Movement Leader Sees Aiding Refugees as a Spiritual Mandate

Carol Conger-Cross has come to Mexico to meet a man from El Salvador. He is huddled in the corner of a small, dark room, and he is scared.

She is a leader in the Sanctuary movement, which offers aid and comfort to refugees--food, a bed, kind words and support. None of it seems to matter. He is looking at her like a cat frozen by car headlights.

He tells her his story. In 1983, he witnessed the murder of a friend on a street in San Salvador. He says the military committed the murder, and knowing he was a witness, officials apprehended and tortured him. Scars are evident on his face and hands. He fled the country, only to return. Recently, he left again, and now, he says, he is really on the run.

Seeking His Sister

He wants to go to the Midwest, where he hopes a sister is living. He hears she got married, but he doesn’t have an address or phone number, nor does he know her husband’s name. Conger-Cross says Sanctuary will try to help. But first, there are questions.

She wants to know if he is a spy, a member of a Salvadoran death squad on his way to Los Angeles. Salvadoran death squads, she says, have begun to infiltrate Los Angeles, seeking out Salvadoran refugees as targets. She says a Salvadoran woman, the victim of political persecution in her native country, was recently gang-raped by death-squad members in Los Angeles.

After more than an hour of conversation, Conger-Cross is satisfied the man is not a spy, that he is deserving of a few dollars for clothing and tips on how to cross the border--questions and tactics he might encounter.

According to Conger-Cross, Sanctuary members in San Diego do not smuggle aliens across the border; they counsel them and screen them ahead of time. Many are encouraged to stay in Mexico. “It’s always better to stay and blend in, especially when the language is the same,” she says. Many do stay, but many more head north, sometimes against her wishes.

At the border checkpoint, Conger-Cross, 32, tells the guard she has been in Tijuana to “visit a friend.” No more questions are asked; she is back in the United States.

But what she has done, according to the U.S. Border Patrol, is to aid and abet a refugee--an act that, when committed in the United States, is a felony.

She says she is willing to take such risks on the basis of religious faith. She can be counted on to go to Tijuana again. She will help dozens after they’ve crossed. Some will tell sadder stories and bear greater pain. Others might be spies.

Always, there is danger, suspicion and fear.

Conger-Cross, who lives in Lemon Grove with her husband, a 4-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old stepdaughter, is sometimes asked why she endures such risks. (Her husband, Dale, also is involved in the movement, though not as intensely. He once served as Sanctuary’s national media spokesman.)

“I take the risks,” she said, “because I do have children. As I understand my faith, it means to assist the sojourner in your land, to feed the hungry, aid the poor. If I was in that position, fleeing for my life, I hope someone would assist me. I’ve never seen a big difference between my child and one starving to death in Ethiopia or El Salvador.”

Risks--and involvement in the 6-year-old Sanctuary movement--already have exacted a toll. Conger-Cross’ brother, Phil Willis-Conger, was convicted in 1986 of conspiracy, transporting illegal aliens and misdemeanor aiding and abetting. Willis-Conger, who now lives in Berkeley, was then director of the Tucson Ecumenical Council’s refugee task force; he received five years’ probation.

Interfaith Coalition

Conger-Cross is coordinator of the San Diego Interfaith Task Force on Central America, which has its offices in her place of worship, the United Methodist Church of La Mesa. The task force is a coalition of more than a dozen churches and synagogues offering sanctuary to refugees fleeing war in Central America. Most are from El Salvador and Guatemala, a few from Nicaragua and Honduras.

The movement has enlisted more than 300 churches nationwide and aided more than 4,000 refugees since its inception in 1981. It was born when 13 Salvadorans out of a group of 26 died while crossing an Arizona desert. Thirteen drank their own urine to survive.

Sanctuary has been a frequent target of the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“The law makes no allowances for those who take the law into their own hands,” Border Patrol spokesman Michael Nicley said of Sanctuary. “The Immigration and Naturalization Service is asked to determine who may or may not enter the country. It isn’t the job of some church.

“Harboring and transporting aliens is a federal crime--aiding and abetting. If you know someone’s an illegal alien, and you’re offering food, clothing, shelter--even if they’re ill--you’re committing a felony.”

‘They Feel Justified’

Nicley said Sanctuary draws people “less concerned with religious commitment than with making a political statement. These are people who disagree with the government’s Central American policy. They feel justified in breaking the law.”

Conger-Cross drives refugees to doctors’ offices. She finds living accommodations in people’s homes. She helps with clothing, groceries and culture shock. She talks to them, prays with them. She sees “aiding and abetting” as a spiritual mandate.

She disagrees with the government’s policy. Hardly a supporter of President Reagan, she believes the contras would cease to exist if not for Reagan’s persistent efforts to supply them.

She disagrees strongly with Nicley’s claims about Sanctuary.

It aids victims of the right and the left, she said. One refugee she is working with was tortured by the Sandinistas, she said. Others are victims of death squads in El Salvador or the U.S.-backed military there.

Miguel, a Salvadoran she is helping, suffered the murders of his father, mother, brother and sister between 1980 and 1983. His father was found bound and shot in 1980. His brother and sister were killed after their home was searched. His mother was killed with two other people, two days before Christmas 1983. Guards at a military checkpoint said the driver refused to stop, so, they opened fire.

“She was my mother,” he said. “I know she would never do that.”

Miguel remained in El Salvador until May, leading protest movements in the countryside. He said he witnessed a massacre near the Honduran border and another one in which soldiers proudly paraded with the heads of children on stakes. He said the battalion that committed the atrocity, Atlacatl , was trained in the United States.

He recently turned 21. He said Sanctuary workers have provided him with food, clothing and shelter. He has gruesome nightmares and may soon receive psychiatric care. He said in Spanish that Sanctuary has taught him that “not everyone from the United States is evil, like I thought they were.”

Conger-Cross said she is convinced her phone and the phone in the task force office are tapped.

“We use lots of pay phones,” she said with a laugh.

One day recently, a co-worker, a nun, turned and asked, “Carol, are we going to have a normal week this week?”

“What’s a normal week?” she asked.

“You know, where we just answer the phones.”

Sometimes, the stress is overwhelming.

‘It Gets Tough’

“When I come home at 6 o’clock, and my little girl is yelling, ‘Mommy, mommy, mommy,’ and I’ve got to be at a 7 o’clock meeting in North County--yeah, it gets tough. In fact, it sounds just like last night.”

While unwinding on a drive, maybe with a refugee by her side, Conger-Cross is prone to relax by listening to Jackson Browne’s “Lives in the Balance,” a rock album devoted largely to Central America.

“What’s good about a world in which war rages at a fever pitch?” asks the song “Soldier of Plenty,” an indictment of the U.S. involvement. “And people die for the little things, a little corn, a little beans. . . .”

She enlisted Browne’s help recently when the local movement desperately needed money. He staged a benefit concert at San Diego’s Symphony Hall that Conger-Cross said netted $16,000--which went to feed and clothe victims like Miguel. Browne, whom Conger-Cross met through Sanctuary, also helped raise $55,000 toward covering $1 million in legal expenses accrued by Phil Willis-Conger and 10 others in the Sanctuary court case.

Conger-Cross said rock music has turned out to be one of Sanctuary’s most alluring fund-raising tools. The task force received $2,700 from the World Council of Churches in July. The total budget for 1987-88 is $38,000.

Tom Campbell, a rock promoter based in Hermosa Beach, worked with Browne and Conger-Cross in producing the San Diego concert. Campbell said he had heard of Conger-Cross through his own involvement in the National Sanctuary Defense Fund, which recommended her as a leading activist on the San Diego-Tijuana border.

“What’s happened to us in this country, as we’ve become more industrialized and impersonal, is that we’ve lost the feeling we can do much of anything,” Campbell said. “Activists such as Carol believe we can do something--one person can . One old, crazy woman named Mother Jones wanted to do something about child labor and did. I don’t think a person like Carol has a conscious choice about what she does. She arrives at it through a tremendous moral and spiritual commitment.”

In its early days, Conger-Cross said, Sanctuary worked strictly within the system, only to become disillusioned and bitter. It first sought to aid refugees by having them apply for political asylum, the route the government encourages.

“Then they (the government) start slapping $2,000-$4,000 bonds on people,” Conger-Cross said. “The movement had thousands of dollars wrapped up in these bonds. We made tons of trips to El Centro, bonding out every single person every single time. Then all of the applications are stamped ‘denied.’ When you’re talking somebody who’s been tortured, who has torture marks all over the body, somebody whose family has been mutilated and massacred . . . and they’re all denied ? Something’s not working.”

Granted More Leniently

Conger-Cross produced figures from the INS, showing that asylum is granted far more leniently and consistently to refugees fleeing Communist countries than to those with “a well-founded fear of persecution”--the language of the refugee act of 1980.

“It says nothing about fleeing communism,” she said.

But in figures compiled between June, 1983, and September, 1986, the INS granted asylum to refugees from El Salvador 2.6% of the time, to Romanians 51% of the time; to Guatemalans .9% of the time, to Czechoslovaks 45.4% of the time; to Hondurans 2.5% of the time, to Poles 34% of the time.

Border Patrol spokesman Nicley said most refugees do not harbor a well-founded fear of persecution. He believes most are not fleeing a war as much as they’re seeking economic gain.

“Certainly, war affects economic stability,” he said. “But the fact that their countries are in shambles doesn’t have anything to do with a well-founded fear of persecution.”

Conger-Cross said Nicley’s words are simply not true, that hundreds of cases contradict such claims.

Nicley said the Sanctuary movement is “no threat” to the Border Patrol but that the entire issue is so emotional that no one sees it objectively.

“This is a political hot potato,” he said. “Sanctuary’s activities are nothing we haven’t experienced before. We enforce the law and don’t care who’s involved. If someone’s in the clergy, big deal. They’re breaking the law.”

Conger-Cross said refugees endure “a lot of terror, a lot of emotional turmoil. They show all the signs of delayed stress syndrome, just like Vietnam vets. To see your whole family mutilated in front of you is something most Americans can’t relate to, but it happens. Believe me, it happens.”

Norman Broadbent is minister of the United Church of Christ of La Mesa and a colleague of Conger-Cross. He calls her a hero, and her level of commitment an anomaly in an apathetic society.

“Faith says something about providing hospitality and safety to people who live lives of fear and desperation,” Broadbent said. “Our faith leads us to respond to those fears even if it puts us in jeopardy.

“We do it not because we wish to defy or violate the law, but because we’re willing to accept and pay the consequences of an act of faith. We do it not because we lack respect for the law but because we have ultimate respect for the kind of law that provides justice for all.”

Conger-Cross said she developed such respect at an early age. As far back as she can remember, she was taken to church and taught the virtues of a Christian life. Her father and mother served as missionaries before she was born. Her father taught school for 32 years in the Grossmont District and for four years in Latin America. She was bilingual and traveled in Central and South America long before most of her friends had bought their first Beatles record.

Dangers Worth Facing

She was taught to believe that risks are worth it, that dangers worth facing often bring opportunity and change. As she says, if you don’t stand for something, you’re apt to fall for anything.

“I never know when I’ll get a call from a refugee any time day or night,” she said. “I never know the situation I might walk into. I never know the true motivation of the person I’m helping. Maybe they’re a government agent. There is a lot of danger.

“But to be a Christian, you have to take risks. The Bible doesn’t say, ‘You do your job, you pay your mortgage and forget everything else.’ Sorry, that’s not risky, folks. God is constantly pushing me to do more. Some say God doesn’t take sides. But he does. He takes the side of the oppressed. He’s really right there for that.”