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THE FUTURE OF SANCTUARY  
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Lloyd D. Barba and Sergio M. González
May 31, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ Sanctuary activists face new challenges under Trump’s second term
but their work has always entailed great personal risk. _

A protest in Chicago involving religious groups against U.S.
intervention in El Salvador in 1989 , Photo credit: Linda Hess
Miller/Wikimedia Commons // Dissent Magazine

 

In the summer of 1984, a caravan of vehicles full of religious
activists sped across the United States. Moving from Tucson to Los
Angeles to Denver and finally ending in Detroit, this self-styled
“Sanctuary Freedom Train” was transporting a Salvadoran family of
four that had fled their war-torn country and arrived in the United
States seeking political asylum. Raul and Valeria Gonzalez had escaped
with their two children after Raul, a teacher, had been arrested and
beaten by government soldiers and threatened with worse if he were to
continue his literacy work among the country’s poor. The Gonzalez
family found refuge in Detroit’s St. Rita’s Catholic Church, where
people of faith had pledged to offer sanctuary to migrants who had
been unduly denied asylum by the American government. Once settled in
his new temporary home, Raul became an organizer himself, inviting
congregations across the country to join a national movement for
migrant justice. As he noted a year after disembarking the Sanctuary
Freedom Train, “solidarity is doing whatever is needed to stop the
suffering of others.”

Over the last forty years, immigration and refugee justice activists
have adopted and adapted the practice of sanctuary as a form of
solidarity, sheltering undocumented individuals and families who have
exhausted all legal recourse to remain in this country. What began as
a faith-based movement has grown into an all-encompassing effort to
transform cities, schools, and other public spaces into locations free
from the specter of an ever-encroaching detention and deportation
apparatus. The municipalities that have declared themselves
“sanctuary cities”—a term first embraced by activists in cities
like San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1980s—have
adopted a number of different policies, the most important of which
are noncooperation agreements, which limit how authorities within a
given jurisdiction can work with federal immigration enforcement.
Whether it’s in a church pew or on a city street, advocates of
sanctuary have embraced a communal ethic of radical hospitality toward
those forced to the margins of society. Their work evokes the words of
Jim Corbett, a founder of the 1980s sanctuary movement: “Individuals
can resist injustice, but only in community can we do justice.”

The re-election of Donald Trump has presented a wave of new obstacles
for sanctuary activists. In just the first few weeks following his
inauguration, Trump moved to make good on campaign promises to make
life untenable for refugees, visa holders, and undocumented residents
alike, signing executive orders that declared a national crisis at the
U.S.–Mexico border, expanded the number of people who are
deportable, and constrained the country’s asylum laws. He’s found
ready allies among Republicans in Congress, who have taken up the
charge of rooting out sanctuary policies by calling the mayors of
Boston, Denver, New York City, and Chicago before the House Oversight
Committee in highly publicized hearings. Perhaps most troubling for
sanctuary advocates has been Trump’s rescinding of the “sensitive
locations” memo, an executive policy that discouraged immigration
agents from entering hospitals, schools, and houses of worship. Within
a week of the rescission, ICE agents appeared at a Latino Pentecostal
church outside of Atlanta, engaged the ankle monitor of the church
founder (who had an open asylum case), and arrested him as soon as he
stepped outside of the church. All of these moves seem to call into
question the very essence of the protection sanctuary has sought to
provide: that the church can serve as a steady and reliable xxxxxx
against what historian Adam Goodman has dubbed the “deportation
machine.”

What future does this long lineage of sacred resistance have in an
America marked by growing animosity toward undocumented residents?

The origins of sanctuary movements can be traced to the 1980s, when
the United States carried out proxy wars across Central America in an
effort to stem the tide of communism. The Reagan administration
provided funds, arms, and training to dictators who promised to quash
revolutionary efforts, and the results were devastating: millions of
civilians found themselves in the crosshairs of death squads and
secret police charged with ferreting out any subversive behavior.
Thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled the violence in their
countries, but the United States refused to recognize people displaced
by the conflicts as refugees.

Incensed by this abdication of not only U.S. and international human
rights law but also a higher law to extend welcome to the stranger,
congregations in border states like Arizona and California risked
federal prosecution by offering sanctuary to Central Americans
beginning in 1982. The initial declarations of sanctuary made public a
practice that people of faith had been carrying out privately in the
borderlands for years. Sanctuary organizers paired humanitarian aid to
asylum seekers fearing detention with a concerted political education
campaign, seeking to use their prophetic platform to educate Americans
about their country’s complicity in the devastation being wrought in
Central America. By the mid-1980s hundreds of houses of worship across
the country had joined what historian Kristina Shull has called “the
largest mass mobilization of civil disobedience against detention and
deportation in US history.”

The sanctuary movement drew upon a deep well of religious hospitality,
anchored in scripture and history. Participants cited a long lineage
of “cities of refuge” in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
and the presence of sanctuary churches in medieval Europe. They also
sought to take the practice of sanctuary out of the church pews and
into the streets by pushing their city councils to pass “sanctuary
city” ordinances. When San Francisco officials drafted a sanctuary
policy in 1985, the biblical allusion made it into the name: City of
Refuge. Many participants also saw themselves as continuing the
radical hospitality work of the nineteenth-century abolitionists who
created the Underground Railroad to assist enslaved people pursuing
liberty in the North. Sanctuary activists invoked these practices as
they developed their own forms of both covert and visible systems to
shield Central American refugees on their own flight to freedom.

These mobilizations drew the ire of the government. The FBI monitored
and infiltrated the movement and began arresting sanctuary activists.
This campaign culminated in the dramatic Sanctuary trial of 1985–86,
when the Department of Justice sued the movement’s leaders.
Ultimately, eight faith activists were convicted on charges of
smuggling undocumented migrants into the United States. But while the
Reagan administration may have won in court, the movement ultimately
claimed the larger victory. In 1990, faith and civic groups
successfully brought their own suit against the federal government and
forced a settlement that allowed all Salvadorans and Guatemalans in
the United States, including those who had seen their asylum cases
rejected, to reapply under a fairer system.

Sanctuary remained dormant until the 2000s, when people of faith again
turned to practices of sacred resistance to push back against a rising
number of deportations under the Bush and Obama administrations. It
was the 2016 election, however, that brought a dramatic upsurge in
faith-based migrant activism. Many of those who engaged in a renewed
form of sanctuary in the early Trump years were veterans of immigrant
justice struggles, having fought for comprehensive immigration reform
and humane border policies for decades. Between Trump’s election and
2018, the number of sanctuary churches and temples went from 400 to
more than 1,100. As people across the country sought to fashion places
of safe harbor for their immigrant neighbors, the movement spread to
secular spaces as well. Echoing the work of 1980s activists,
supporters of immigration and refugee justice pushed their city
councils and state governments to pass policies that restricted the
ability of local police to arrest residents for federal civil
immigration violations or to collaborate with ICE. By the spring of
2019, dozens of cities and counties and ten states had introduced
sanctuary policies. Similarly, college campuses witnessed a massive
surge of sanctuary organizing within a matter of weeks of Trump’s
first election. One petition tracker counted over 200 such petitions,
which were met with mixed success.

While Trump railed against sanctuary cities in his first term, calling
for Congress to ban them, faith activists took their message to a
national audience. In Denver, for example, Jeanette Vizguerra, who had
called this country home for decades despite lacking legal residency,
publicly declared her immigration status and took refuge in a church.
She criticized a hypocritical nation that benefited from her labor
while refusing to offer her citizenship. Vizguerra, who was named in
Time’s yearly list of the 100 most influential people in 2017, was
one of many immigrant leaders who had been forced to find safe harbor
in churches but who continued to fight for an immigration system that
would uphold the worth and human dignity of every person in the
country, regardless of their documentation status. She’s headed up
organizations such as Abolish ICE Denver, the Metro Denver Sanctuary
Coalition, and Sanctuary4All, and has supported numerous human and
immigrant rights organizations in the Denver area. (The risks
Vizguerra was taking by going public became clear after Trump’s
re-election. On March 17, she was detained by ICE on a deportation
order. Her lawyers argue she was targeted in retaliation for her
activism.)

According to Reverend Alison J. Harrington of Tucson’s Southside
Presbyterian Church, the birthplace of the 1980s movement, many
pastors experienced their “Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment” after
Trump’s first election. Referencing the German Lutheran pastor whose
resistance to the Nazi regime ultimately ended with his murder by the
state, Harrington noted that American houses of worship faced a
perilous moment when they had no choice but to “resist” and “say
no to the incoming regime.” Her comments echo those of the late
Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., the Presbyterian clergyman and
longtime pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church, who implored
his own congregation to join the 1980s migrant justice movement by
invoking the passivity of churches and people of faith during the
Holocaust. Americans, Coffin noted, needed to “realize what German
churches learned too late some forty years ago: It is not enough to
resist with confession, we must confess with resistance.” And for
nearly 500 congregations in the 1980s, the moment called for
resistance through sanctuary.

Since returning to office, Trump has once again targeted sanctuary
policies and practices in both religious and secular spaces. Along
with rescinding the sensitive locations memo, Trump has directed
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and
Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue civil and criminal charges
against leaders of sanctuary jurisdictions. His “border czar,” Tom
Homan, has sent a clear warning to sanctuary municipalities that he
won’t tolerate any resistance to his deportation plans: “Get the
hell out of the way. This is going to happen with or without you.”

Within houses of worship and in secular organizing spaces, the terrain
on which sanctuary activists are organizing today is undoubtedly more
unsteady than it was in 2016. Shifts in the American electorate might
lead many to believe that the appetite to challenge deportation raids
and concentration camps is shrinking. American attitudes surrounding
immigration have grown more conservative since the first Trump
administration.

Some state and local elected officials have read these polling numbers
as a sign that they should reframe how they talk about immigration
enforcement policies. Over the last few months, governors of many
liberal states have pledged to stand by their immigrant residents, and
cities like Los Angeles and Boston have reaffirmed their commitment
not to serve as auxiliary forces for Trump’s deportation schemes.
But not all sanctuary cities have remained as steadfast. In New York
City, home to the country’s largest undocumented population, Mayor
Eric Adams has suggested he is more than willing to walk back multiple
decades of sanctuary policies, especially if it allows him to curry
favor with Trump and avoid federal indictments. Other mayors have
argued that claiming the moniker of a “sanctuary city” puts them
at greater risk of ICE raids. As Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson
recently noted in denying that his city had sanctuary policies, “I
don’t want to put the city of Milwaukee in a position where we’re
being targeted by the Trump administration. I think that only serves
to heighten the anxieties that people already have in this
community.”

Congregations, meanwhile, find themselves in a decidedly different
position since the first Trump administration. Fewer Americans are
regularly attending weekly services since the COVID-19 pandemic, and
many houses of worship find themselves stretched thin and with less
capacity to attend to pressing social issues.

Beyond the question of attention and resources is the question of the
efficacy of sanctuary practices in a second Trump presidency. What
type of protection could a church actually offer a sanctuary seeker,
given ICE’s apparent willingness to push enforcement into houses of
worship? Church World Service (CWS), an ecumenical organization that
has helped coordinate sanctuary efforts in recent years, warned in
December that the revocation of the sensitive locations policy would,
along with jeopardizing the power of sanctuary, “create fear to
access even the most basic, life-sustaining needs, jeopardizing the
health and safety of our communities.” While religious organizations
have filed lawsuits alleging that this policy shift violates their
congregants’ religious freedom, a nationwide pause on these
potential church sweeps has not been forthcoming.

Would an undocumented resident even want to enter into sanctuary if
they knew it might mean living within the confines of a church for the
duration of Trump’s presidency? As he ramps up his zero-tolerance
policies and does away with prosecutorial discretion (an
administrative maneuver that has offered relief from deportation), a
house of worship might feel more like a prison than a place of safe
harbor.

Today, faith leaders who engaged in earlier sanctuary mobilizations
are quick to acknowledge all of these limitations. They note, however,
that sanctuary work has always been risky. It has always required a
steadfast dedication to challenging the state, especially when federal
police powers endanger a community’s most vulnerable. In the 1980s,
churches and synagogues that engaged in sanctuary activism did not
have the protection of a sensitive locations memo; in fact, while
there is a fear today of ICE agents potentially raiding a house of
worship, forty years ago activists faced infiltration by FBI agents
who broke into parish offices, sat in church pews, and covertly
recorded Bible study sessions as the federal government built a case
against movement leadership.

In the aftermath of Trump’s re-election, sanctuary organizers have
remained committed to living out the scriptural injunction to welcome
the stranger, even as they grapple with how they might need to adapt
their organizing tactics. Speaking with us just weeks after Trump’s
win, Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz, a co-founder of the New Sanctuary
Coalition, noted that “whenever there’s a law that diminishes
dignity, we have an obligation as Christians” to recognize the
“higher ground.” It’s a position, he says, that “demands that
we be conscious” and “fight against those dehumanizing forces, all
of those violent dynamics of the state against people.” Ruiz
remained unsure, however, what forms that fight might take, either in
religious or secular spaces.

During the Biden administration, the national network that nurtured
the movement became largely dormant as many fewer undocumented
residents had been forced to find refuge within houses of worship.
Nevertheless, Matthew 25/Mateo 25 co-founder and longtime sanctuary
organizer Reverend Alexia Salvatierra told us that smaller-scale
coalitions have remained active locally in cities throughout the
country, responding with new ways to offer radical hospitality.

Along the U.S.–Mexico border, for example, many former sanctuary
congregations shifted their work to assisting the growing number of
asylum seekers in the United States. Harrington described how
Southside Presbyterian had created a long-term shelter for
asylum-seeking women that provides mental health services to address
the trauma of migration. Similarly, at the national level, Reverend
Noel Anderson, who has coordinated sanctuary efforts for CWS over the
last several years, told us that his organization and many local
coalitions had “pivoted toward solidarity with asylum seekers” by
joining efforts like the Welcome With Dignity campaign, a national
effort to build a more humanitarian asylum system that centers
compassion and justice.

Trump’s re-election served as a stark reminder that earlier methods
of faith-based resistance might still be needed. From California and
Oregon to Pennsylvania and New York, congregations that had previously
offered safe harbor or had voiced support for the movement immediately
reaffirmed their commitment to sanctuary. At Lake Street Church in
Evanston, Illinois, Pastor Michael Woolf organized a coalition of
faith and community leaders, including Mayor Daniel Biss, to continue
their work. Woolf led an ecumenical service one week after Trump’s
inauguration to once again declare his church a sanctuary. And in an
effort to prepare for more public as well as private sanctuary
offerings, faith groups and denominations such as the United Church of
Christ have teamed up with legal organizations and clinics to provide
resources for congregations that find themselves in the
administration’s crosshairs.

While sanctuary has always been organized most effectively at the
local level, national faith leaders have also recognized that this
particular political moment represents an inflection point that
requires a coordinated response. On February 6, leaders from across
faith traditions issued a statement recommitting to “the work of the
Sanctuary Movement.” Signees reiterated their commitment to “a
moral vision to welcome immigrants and love of neighbors” and
pledged to “accompany immigrant communities through creating
networks of protection in houses of worship.”

What form those protections will take remains unclear. Were ICE agents
to arrive at the door of a church with a judicial warrant in hand,
prepared to force their way into a sanctuary to arrest an individual
declared unlawfully present in this country, would a congregation
stand in their way? Would pastors and lay workers be willing to risk
felony charges for their solidarity, just as sanctuary activists did
in the 1980s?

Facing federal prosecution in 1985, Sister Darlene Nicgorski, one of
the movement’s national coordinators, explained that she was doing
nothing more than engaging in “a conspiracy of love.” People of
faith, she promised, were in the fight “for the long haul,”
because “faithfulness is the virtue of our day—the faithfulness of
walking alongside, following, whatever the costs.” In this high tide
of xenophobia, sanctuary is one such form of faithfulness.

_[LLOYD D. BARBA is assistant professor of religion and core faculty
in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College._

_SERGIO M. GONZÁLEZ is assistant professor of history at Marquette
University._

_They are the co-hosts of the limited edition podcast
series Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State
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public fellows with the Public Religion Research Institute
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* sanctuary
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* sanctuary cities
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* Immigration
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* Immigrants
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* deportations
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* ICE
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* homeland security
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* DHS
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Stephen Miller
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* political asylum
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* asylum
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* refugees
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* immigration justice
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* religious activism
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* Religious Left
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* faith leaders
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