Taking Sanctuary in Illogic

The sanctuary movement finally has had its chance to explain itself in court, and the verdict is mixed. A sanctuary leader, the Rev. Glen Remer-Thamert, a Lutheran minister who admitted smuggling Central Americans to safety in the United States, was acquitted of serious charges in Albuquerque after a federal trial in which he was given every opportunity to explain the religious and legal positions of the movement. A federal jury also acquitted a poet and free-lance journalist, Demetria Martinez, who accompanied two pregnant Salvadorans as they prepared to cross the border at Juarez but did not cross with them.

Both the acquittals and the chance to air their views about why the United States should offer a safe haven to those fleeing strife in Central America were gratifying to sanctuary activists; the trials of many other sanctuary members have ended in convictions when such testimony has been barred. An attorney in the Albuquerque case concluded that what the latest verdict means is that jurors don’t regard sanctuary activists as criminals. “They don’t want to have someone who is doing good, who is trying to help a refugee in need, to be (considered) a felon,” said attorney Karen Snell, who also worked on sanctuary-related cases in Arizona and Texas.

We read the verdict differently. As several jurors explained to reporters, they relied heavily on a proclamation issued in 1986 by then-Gov. Toney Anaya declaring New Mexico a “sanctuary state.” The proclamation, rescinded by Anaya’s successor, had no legal significance, but Remer-Thamert managed to convince the jury that because he believed it did, he lacked criminal intent. This doesn’t mean that the jurors accepted Remer-Thamert’s religious views or subscribed to the movement’s interpretations of U.S. obligationsto refugees under international law. It may mean instead that they were uncomfortable with a defense based on morality and grasped at Anaya’s proclamation because it offered some legal basis for acquitting Remer-Thamert. (Martinez’ defense, that she went along merely as a journalist for the National Catholic Reporter and the Albuquerque Journal, was quite different and easily won over the jury, members said.)

Perhaps we’re old-fashioned, but civil disobedience is easier to accept when its adherents acknowledge that they’re breaking the law and attack the law--or its enforcement--as unjust. That’s what we thought the sanctuary movement was originally all about: It was organized to help refugees, mostly from El Salvador and Guatemala, who were fleeing guerrilla warfare and death squads but could not win asylum here because of the federal government’s discriminatory enforcement of the 1980 Refugee Act. Statistics clearly show that refugees from nations with pro-U.S. governments are far less likely to be granted asylum than are Nicaraguans complaining of the harshness of the Sandinistas.

The sanctuary movement’s arguments about the inequities of the asylum program and about conditions in Central America are very compelling. But the position that Remer-Thamert staked out in Albuquerque--that he didn’t think he was breaking the law--defies logic and borders on sleaze; the prosecution’s suggestions that he benefited financially from dealings with an adoption agency and pressured the Salvadorans to put their babies up for adoption don’t help, either. If he believed that everything he did was legal in New Mexico, why did he operate clandestinely? He and his lawyers may have won this case, but their defense undercut the moral force of their movement.