politics: sanctuaries and the 2008 election

(image by the Korean Resource Center via Flickr.)

Two weeks ago, Elvira Arellano, a 32-year-old single mother from Mexico, walked out of Our Lady Queen of Angels church in Los Angeles, stepped into a waiting car and drove off. Five blocks away, she was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

ICE had spent a year trying to arrest and deport Arellano for twice violating U.S. immigration laws. Not that Arellano had been hiding from the law – everyone, especially the media, knew exactly where she was for most of that year: inside Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago.

When Arellano took sanctuary in the Humboldt Park church last summer after failing to convince immigration officials that she should be allowed to stay in the United States with her eight year-old son (a natural-born U.S. citizen), she instantly made headlines. But there was nothing new about her – or the government's – predicament.

At least 500 years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Church law in the Old World provided sanctuary to both fugitives and debtors. Two thousand years earlier, the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament related God's instruction to Moses: "select for yourselves cities to be your cities of refuge that the manslayer who has killed any person unintentionally may flee there." While Arellano's offense was far less serious than manslaughter, violations of federal immigration law are probably more contentious today than they have been in over 20 years.

In the 1980s, immigration raids were common enough to show up in movies like Cheech Marin's comedy Born in East L.A.. Then, like now, churches and synagogues sought to invoke the ancient tradition of sanctuary to provide shelter to illegal immigrants, especially when these were considered to be refugees from Central American civil wars in which the U.S. government played no small role. Eventually, entire cities, from San Francisco to New York, extended a similarly quasi-legal protection to immigrants facing deportation.

But today's raids and the reborn sanctuary movement are happening in a very different political moment. During the 1988 presidential campaign, being "soft on crime" meant keeping serial rapists like Willie Horton locked up. Today, it could mean preventing single mothers like Elvira Arellano from working and residing in the U.S. with a fake Social Security card.

Republican presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney recently released a radio spot condemning sanctuary cities for being "magnets that encourage illegal immigration and undermine secure borders." Romney also blasted Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani for endorsing sanctuary policies during Giuliani's two terms as the Mayor of New York City. The sparring prompted another Republican hopeful, Congressman Tom Tancredo, who personally called for the deportation of an 18 year-old illegal immigrant with a 3.9 GPA, to claim that his competitors are "sounding like [him] when it comes to illegal immigration."

After two illegal immigrants were arrested as suspects in last month's brutal murders of three college students in Newark, New Jersey (a "sanctuary city"), would-be candidates Romney, Giuliani and Tancredo all associated the heinous crimes on the failures of immigration policy and singled out sanctuary cities, in particular.

A recent telephone survey by Rasmussen Reports found that 58% of the nation's voters "favor cutting off federal funds for 'sanctuary cities' that offer protection to illegal immigrants."