When she returned home to find her husband missing, Sandra Aguila Salinas knew she had to flee.
Had she been at home when the authorities came, the then 24-year-old union organizer would have joined her husband in jail. The Salvadoran government had issued a warrant for her arrest as well as his.
It was 1982, the early stages of the 12-year Salvadoran Civil War. The government, with significant military aid from the U.S., waged bloody war against the Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional (FMLN), a coalition of left-wing organizations.
The administrations of presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were willing to send arms to the Salvadoran government, munitions that would be turned on civilians and FMLN fighters alike, but they were not willing to take in people like Aguila Salinas who were caught in the crossfire. Salvadorans attempting to flee the violence did not qualify for asylum status in the U.S.
But now, more than 30 years later, Aguila Salinas teaches kindergarten at the Madrona Elementary School in SeaTac.
Her classroom is a riot of color, with vocabulary signs in English and Spanish, boxes and supplies bunched up against the wall as she prepares to move rooms.
“Sanctuary” is more than a term of art for Aguila Salinas — it may very well have saved her life.
She’s still an organizer, using her story to fight for the rights of immigrants and refugees, and to push cities like Burien to adopt “welcoming” or “sanctuary” status, a promise that they will not use local resources to help the federal government in its mission to deport undocumented immigrants.
“Sanctuary” is more than a term of art for Aguila Salinas — it may very well have saved her life.
She and her husband were part of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, a network of religious institutions within faith communities that chose to break with the government and open their doors to provide shelter, food and support to individuals and families escaping the political violence in Central America who, due to immigration policies, had difficulty finding refuge in the U.S.
“We felt safe, they were helping us get jobs,” Aguila Salinas said. “If ICE came, we had allies to protect us.”
And, as in the 1980s and again in 2007, houses of worship across the Seattle area and the country are preparing to do it again.
On May 1, while thousands marched in the streets for worker and immigrant rights, members of Seattle’s faith communities gathered in St. Mark’s Cathedral to commit their time and space to support undocumented immigrants that have been targeted by the Donald Trump administration.
It was part of a statewide movement to protect people who were under assault and had little power or recourse, said Rev. Michael Ramos, executive director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle.
“We see a moral and spiritual duty to provide hospitality,” Ramos said. “To that end, we are used to walking with people who have experienced marginalization in different ways. To that extent, it does build on a tradition that we seek to live out every day in different ways.”
It’s an imperative shared by an increasing number of congregations, likely in reaction to the changing political climate surrounding deportations set forth by the new administration. The Immigrant and Refugee program with the Church World Service, a multi-faith organization with a social justice mission, is aware of roughly 400 congregations that had formally registered as “sanctuaries” prior to the 2016 presidential election, spokesperson Myrna Orozco Gallos said.
That number has doubled since the election, she said.
“People are fearing deportations and increased enforcement,” Orozco Gallos said. “Mostly [the Sanctuary Movement] comes around when there’s a need or talk of it. Some have been quietly doing it for years.”
“Quietly” because they and other faith communities have no formal protections that keep undocumented folks secure, despite the history of churches stepping in to care for the most vulnerable. Instead, their work depends on ice and other arms of the federal government respecting a longstanding tradition to leave certain spaces like churches and schools alone in an administration that has shown little respect for such norms.
So you want to have sanctuary?
On July 4, 1984, Aguila Salinas and her husband entered University Friends church in Seattle. It would be their home for the next two years.
The journey was a whirlwind. The Quakers helped the couple get across the U.S.-Mexico border and then the couple spent the next few days caravanning up the coast, stopping in every church that would welcome them. They shared their story and spread the word about the dictatorship and violence that the federal government was supporting in El Salvador.
They’d made the decision to go to the U.S. because they didn’t have the correct papers to work in Mexico City, where Aguila Salinas spent 18 months waiting for her husband to be freed, and the family couldn’t afford to live without employment.
Their work options were not much better in the north, but the dependency of the American agricultural sector on cheap, undocumented labor meant that they would have some opportunities. In the end, it was that same dependency that would earn workers like them a path to citizenship with the passage of Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
University Friends was one of only a handful of churches in Seattle at that time that took in families during the 1980s Sanctuary Movement. That could be because of the danger involved, and the risk of stepping out first amid a new movement. There are also more mundane considerations.
Becoming a “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants is a serious undertaking.
Groups that choose to take in individuals or families provide not just space but everything necessary for life in an open-ended commitment that lasts as long as the threat.
Aguila Salinas and her husband spent two years at University Friends before a lucky confluence of events put them on the path to citizenship and ultimately the ability to come out of the shadows. During that time, the church provided everything the couple needed — food, space, protection, even access to educational materials and English lessons so that they could adapt to their new home.
To be totally secure, immigrants can’t leave their sanctuary, said Orozco Gallos. Even to walk outside puts them at risk, and the Trump administration has made clear that it supports its ice officers going to extreme lengths, such as waiting outside of courthouses and homeless shelters for people they suspect of being undocumented.
“It takes a big toll,” Orozco Gallos said.
Some stays last six months, others can be considerably longer. Churches must go through a discernment process with their congregations to decide what level of support they are willing to give.
The local faith community is focusing its efforts on four components, of which providing actual sanctuary is only the first, Ramos said.
The others involve organizing rapid response networks to respond to workplace raids or sweeps, accompanying those who have been detained by ice to hearings and meetings and standing up to protect targeted communities.
As the network builds, Ramos and others are reaching out to other cities, giving presentations and know-your-rights workshops in communities like Tacoma and Port Townsend.
“It’s all quite exciting,” Ramos said. “We’re still in the building phase.”
Such networks are springing up across the country, Orozco Gallos said, and much of the work that she’s focused on involves finding ways to keep churches connected and bringing hundreds of new congregations into the fold.
“We try to have them all talk to each other for fellowship and comfort, knowing there’s someone in their shoes right now and they’re not alone,” she said. “We offer opportunities for them to talk to one another [and] work with congregations that are thinking about becoming sanctuary churches and coalitions.”
Those coalitions can help ease the burden any single church faces. In Los Angeles, there are 130 churches that work together to provide sanctuary, Orozco Gallos said.
Treating symptoms
Ultimately, even if the Sanctuary Movement here in Seattle can shield people from the indiscriminate and destructive application of U.S. immigration enforcement, it can only treat the symptoms, not the cause: a structural unwillingness to take on the difficult work of immigration reform.
As advocates are quick to point out, the situation facing undocumented folks is not new, nor is it a question of having a Republican versus a Democratic president — deportations soared during Barack Obama’s eight years in office.
The current administration is simply taking existing laws and applying them indiscriminately, accompanied with harsh language that sparks massive fear, Ramos said.
“The dehumanizing rhetoric is being accompanied by oppressive policies, creating fear and apprehension in a generalized way we have not seen in this way in a long time,” Ramos said.
“The dehumanizing rhetoric is being accompanied by oppressive policies, creating fear and apprehension in a generalized way we have not seen in this way in a long time,” Ramos said.
Aguila Salinas believes that change can come, but only if documented people can understand what it means to live constantly unsafe and on the margins, and how it benefits society as a whole to let them in without reservation.
If they don’t, she’ll continue to see scenes like one that played out in her kindergarten classroom when a student asked her how she was feeling.
“Sad,” she told her student, before asking how they were.
“Yeah, me too, teacher,” the student told her, and Aguila Salinas asked why. “Teacher, mom says we have to start packing up our luggage.”
Ashley Archibald is a Staff Reporter covering local government, policy and equity. Have a story idea? She can be can reached at ashleya (at) realchangenews (dot) org. Twitter @AshleyA_RC
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