“An Act of Public Witness”: Sanctuary, Religious Spaces, and Immigration Activism in Midwestern Sanctuary Movements

This paper analyzes the growing association between movements for immigrant justice and religious organizations by examining the growth of the 1980s sanctuary movement in the U.S. Midwest and its connections to the resurgent New Sanctuary Movement of the twenty-first century. Sanctuary coalitions – interfaith, interracial, and interclass efforts to support undocumented immigrants and potential refugees – function as both humanitarian aid organizations and political movements in both their iterations. In the 1980s, religious organizations across different faith traditions, heeding a moral calling to welcome the stranger, joined together to open their doors as places of sanctuary for Central American refugees, often in defiance of federal immigration law. Congregations engaging in the movement grappled with contradicting obligations to moral calls of hospitality and legal constrictions on supporting undocumented asylee applicants, ultimately challenging people of faith to recognize their intrinsically political nature as social institutions. Historians have yet to explore the development of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s to better understand how transnational movements addressing refugee crises can serve as arenas in which religious and political concerns have often aligned and crossed in the post-World War Two era. By weaving the narratives of Latino immigration and faith into our understanding of the historical fabric of Midwestern communities, this larger project attends to the way racial-ethnic divisions created distinctions in the integration of immigrants into religious spaces while also tracing the congruencies between their incorporation experiences. A study of the sanctuary movement in its historical and contemporary manifestations unveils that expressions of interethnic and interracial community, though fluid and contingent, have the ability to cut across lines of difference defined by categories of nationality or immigration status.