The New Sanctuary Movement

Dr. Sergio M. González: This is part two of episode five of Sanctuary. Welcome back. Welcome to Sanctuary, a limited podcast series about immigration, faith and the borders between church and state. Sanctuary is created by me, Dr. Sergio González

Dr. Lloyd Daniel Barba: and me Dr. Lloyd Barba.

Dr. González: In conjunction with the Institute for religion, media and civic engagement and Axis Mundi Media.

Dr. Barba: Sanctuary was produced by Dr. Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto. Kari Onishi provided production assistance. Sanctuary was made possible through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation and with support from the religion department at Amherst College.

Dr. González: Additional support was provided by the American Academy of Religion. And before we get started, we just want to warn listeners that this series contains infrequent depictions of violence and sexual assault that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Dr. Barba: And finally, Sergio, that brings us to our last key date leading up to Sanctuary: 2005, when all that became patently clear. And this time, Sergio, we go to your home state.

Dr. González: The Badger State it is! In Wisconsin, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, my congressman, introduced a piece of legislation that would alter immigration politics and activism for the next two decades. Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and author of such illustrious laws as the Patriot Act, introduced HR 4437, also known as the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act.

Media Clip (Sensenbrenner): First of all, let me reiterate what the leadership has said. I want to see a good bill passed by the Congress and sent to the President of the United States. And a good bill secures our borders, enforces the employer sanctions law to turn off the magnet of more illegal immigrants coming across the border, and protects our law enforcement officials who are dealing with an increasing criminality of drugs and terrorists coming across the border.

Dr. González: The bill promised to build a 700 mile-long fence along the US-Mexico border, end the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, and categorize all unlawful presence and visa overstays as felonies. And perhaps most stunningly, it would have criminalized any form of support for undocumented immigrants, including the types of services that churches often offered. The Sensenbrenner Bill quickly passed the House of Representatives in December 2005. The legislation, so obviously punitive in the way it went after not just immigrants, but their families and communities, stirred an awakening of social activism across the nation. The following spring, more than 4 million people took to the streets in cities across the nation to protest the bill.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): We are fighting for Spanish people. We are fighting for the American dream.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): We are a community.

Dr. Barba: And here's where the tide really begins to turn. The 2006 immigration reform marches reached a climax on May Day, also called "A Day Without Immigrants." Latino advocacy organizations, labor groups, and faith leaders and congregations protested not just HR 4437 but the entire strain of anti-immigrant sentiment that had permeated the country since the 1990s. These mobilizations have been widely recognized as the beginning of the modern immigrant justice movement. Listeners wouldn't be surprised to hear, however, that we'd placed this origin story in the 1980s with the original sanctuary movement. But the Sensenbrenner Bill wouldn't be the last time Congress tried to take up the complicated issue of immigration. What else was developing at this time, Sergio?

Dr. González: Well, from 2005 to 2007, the country witnessed back and forth proposals to solve what was then commonly seen as an immigration crisis at the border. In 2007, already well into the last half of his final term, President Bush worked with a team of congressmen to craft compromise immigration legislation.

Media Clip (Bush): If you're serious about securing our borders and bringing millions of illegal immigrants in our country out of the shadows, this bipartisan bill is the best opportunity to move forward.

Dr. González: Bush hedged carefully, however, making sure to not suggest that he was proposing any form of "amnesty" or pardons for undocumented immigrants. Just like today, that was a term that was a toxic one among conservatives, and would have made the legislation dead on arrival.

Media Clip (Bush): This bill does not grant amnesty. Amnesty is forgiveness without a penalty. Instead, this bill requires workers here illegally to acknowledge that they broke the law, pay a fine, pass background checks, remain employed and maintain a clean record. This bill provides the best chance to reform our immigration system and help us make certain we know who's in our country and where they are.

Dr. González: Now, even with this careful wording, however, the 2007 bill stood no chance. Like all forms of "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation introduced since 1986, this bipartisan proposal was unsuccessful.

Dr. Barba: As they had for over two decades, congregations and religious institutions played an active role in both advocating for legislative reform and ministering on the ground to undocumented residents. Cover pages of Time magazine in 2007 made those linkages clear. While one cover-story trumpeted "Immigration: Why Amnesty Makes Sense," another published shortly thereafter, asked, "A Church Haven for Illegal Aliens," and another read, "Does the Bible Support Sanctuary?" Sanctuary, then was clearly in the air, even well over a decade after the end of the original sanctuary movement.

Dr. González: And Lloyd, at the forefront of these early church mobilizations were groups like the Los Angeles-based Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE. CLUE had led the charge in California in challenging the xenophobia baked into policies like the Sensenbrenner Bill. The organization was also something of a midwife for what would emerge as the New Sanctuary Movement. CLUE leaders, as did clergy throughout the country, believed that people of faith had something special to contribute to the immigration debate.

Dr. Barba: And just as millions of everyday Americans took to the streets, either protesting punitive policies, or in some cases, supporting comprehensive immigration reform, a familiar idea was floating through the air. Take, for example, Interfaith Worker Justice, another LA faith-based group. In the midst of these mobilizations, Interfaith sent out a mailer with the question, "A new movement, an old commandment, or both?" You can see that the group was invoking the concept of sanctuary at a moment when the state had failed vulnerable populations, just as religious groups in the past had.

Dr. González: I mean, Lloyd, the fact that these faith groups knew what idea to summon amid the immigration debates of the early 21st century made it pretty clear that terms like "sanctuary" were part of the nation's "cultural" and "religious repertoire." But to get to the origins of this new movement, we need to go back to where we started Episode 5 in our first part, and pick up with the story of Elvira Arellano.

Media Clip (Arellano): No soy ni criminal ni terrorista. Soy madre y padre para mi hijo y soy una obrera más. [Crying] Si voy a tener que pasar diez o veinte años allí en la carcel, no me importa pero voy a luchar porque mi hijo, porque yo me respetará, porque el pueblo indocumentado, porque el pueblo ciudadano sea respetados." ["I am neither a criminal nor am I a terrorist. I am both mother and father to my son and also am a worker. If I need to spend ten or twenty years in prison, it doesn't matter to me because I am going to fight for my son, my self-respect, and the undocumented and citizen community shall be respected."]

Dr. Barba: Now I doubt that when Elvira Arellano took sanctuary in Chicago's Adalberto United Methodist Church in 2006, she knew that she was about to start a national movement. Her immediate concern was her own individual case and what would happen to her and her US-born son, Saul.

Dr. González: And that's exactly what her entry into sanctuary did, Lloyd. It used the centuries-long traditions of church-based sanctuary in the service of immigration justice. But the rhetoric that Arellano was using, as our listeners might have already noticed, was quite different from the language that 1980s activists were invoking. Let's take a beat here, Lloyd, because I think it's important to make this point for our listeners. Why was Arellano using the language of not being a terrorist or criminal?

Dr. Barba: Well, for starters, Sergio, we need to remember that she was rounded up as part of an operation intended to root out terrorists working in airports. Let's recall the political rhetoric in a post-9/11 America and how it conflated immigration and terrorism as basically two inseparable issues. And also, remember that because of those 1990s laws that we discussed earlier, US immigration policy was now reclassifying a lot of unauthorized entrance into the US as a felony. Arellano simply rejected this way of thinking about immigration. The rapid expansion and power of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, meanwhile, was likewise tying terrorism with immigration. And again, Arellano simply refused to allow that to define her.

Dr. González: That's right. And as an immigration activist and a sanctuary recipient, Arellano frequently contrasted this idea that she was a terrorist and a criminal with her role as a mother. In 2006, she was featured as part of Time magazine's end-of-the-year feature called "People Who Mattered." When she was asked why she continued to fight to stay in the US, she answered, quote, "It's wrong to split up families. I'm fighting for my son, not for myself. It's a matter of principle. I don't want him treated like garbage. I am a mom and a worker. I am not a terrorist."

Dr. Barba: And, Sergio, what I'm about to say is not just because we were both raised by wonderful Mexican mothers but we know that motherhood is such a potent symbol in the US and also across Latin America. What's that saying about Mexico from a few decades back? 90% of Mexicans are Catholic, but 100% of Mexicans are Guadalupanos?

Dr. González: That's right, and in a Christian Latino context, it adapts well to the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus. And the most ubiquitous symbol of sacred motherhood in the Americas is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a nearly 500 year old Mexican Marian apparition. For most Mexican Catholics, for example, you really can't talk about faith without talking about La Virgencita.

Dr. Barba: Oh, absolutely. And in most of her public appearances, Arellano, as a mother, made so much of her stay in the US about not wishing to be separated from her son. She tapped into this maternal language, as would so many other mothers seeking sanctuary in the years to come.

Dr. González: Yeah, it really was everywhere. Looking back at photos and documentaries of Elvira, you see images of Our Lady Guadalupe in the background. There's even one of her holding Saul in a similar pose to the Madonna cradling the Christ child.

Dr. Barba: Now, some critics would eventually claim that Elvira's status as a single mother didn't make her an ideal face for the sanctuary movement. Her supporters resisted that, however. As one said, "God had once chosen another single mother to bring about the birth of Jesus." Just like Mary, Joseph and Jesus, the Holy Family that had once fled to escape to Egypt, so too did Arellano now need to reside in the foreign land to ensure her son's livelihood.

Dr. González: And there certainly was a reason why Arellano and her supporters needed to fine tune their public messaging, especially as a part of their social movement work. Remember that they were operating in an era of extreme anti-immigrant sentiment. That meant that her opponents- well, they were really opponents of all undocumented residents in the US- were legion. Some of these people would actually show up to Adalberto United Methodist, the church where Arellano had taken sanctuary. They'd stand outside of her window yelling at her with some of the vilest language you can imagine.

Dr. Barba: That's right, Sergio. And much of this type of counter protesting came from groups like the Minutemen, an anti-immigrant vigilante group that had gotten their start at the US-Mexico border. Here's one critic of Arellano and the entire concept of sanctuary.

Media Clip: No, it's not in the best interest of the country. It is in the best interest of the families to stay together, so they should all be deported. Children, parents, grandparents, anybody that managed to slither across the border illegally. In the case of Ms. Arellano, she's a criminal because she was deported, came back, and then had that child knowing that she was under a deportation order at the time. How that child got American citizenship is a travesty.

Dr. Barba: This sort of mockery was not uncommon. At another sanctuary church, the Los Angeles-area Simi Valley United Church of Christ, a group gathered to mock sanctuary recipient Liliana Sanchez de Saldivar. You can hear them calling for immigration and custom enforcements as a chant for her removal. At the same church, one protester led a small group every Sunday for a year to protest Liliana's stay in sanctuary.

Media Clip (Simi Valley UCC Protestors): ICE ICE baby, ICE ICE baby...

Media Clip (NPR Report - Gloria Hillard): Mike Hilden is probably not someone you would peg as a leader of an anti-illegal immigration group. The 27-year-old dressed in black high tops, skinny jeans, and a striped t-shirt blends right in with the young latte and laptop crowd at this LA coffee bar.

Media Clip (NPR Report - Mike Hilden): It sounds so cliche to say activist. You know, I'm just someone who's exercising his First Amendment rights. And I wish more Americans would do that.

Media Clip (NPR Report - Gloria Hillard): For a year, every Sunday, Hildan or other members of Save Our State demonstrated outside the United Church of Christ in Simi Valley, California.

Media Clip (NPR Report - Mike Hilden): We think it's setting this horrible precedent, the government is, by not going in there and taking her. This is 2008. it's not 1870 anymore, you know? We only have so much space, so many resources. And at some point we have to say, enough is enough.

Dr. Barba: Well, I have no idea as to what he meant in reference to 1870... actually, Sergio, I think I have an idea.

Dr. González: Yeah, he wasn't being too coy on that front. So that's what sanctuary activists in Chicago were working against. And as they were rolling out their messaging, they worked to both harken back to the tradition of church-based immigration activism from the 1980s and create a movement that was responsive to the present moment. Activists knew that this would be a movement anchored in a sense of biblical justice, rooted in scriptural traditions and teachings. From the day sanctuary opened in Chicago, sanctuary organizers turned to God for direction.

Media Clip: [Praying at opening of sanctuary for Arellano]

Dr. González: Importantly, as with the 1980s movement, sanctuary activists also explicitly tapped into a long tradition of civil disobedience. Take it from Arellano's pastor, Reverend Walter Coleman of Adalberto United Methodist.

Media Clip (Reverend Coleman): Well, our church was really founded by about 125 families, about half of which were undocumented. Civil disobedience is a tradition of our church, nonviolent civil disobedience, which also includes the willingness to accept the consequences.

Dr. Barba: And in many ways, Chicago proved to be the perfect location for this new form of sanctuary to develop. As we know from previous episodes, Chicago had long been a hotbed of organizing for labor rights and immigrant rights. That stretched back to the 1980s, but it was made even more clear in the marches that developed in response to the Sensenbrenner bill. These new mobilizations that developed in the early 21st century weaved together traditions of immigrant and labor organizing. During the 2006 marches, activists highlighted the conditions and precarity that mixed-status families had been thrown into by deportations.

Dr. González: None other than the renowned labor and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, co founder of the United Farm Workers, made that clear. Listen to Huerta, who joined Arellano when she entered sanctuary in 2006.

Media Clip (Huerta): By this action that Elvira has taken, she is putting a new face on this whole issue immigration. On behalf of the 3 million children in the United States who are citizens of the United States, but whose parents face deportation every single day because they do not have the documents. This is a moral outrage.

Dr. González: As Huerta notes, it was about more than just the estimated 12 million undocumented residents in the US. It was also about their family members. Political scientist Amalia Pallares, who has written extensively about the New Sanctuary Movement, estimated that, in the early 2000s, there were "approximately 16.6 million people who were directly affected by deportation or the possibility of deportation." She notes that from 2010 to 2012, nearly 23% of all deportations were issued for parents with citizen children.

Dr. Barba: Sanctuary, as it developed in Chicago, then, would be about confronting an unjust deportation system that not only affected undocumented residents, but millions of people who loved and depended on them. And pretty soon that form of sanctuary was carried into areas far beyond the Windy City.

Media Clip (NPR Reporter): Today, a group of religious congregations announced what they are calling a New Sanctuary Movement. They pledged to provide legal, emotional, and financial help to immigrants facing deportation, and sometimes, they said, they'd even offer them physical sanctuary. The new campaign was announced at coordinated news conferences in cities around the country.

Dr. González: Arellano's stay in sanctuary from 2006 to 2007, ultimately triggered a robust response from people of faith across the nation. As had been the case with the opening of sanctuary in Tucson in 1982, the beginning of sanctuary in Chicago set a model for other houses of worship that sought to join the movement. In May 2007, for example, St. Paul the Apostle in New York City made a similar dramatic and public declaration of sanctuary.

Media Clip (Pastor Gil Martinez - St. Paul the Apostle NYC): As the ringing of the bell announces a new thing and breaks the silence, so too, do we announce our new resolve to speak out about injustice, to no longer be silent and complicit in injustice, to welcome our brothers and sisters who are in this land with us, and to commit ourselves to welcome them in the name and the spirit of our common and diverse religious traditions.

Dr. Barba: By 2008, there were nearly 30 local grassroots coalitions that had formed to support sanctuary work. Together, they made up a loosely organized network that called itself the New Sanctuary Movement, or NSM, for short. It was clear that the NSM was drawing on the traditions of hospitality and welcome that animated activists in Reagan-era America. Take it from Rabbi Michael Feinberg of New York City.

Media Clip (Feinberg): For us, sanctuary is an act of radical hospitality, of the welcoming of the stranger who is like ourselves, the stranger in our midst.

Dr. González: But there were also important distinctions between sanctuary in its first iteration and this early 21st century variety. Let's see if we can draw out some of those continuities and contrast, Lloyd.

Dr. Barba: All right, let's start with this one, Sergio,. As Arellano's case makes clear to us, the people entering sanctuary in the early 2000s were not all Central Americans. Remember, in the 1980s sanctuary was mostly helping Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers. Arellano is Mexican.

Dr. González: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I thought all Latinos are the same. Are we just one big monolithic group? Just one big brown swing vote?

Dr. Barba: Oh, yeah! And remember in 2019 when Fox and Friends announced, "Trump cuts USA Aid to THREE Mexican countries!" So yeah... perhaps some listeners might already know this, but Latinos come in many shapes and sizes... even though you and I, Sergio, admittedly, we're of comparable stature.

Dr. González: All right, all right. So it wasn't just Central Americans entering sanctuary and the NSM.

Dr. Barba: That's right, but Latinos did continue to be the predominant population entering sanctuary. And that wasn't surprising, as Latin Americans constituted the largest share of the nation's undocumented population. People originally from Latin America, however, whether they were from Mexico or El Salvador or Guatemala, weren't the only people seeking safe harbor in houses of worship. The NSM, unlike its predecessor, was now a truly global phenomenon.

Media Clip (NPR Reporter): Two families seeking aid appeared. One of them, Joe Liang, and his wife, Mei Xing, came with their two children. Liang, who was undocumented, said he had been put in detention and was facing deportation after driving with a relative who was pulled aside for speeding.

Media Clip (Liang): We do not want our family to be apart, and my wife and I have been here for more than 10 years already. We work and support our family together. Our children were born here, and we never commit any kind of crime.

Dr. González: Now Lloyd, that reminds me how sociologist Grace Yukich, who tracked the NSM in New York City, notes that between 2007 to 2009 there were six families living in Sanctuary. Two were from China, who we just heard about, and the others were from Senegal, Guatemala, Jamaica and Haiti.

Dr. Barba: Right, and here's another major difference. Arellano, like so many others, never claimed to be a refugee fleeing a civil war. Remember that during the 1980s, sanctuary congregations were offering aid to those fleeing violence in their home countries, violence that was in many ways being supported by American taxpayer dollars. But the NSM was providing help to people who would not typically qualify for political asylum. Individuals entering sanctuary in the early 2000s were most often people who had actually lived in the US for several decades. They usually made the case that they were, in fact, truly Americans in all ways, except perhaps in their legal documentation status. They lived large parts of their lives in the US, and many had created deep family roots in this country. Think, for example, of Arellano and her US-born son, Saul.

Dr. González: Yeah, that's right, Lloyd. And here you're bringing up another key word for the NSM: "families." In the early 2000s, it was hard to disentangle the concept of "sanctuary" from the concept of "families." Now, this isn't to say that families didn't take sanctuary in the 1980s. In fact, as we noted in our second episode, the very first case of public sanctuary in Tucson welcomed Alfredo and his family into the church. But sanctuary activists in the NSM often centered family reunification as a reason for their activism. Deportation, they argued, threatened to disrupt the very fabric of a family unit. Here's Noel Andersen of the Church World Service making that very point.

Media Clip (Andersen): So, you know, because the reality is, the sanctuary movement is about families, about keeping families together. It's about stopping people from being deported.

Dr. González: Sanctuary, according to NSM activists, was really the last option to fight family separation and keep families together.

Dr. Barba: That's right, Sergio. And there was something really strategic in this framing. Sanctuary organizers, along with the immigrant rights movement more generally, sought to wrest control from the political Right this idea of a pro-family discourse. It was anti-family, heck, anti-Christian, to rip mothers and fathers away from their children. And in putting forward an alternative pro-family model, the NSM was also opening the door for something of a revival of a religious Left in the US. Just as in the 1980s, when sanctuary activists served as counterweights to the Moral Majority and the Religious Right, activists in the early 2000s argued that no one had ownership on the intersections between faith and politics.

Dr. González: And one last thing here, Lloyd. Just like sanctuary in the 1980s had been part of a larger movement of movements- remember the peace and solidarity coalitions for Central Americans- the NSM of the early 2000s was part of a broader constellation of immigrant justice movements. NSM activists sought to expand their forms of activism in new ways. Making it into, what sociologist Grace Yukich refers to as, a "multi-target social movement." Sanctuary referred to the actual harboring of undocumented immigrants in houses of worship, obviously. But it also signaled a broader solidarity with immigrants. It eventually came to include collaborations between congregations and sanctuary families residing in their own homes.

Dr. Barba: Alright, I think making all of these distinctions and connections clear is really helpful here, Segio. It helps us better understand not only how we got to Arellano entering sanctuary in Chicago, but also how this moment became a movement. On May 9, 2007, congregations across the country decided to join Chicago and make this renewed sanctuary activism something much bigger as the New Sanctuary Movement. The choice of that specific date wasn't coincidental. It was a day that the US Senate was introducing the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, another legislative effort to address the status of the country's more than 12 million undocumented residents. On that day, sanctuary coalitions held coordinated press conferences in cities like LA, New York, Chicago and Seattle. They announced, with a unified voice, that sanctuary would officially be the national response by people of faith to the national question of immigration.

Dr. González: Right, and we say this knowing that it's impossible to note all of the key actors who helped get this movement off the ground. And we've heard from some of them in this episode already, including groups like CLUE and Interfaith Worker Justice in Los Angeles, as well as faith leaders like Father Juan Carlos Ruiz of New York City. Now they brought together a large network of people to make this work. Let's hear from Reverend Alexia Salvatierra, a national leader based out of LA, here describing the NSM strategies and targets.

Media Clip (Salvatierra): They got around to the second sanctuary movement, most of the people we are trying to help were working, had somewhere to live, had children in school, were integrated into their communities. The last thing they wanted to do was to live in churches. So what we did was we got a small number of families, who had really powerful stories, and we worked with them. They were deeply committed Christians, most of them. We worked with them in prayer and discernment until they decided that they would go into sanctuary, even though, in many ways, it was a hardship for them to try to change public opinion.

Dr. González: The opening of the NSM in spring of 2007 served as a national invitation for houses of worship to get into the work of serving undocumented residents who fear detention and deportation.

Dr. Barba: And that's spot on, Sergio. And we do well to note that these mobilizations, however, were often piecemeal and very much driven by local networks and congregations. That contrasted starkly from the 1980s, when the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America had taken charge and created discernment handbooks and published a national newsletter. In the NSM's first five years, by contrast, there was no national leadership structure. That wouldn't change until 2013, when Church World Service took a more direct lead in national organizing efforts.

Dr. González: Now Lloyd, it also seems that clear wins for sanctuary activists and the NSM's early years were also sometimes hard to identify. Local sanctuary networks were often fighting on behalf of individuals. Think here, again, of the case of Elvira Arellano. So even though some people did receive stays of deportation while living in sanctuary, it was harder to stitch together a national story of success while these "wins" were happening. In addition, a sanctuary seeker's time in sanctuary could be drawn out for months or even years.

Dr. Barba: That's right. Let's take, for example, the 2008 case of Flor Crisostomo, who entered sanctuary at the same Chicago church where Arellano had once lived.

Media Clip (NPR Reporter): Elvira Arellano made national headlines when she took sanctuary in a Humboldt Park Church to avoid deportation. Now, this woman, Flor Crisostomo, is following Arellano footsteps.

Dr. Barba: Crisostomo, who entered sanctuary during the last year of the Bush presidency, wouldn't exit until October of the following year, at which point a new president had assumed power.

Dr. González: When Barack Obama entered the White House in early 2009, sanctuary activists had high hopes for the type of comprehensive immigration reform that would make their mobilizations completely unnecessary. As a candidate, Obama had campaigned on finding a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents.

Media Clip (Obama): It's about all the people who are paying a price because of a broken immigration system. All the communities that are taking immigration enforcement into their own hands. All the neighborhoods that are seeing rising tensions as citizens are pitted against new immigrants. The American people need us to put an end to the petty partisanship that passes for politics in Washington, and they need us to enact comprehensive immigration reform once and for all. We can't wait 20 years from now to do it. We can't wait 10 years from now to do it. We need to do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States of America!

Dr. González: Instead, President Obama tacked sharply to the right. Even though he moved away from the workplace raids that were commonplace during the Bush administration and promised to focus deportation efforts on criminals and not families, the new president made full use of the immigration deportation system that his predecessors had helped refine over the last decade.

Dr. Barba: Oh, for sure. Especially in the post 9/11 years we see a well-oiled deportation machine, to borrow historian Adam Goodman's term. Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration removed more than 2.5 million people from the country. That meant that he deported more people than any president in American history.

Dr. González: It was a record that rightly earned him the moniker of, 'Deporter in Chief.' A title bestowed upon him by the very communities who had hoped he'd offer an alternative to the punitive policies of the 1990s and aughts. During the Obama presidency, sanctuary and immigration activists were thus constantly reminded that if there's one issue that has truly been bipartisan over the last three decades, it's been going after this country's undocumented residents.

Dr. Barba: In light of these rising deportations, sanctuary became a way of evading deportation for individuals whose sanctuary networks believed had, quote, winnable cases. That meant leaning even harder into supporting individuals who might have, let's say, sympathetic stories to a broader American public. In other words, emphasizing the preservation of families. Beyond continuing to assist individuals seeking refuge, the NSM also helped move along other important immigration policies. For example, sanctuary activists helped bring to fruition something called the Sensitive Locations Memo. Let's hear again from Dr Alexia Salvatierra, the Madrina (or godmother) of the NSM.

Media Clip (Salvatierra): Over time, we were also able to achieve a policy known as sensitive-zones, which said that ICE would not go into a church or a school or a hospital without a judicial warrant, so that people could feel safe in those situations. A judicial warrant, of course, is if they know that a particular individual has committed a serious crime.

Dr. González: And while the Sanctuary Movement was scoring some of those smaller scale victories, as noted by Salvatierra, congregations across the country continued to provide refuge within church walls. Let's go back to where the original sanctuary movement started: Tucson. There, in 2014, people of faith found light and hope in helping Rosa Robles Loreto.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Journey for a woman taking sanctuary in a South Tucson church will come to an end later on today.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): Rosa Robles Loreto will leave South Side Presbyterian Church around 11 this morning. Rosa, who's in the US illegally, was told last year to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported. That's when she took refuge at that church, and that's where she's been for more than 460 days now. Rosa gained support from many in Tucson who rallied, making signs calling on lawmakers to stop her deportation. There's no word, yet, on why she'll be leaving the church this morning, but we do know she'll be able to safely return to her family here in Tucson, once she's out.

Dr. González: The NSM celebrated Robles Loreto's departure from sanctuary.

Media Clip: [Chanting in celebration]

Dr. Barba: As Obama's presidency came to a close in 2016, sanctuary activists were still hard at work, albeit at a much smaller scale. Because of the tireless advocacy of immigration activists, the President had begun to pull back on some of his more punitive policies during his second term. People still saw sanctuary in faith spaces, however. Such was a case for Jose Juan Moreno, who lived in a Chicago church in the spring of 2016.

Media Clip (CBS News): A deportation drama is playing out in Chicago just as the US Supreme Court hears arguments on President Barack Obama's Executive Order that would shield 4 million non-documented immigrants. CBS 2's Vince Gerasole is live in Hyde Park, where a man is seeking sanctuary there. Vince?

Media Clip (CBS News - Vince Gerasole): Good evening, Rob. His name is Jose Juan Moreno. He is a husband and a father of five. And you might say the church here is now not only his home, but his entire world. He's been granted sanctuary here, and just one step beyond the stairs behind us is a step closer to deportation and the further breakup of his family.

Dr. González: Morena was only one of a handful of individuals who lived in sanctuary in 2016. And although there were approximately 18 sanctuary coalitions in operation across the country, many immigration activists hope that this particular form of organizing might no longer be necessary under a new president. The 2016 presidential election seemed to present a clear choice on the topic of immigration. Candidate Hillary Clinton promised to make protecting immigrants a key priority of her administration.

Media Clip (Hillary Clinton): I will fight for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for you and for your families across our country. I will fight to stop partisan attacks on the executive actions that would put Dreamers, including those with us today, at risk of deportation. And if Congress continues to refuse to act, as president, I would do everything possible under the law to go even further.

Dr. González: Her opponent, Donald Trump...well, we don't think we need to remind our listeners how Trump promised to handle this issue.

Media Clip (Trump): Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. There will be no amnesty... I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice, just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice. Okay?

Dr. Barba: Many political pundits believe that such anti-immigrant rhetoric and promises of national deportation forces would simply be too much for American voters. Sanctuary activists may have hoped for as much, but they believed in preparing for the worst. And so they kept their networks up and running just in case. And as it turned out, their instincts proved correct.

Media Clip (CNN - Wolf Blitzer): [Clapping] Right now, a historic moment. We can now project the winner of the presidential race. CNN projects Donald Trump wins the presidency...

Dr. González: Join us next time as we explore how the New Sanctuary Movement confronted the Trump presidency and in the process, helped breathe new life into one of the most dynamic faith-based social movements in the history of the United States.

Dr. Barba: That's it for this episode of sanctuary. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Dr. Lloyd Barba

Dr. González: and I'm Dr. Sergio González.

Dr. Barba: Remember, sanctuary saves lives

Dr. González: and strangers are neighbors you just haven't met yet.