During the first sanctuary movement, the feds used undercover informants to track immigrants
Many called them refugees, but Ronald Reagan disagreed
When Donald J. Trump won his bid for the White House, in part on an anti-immigrant platform that included the promise of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and the construction of a wall to separate the U.S. from Mexico, mayors of cities large and small across the country, determined to keep their status as so-called sanctuary cities, vowed to defy federal deportation actions.
Less than a week after Election Day, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, sought to comfort undocumented immigrant residents of the city. “To all those who are, after Tuesday’s election, very nervous and filled with anxiety, you are safe in Chicago,” he said. “Chicago has in the past been a sanctuary city. . . . It always will be a sanctuary city.”
However, on Wednesday, Trump checked that proclamation — and other similar statements by mayors of sanctuary cities — by issuing executive orders to begin planning construction of the wall and to speed the deportation of undocumented immigrants, as well as strip federal funding from the sanctuary cities that continue to protect them.
In New York, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that Trump lacks the “constitutional authority” to withhold the funding and that only Congress can make that change. And Mayor Bill de Blasio echoed that sentiment, saying that he would not “allow our police officers to be used as immigrant enforcement agents.”
With a growing list of cities making declarations of that order, there is a brewing complex power struggle very similar to the sanctuary movement during the Reagan administration.
In 1982, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, a frustrated federal government began an investigation of several faith-based sanctuary communities that provided shelter, medical care, financial assistance, and legal advice to refugees fleeing persecution from Central America — especially El Salvador and Guatemala, but also Nicaragua — after U.S. deportations directly led to the torture, executions, and disappearances of asylum-seekers. The movement originated in Arizona, but also had a strong presence in Southern California, Texas, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
As part of the investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched Operation Sojourner, a 10-month covert operation in which the federal agency began deploying paid informants as undercover agents to attend worship services and other church gatherings. While posing as committed sanctuary workers, the informants secretly recorded meetings and reported on how refugees were transported and sheltered.
In January 1985, the U.S. government indicted 16 people (later reduced to 12) primarily in Arizona and Texas, including three nuns, two priests, a minister, and lay volunteers, on 71 counts of conspiracy for transporting and concealing undocumented immigrants. The indictments were based on information — including approximately 100 covert tape recordings — gathered by at least two paid government informants who infiltrated the sanctuaries.
Ahead of what became known as the “Sanctuary Trials,” one defendant, Jack Elder, a Catholic sanctuary worker from Texas, argued that the Reagan administration had a moral responsibility to care for the refugees. “I am looking for a confrontation,” a defiant Elder said. “Not to be self-righteous about it, but there’s a moral force behind what we’re doing that has the potential to focus some light on foreign policy. . . .There’s a war going on in El Salvador now; there are bombing raids financed by the U.S. government. This is the issue people are fleeing from.”
Jim Corbett, a co-founder of the sanctuary movement in Arizona echoed the sentiment, saying the movement would only grow. “We decided to go public because we had all become aware that a full-scale holocaust was going on in Central America, and by keeping the operation clandestine we were doing exactly what the government wanted us to do—keeping it hidden, keeping the issue out of the public view,” he said.
The Reagan administration attempted to stifle the growing national support that had reached more than 500 congregations of all religious denominations by painting the movement as little more than radicals who oppose a single regional foreign policy of an otherwise popular presidency.
On NPR, Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and then assistant secretary for inter-American affairs under Reagan, said, “[T]he militant activists, are really just opposing American policy in El Salvador. I think they mislead many churchgoers . . . [into] thinking that there is some horrendous 1930s type situation and that if they don’t act thousands will die by the end of the week.” He added: “I’ve seen some of the material that is handed out by organizers to people in churches. It’s horrendously misleading stuff. It’s the kind of stuff that would lead any sensible person who reads it to jump into the sanctuary movement.”
But years earlier, leaders in the sanctuary movement had already anticipated that issue. Philip Wheaton, an Episcopal priest and director of the Ecumenical Program for Inter-American Communication and Action, told an early national gathering of sanctuary workers, that “The struggle is not against one man named Ronald Reagan but against an acquisitive economic system based on the law of gain . . . and the degradation of human beings. We struggle against a system whose ultimate concern is not refugees and not dictators and not democracies but the maintenance of an economic order in which we Americans consume most of the wealth of the resources of this planet.”
However, during pretrial hearings in Phoenix, U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll dismissed defense arguments based on the state of human rights in Central America, as well as claims that international law permitted sanctuary workers to disobey American immigration law. Carroll put severe limits on what the defense could enter as evidence and banned the words “death,” “kill,” and “torture.” He also required lawyers to use the word “alien” in place of the word “refugee.” At the same time, he was equally disturbed that the government utilized undercover agents to gather evidence, saying that sending “people paid to do it and wired to do it into places of religious activity” means “the whole process has been sullied in a sense.”
In May 1986, the jury convicted 8 of the defendants on trial of 18 counts. Carroll, however, sentenced them all to either probation or house arrest. While the trials did deter some sanctuary communities from continuing with their vigorous efforts, they also led to a change in U.S. policy after many Democrats in Congress pushed through a bill in 1990 granting temporary protected status (TPS) to Central Americans in need of safe haven. However, it was not until the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act that refugees could apply for permanent residence.
The federal government never publicly addressed the chilling surveillance of congregations. But James Brosnahan, a Sanctuary Trials defense lawyer, did.
Speaking to the National Catholic Reporter, he bemoaned the infiltration tactics, saying, “I would like to think of it as an aberration that will never happen again.”
