The New Sanctuary Movement and Immigration Reform

Introduction

The Sanctuary activity was a devout and political activity of approximately 500 congregations in the U.S. that aided Central American refugees by defending them from Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities. The activity flourished between 1982 and 1992 (Carroll 397-404). Various denominations were committed, including Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, and Mennonites.

Discussion

The sources of the activity were from the right of sanctuary in medieval law. The activity started along the U.S. boundary with Mexico in Arizona but was furthermore mighty in Chicago, Philadelphia, and California. In 1981, Rev. John Fife and Jim Corbett, amidst other ones, begun expressing Central American refugees into the United States. It was their intent to offer sanctuary, or faith-based protection, from the political aggression that was taking position in El Salvador and Guatemala.

The Department of Justice indicted some activists in south Texas for aiding refugees. Later indicted were 16 activists in Arizona, including Fife and Corbett in 1985; 11 went to check and 8 were convicted of alien smuggling and other charges. The defendants claimed their undertakings were justifiable to save lives of individuals who would be slain and had no other way to escape.

This activity has been done well in the 2000s by the activity of locations of adoration and other houses of adoration, to defend immigrants in hazard of deportation. The New Sanctuary Movement is a mesh of houses of adoration that facilitates this effort. Sanctuary of refugees from Central American municipal confrontations was an activity in the 1980's (Lippert 3-7). Part of a broader anti-war activity positioned against U.S. foreign standard in Central America, by 1987 440 sites in the United States had been broadcast "sanctuary congregations" or "sanctuary cities" open to migrants from the municipal confrontations in El Salvador and Guatemala. These sites embraced university campuses (Miller and Knill 12-16).

From the late 1980s expanding into the 2000s, there furthermore have been demonstrations of locations of adoration providing "sanctuary" for short time span to migrants converse deportation from Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, the United States, and Canada, amidst other nations (Carroll 397-404). From 1983 to 2003 Canada accomplished 36 sanctuary incidents. The "New Sanctuary Movement" association approximates that is not less than 600,000 individuals in the United States have not less than one family constituent in hazard of deportation.

The activity itself was broadcast a 1984 victor of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award (CBS News 1). Like the underneath ground teaches that was established in the United States all through the nineteenth 100 years to help runaway slaves, the Sanctuary activity was born in response to the plight of political refugees from the concerned Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Elvira Arellano (born 1975) is a Mexican citizen from San Miguel Curahuango, Michoacán, famous for seeking sanctuary while house unlawfully in the United States (Ridder 1). Facing deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Arellano endeavoured to affirm sanctuary in the Adalberto United Methodist Church on ...