after a six-month federal trial.

Also placed on probation were four church lay workers: Philip Willis-Conger, Margaret Hutchison, Maria del Socorro Pardo de Aguilar and Wendy LeWin.

All but Clark and LeWin were convicted of conspiracy. Clark was found guilty of concealing, harboring and shielding an alien, and LeWin was convicted of transporting an illegal alien. Some of the other defendants also were convicted of similar charges.

Three others, including co-founder James Corbett, were acquitted of all charges.

Reno, who recently moved from Phoenix to Seattle, said those convicted “can posture” and make speeches about the movement’s growth but “the government prevailed on the most important issue: Their conduct was a crime.”

Sanctuary activists have helped aliens whom they regard as political refugees entitled to asylum to enter the United States and in many cases to stay here, often under the protection of churches. Many of those given sanctuary say they are fleeing the ravages of conflicts between leftist guerrillas and U.S.-backed forces in El Salvador and Guatemala.

“As long as the United States continues to fund the war . . . in Central America, as long as Guatemalans and Salvadorans continue to be bombed and continue to flee, that’s what causes the sanctuary movement to continue,” Hutchison said.

Sanctuary workers themselves disagree on how the trial may have affected U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service policy.

Living With Sanctuary

“The federal government, as far as we can tell, has been willing to live with sanctuary” since the trial, Corbett said. His lawyer, Stephen Cooper of St. Paul, Minn., said more asylum petitions are being granted and fewer people are being deported.

But Fife said new national figures show that over the last seven months, asylum has been granted to only 3% of Salvadorans, no Guatemalans and 85% of Nicaraguans applying for it.

“I guess if there’s one bottom line, it is that the trial changed nothing--in terms of our ministry or our assistance to refugees,” said Fife. “It certainly did not alter INS’ policies.”

Fife, who received a human rights award in December presented by former President Jimmy Carter, said he spends about half his time in sanctuary-related work but also has resumed his pastoral duties with the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson.

As for whether his current sanctuary-related work breaks the law, Fife said, “I don’t know, the judge doesn’t know and my probation officer doesn’t know.”

Hutchison has continued to work with the United Methodist Church in a ministry along the Mexican border. She, too, has accepted awards and made numerous speeches.

Nicgorski, who is working at the Dominican Sisters’ Women’s Center in Plainville, Mass., was named one of Ms. magazine’s women of the year.

Pointing to symposiums held by various law schools, as well as one sponsored in May by the Harvard Divinity School, she said that sanctuary efforts have “moved mainline, in a sense, very quickly.”

INS ‘More Humane’

Corbett, who works in Tucson helping Salvadorans get legal counsel to determine their legal status, said that if anything, the INS in Arizona may be “more humane” now in its grants of asylum than in other districts.

He said Quinones, a priest in Nogales, Mexico, is working with homeless people in that Mexican community and trying to raise $12,000 to build a two-story extension to his church to house at least 30 people.

Clark, after a stint in Rome, has returned to a parish in Davenport, Iowa; Aguilar, a widow, still lives in Nogales, helping Quinones; LeWin took training in emergency medical services; Willis-Conger is at a San Francisco seminary, studying to become a Methodist minister.