Sanctuary: How an Ancient Idea Became a Modern Movement | Sergio González & Lloyd Barba | Sanctuary in America

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today. I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:14

What happens when the law conflicts with your moral convictions? For centuries, people have turned to sanctuary for protection. So, what is sanctuary and why does it still matter?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:26

My guests today are Sergio González, who is an associate professor of history at Marquette University, and Lloyd Barba, an associate professor of religion at Amherst College. They are the authors of Sanctuary in America: How Activists Defied the Government and Defended Immigrants and Why it Still Matters, published by Oxford University Press.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:48

Welcome, Sergio and Lloyd. I am so excited to have you here on the Clio Dialogues. Thank you for joining me.

Guest, Sergio González 0:54

Thanks for having us, Jennifer.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 0:56

Yeah, really excited about this. Thank you, Jennifer.

– What Is Sanctuary?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:58

You've written a book that addresses a controversial and often misunderstood topic. So I am glad that you're here to explain sanctuary and the history of it. And so let's just start with that term. When we talk about sanctuary, what exactly are we talking about?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 1:14

So by sanctuary, one really concise way to think about it is as a challenge to state power. Whether that challenge to state power is coming from religious congregations, sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, sanctuary campuses, there are manifold ways in which these different entities decide to challenge the power of the state, especially in its overreach, in deportation, in taking folks who these communities are convinced that they should not be deported. It comes from all sorts of sources. We could turn to the Bible, from which a lot of Jewish and Christian congregations excavated this idea of sanctuary to say we have cities of refuge in the book of Leviticus, in the book of Numbers. And that's what we should be looking to in our idea of how we treat a stranger or how we treat an immigrant. So that the ethos of hospitality is deeply embedded in scripture, along with this idea of refuge that's carried for centuries and millennia in the medieval period and in early into modernity.

Guest, Sergio González 2:04

Sanctuary can be thought of in a number of different ways. The challenge of state power that Lloyd has mentioned, but also the idea of sanctuary being a physical location, the house of worship in which a person goes to practice their faith, but also a place of respite, a place where they go when they need safe harbor. And the ethic of sanctuary as it was practiced in the 1980s and it continues to be practiced today is this idea that these are places where people can go when they're afraid of some sort of justice not being enacted, retribution in a way that is not right or just. In the context of immigration and immigration justice, the church, broadly defined, has functioned as this place where people can go and engage in religious fellowship, but also a place where they can find a place of safe harbor. The kind of extrapolation of that, the way in which that gets pushed forward, is to think about sanctuary as an ethic that can build a social movement where people can come together and to define individuals by their humanity and not by their economic utility and not by labels that define them as being illegally present in this country. It kind of offers this new idea of how a person can really exist within a community.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 3:05

When

– The Birth of the Modern Sanctuary Movement

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 3:06

and where did the sanctuary movement begin? Why did we need this movement?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 3:09

Well, it's one of those questions where it depends who you ask, right? As it pertains to undocumented immigrants, the popular story is that it begins in Tucson. So as there are Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants who are coming over the U.S. border, arriving is just in really bad shape. I mean, in this one case, someone arrives at a local immigration clinic and they have a bullet still lodged in them. So these are folks who are coming over in really bad shape. And the question is, why are they coming over in larger numbers as opposed to Mexicans? And the term used by the Border Patrol is OTMs, other than Mexicans. By March 24th, 1982, the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona declared sanctuary. Now, kind of a competing origin point is Church in Berkeley, so the University Lutheran Chapel on that same day, March 24th, 1982, in collaboration with Southside Presbyterian Church, also declared sanctuary. Publicly, the Lutheran Church in Berkeley had also declared sanctuary in 1971 for Vietnam War resistors by the same pastor, Gustav Schultz. So for the folks in Berkeley, they would say we're just reaffirming sanctuary, but those in Tucson are saying we're declaring sanctuary. And so there's multiple origin points, but I think the sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, the topic of our book, it's pretty clear that we're we're looking at the date of March 24th, 1982.

Guest, Sergio González 4:20

I think the important thing to add to that, drawing on Lloyd's distinction between the Vietnam era of the 1970s and what really occurs in the 1980s, that the point that maybe many people are familiar with, the idea of sanctuary beginning, is that sanctuary activists in the 70s, in the 80s today, are always drawing upon a very long lineage, a long history of this idea of sacred refuge. Lloyd talks about in his other research this idea of usable sacred histories, these ideas that people can draw from the past and other instances within their family traditions, their religious traditions, their social traditions, where they have offered this idea of safe harbor, whether that's in Scripture, whether that's in the Underground Railroad of the 19th century, whether that's the Vietnam War. And I think we see that manifested today as religious activists continue to draw upon this longer lineage of sacred refuge. And as Lloyd mentioned, this challenge to state power when they feel it's necessary for them to stand up for those who have been pushed to the margins of society.

– Central American Refugees and the Power of Testimonios

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 5:13

Interesting. I want to return to that idea of usable sacred histories. But first, can you address why these immigrants were not just granted refugee status by the US government in the 1980s?

Guest, Sergio González 5:26

This is the big rub that houses of worship and people of faith are engaging in. They encounter these individuals who arrive at the US-Mexico border. And by all intents and purposes, these are people who should qualify for asylum in the United States by the 1980 Refugee Act, by international law, by all these metrics that would say these are people who are fleeing, a sense of persecution in their home countries. If they are to be returned, they will probably face immense harm. And so it's the obligation of the United States to offer them political asylum. The major rubbing point, the big problem here, is that the US is actually funding the very military escapades that are killing these people in the first place. In the 1980s, in the name of stemming the flow of communism to the United States, the Reagan administration is funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into Guatemala and El Salvador, Nicaragua, and they are in many ways aiding and abetting that very civil strife that is forcing people to flee. And so the Reagan administration, instead of qualifying these people as political refugees, calls them economic migrants, which means that they are deportable the second they cross the US-Mexico border. And so churches, synagogues, people of faith recognize that they have an obligation to not only follow American law, international law, but as they see it, a higher moral calling to engage in this practice sanctuary. If the government won't offer them safe harbor, we will, is what they say.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 6:42

You write that the refugees' testimonios had a lot to do with that. What are testimonios and what was it that they were telling people that was convincing them to not only help these refugees, but to defy the federal government?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 6:55

I think it's quite clear that you don't get a sanctuary movement without the testimonios. In many cases, a church delegation, they're going down to refugee camps in places like Honduras, meeting refugees in even non-official refugee camps in southern Mexico, and they're hearing story after story of Guatemalan refugees about their villages. In many cases, there are indigenous Guatemalans about their villages being bombed, just horrific, unspeakable violence of bodies being blown apart, just sadistic evil towards people in the maiming of bodies and torture. And there's cases of Salvadorians as well who testified to the fact that police forces had taken them and tortured them to get information out of them. All because someone was suspected to be a communist or suspected to be, in other words, an enemy of some sort, right? To the Cold War agenda of Reagan and the hemisphere. And if you can fall into that kind of suspicion, there was very little limits as to what government forces would do to try to get you to give up information in this era of civil wars in Central America. And so the testimonios, they shared this with church folks, they shared this with people of faith. And it led them to believe that even if the government won't call these folks refugees, we're gonna do that. It's their testimonios, it's their moving stories. It's so clear that there's such widespread government violence in these countries that one refugee put it really clearly. She said, it was better to flee than to wait for death. And that for me really sums up why people were leaving. They're speaking against a government that has repressed them and against a government in the United States that is refusing to give them refugee status.

Guest, Sergio González 8:24

If we consider the impact of the testimony and the purpose of it, we have to imagine that there are Americans across the country, many of whom are completely unaware of what's happening in Central America, and most importantly, completely unaware of the complicity of their taxpayer dollars supporting the regimes that are making this violence possible. And so the purpose of this, both from the refugees and their North American supporters, is to try to incite a sort of moral battle within those people who are engaging with these stories. So you want to imagine that a Salvador and Guatemalan refugee is standing at the pulpit of a church and they're delivering these very moving stories. And the impact of this for the white middle class urbanite at a church who, before this day, has never even heard about El Salvador, doesn't even know where to place it on a map. And it incites what many of them refer to as a form of conversion experience. Their faith very much is transformed by thinking about not only that individual who sits in front of them, but what that must mean for the hundreds of thousands, millions of people back in Central America who continue to experience this pain.

– How Sanctuary Became a National Movement

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:23

Are there certain denominations that seem to be embracing this more in the 1980s?

Guest, Sergio González 9:29

This is truly an ecumenical and interfaith movement. I think one of the reasons it's so successful is that you can't really place its origins within a specific faith tradition. It expands across Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish people of faith who come together. They have the shared scriptural injunction to offer that form of radical hospitality, even if it puts them in the crosshairs of the federal government. There are, of course, prominent mainline Protestant organizations that take the lead in many ways. Catholics play a very important role, often more at the parish level. And then Jewish congregations are engaging in these traditions, of course, because they say it is our obligation as refugees, as people who can remember the Holocaust within our own lives and the instances of failed hospitality to engage in this form of radical welcome towards those who are arriving at the U.S. Mexico border. So one of the reasons to become so effective is because it stretches across these different faith traditions.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 10:19

You mentioned Tucson. You mentioned Berkeley. Where else were we seeing this happening in the country?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 10:24

By the end of 1982, that first year of sanctuary, you have your first churches in the Chicago area already joining the sanctuary effort year after year, from 1982 until the end of the 80s, you just see the number of sanctuary congregations steadily increasing. It seems to be primarily a phenomenon of Tucson, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area in that first year until then it reaches a Midwest, which we see as a critical juncture, because from there, it's really difficult to track what congregation is going to declare sanctuary next. And an important impetus for that is that denominational bodies will get behind supporting sanctuary. So you see this coming down from the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalists who say we support the congregations that want to do this sanctuary work. So it gets really tough to tease out where the next congregation will be declaring sanctuary. By 1984, there's one way up in the Green Mountains of Vermont. So people are actually going out to these far remote places for respite or refuge, as said who described it earlier.

Guest, Sergio González 11:20

And Chicago really is that important juncture point of the early 1980s because it's the home of an organization called the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, which begins as a Central American solidarity organization. They're religiously based, but they don't imagine sanctuary as their main focus. Very soon they realize it is the most effective way to deliver the message of why Americans need to care about Central America and pushing their legislators to stop the violence that's happening south of the border. And so the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America is made up of very committed activists who are coordinating the spreading of the movement across the country. They develop a how-to manual for those congregations that want to engage in sanctuary work. They call it a discernment packet. So you would imagine it's kind of a study pack. And of course, churches love to engage and study. And so it's this perfect way to kind of work through the problem, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it before arriving at that difficult decision. Are we going to join the movement and invite a person either to live with us or to join a congregation that's already engaged in sanctuary work? And so it seems at first like a spontaneous bursting of fires that's happening, but very quickly it becomes a loosely developed network that is being activated and nurtured by these activists who feel that this is, you know, very much within their moral conviction to do this work.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 12:33

And I should just add, that's the public side of it. So there's also the private network, you know, clandestine underground railroad type of network in which people are moving from safe houses. Some of these are houses of worship, some of them are homes of people of faith. That's the side that's difficult to document because it was never really intended for us to be able to grasp in full view.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 12:51

So this

– “Usable Sacred Histories” and a Higher Law

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 12:52

is not impulsive. This is with great care and thought and contemplation and really prayer on the part of a lot of people, whether they're going to take part in this. Let's go back to usable sacred histories. How did that help and influence the sanctuary movement?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 13:05

Certainly. So one of the things we argue is that sanctuary congregations tap into what I call usable sacred histories. They're usable histories in that people are taking the past and to say we are a continuation of those who provided refuge for Jewish refugees in World War II. We're continuation of those who provided refuge and safe houses for escaped enslaved people in the antebellum period. And we're continuation of sanctuary from the medieval period, the Hebrew Bible, et cetera, et cetera. So they're usable in that sense. And the fact that they're sacred, you have an infusion of not just a sacred history, but also scriptural injunctions. It really does give people more than just a motivation or justification. It says this is a God-given duty to do this kind of work. And we can stand upon the witness and the testimony of our forebearers who did this kind of work, even if it meant engaging in civil disobedience. And a last part, history, is that people believe that Christians in the early church period that they had these kind of surreptitious practices to keep the church going. And they understand that that's part of the DNA, is that sanctuary is a living tradition to carry up the scriptural injunctions of welcoming a stranger, of providing refuge for those who people's consciousness have told them are not criminals. They shouldn't suffer the ramifications of a vengeful state.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 14:15

So it sounds like people are saying that they are obeying a higher law than the law of the state.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 14:22

That is a great way to put it. That's pretty much verbatim, right Sergio? We're obeying a higher law or the law of God.

Guest, Sergio González 14:27

That's exactly. I think that's that's a huge part of it. The other thing we have to remember, it's perhaps maybe not so hard in 2026 to understand this because we're living it in a different way today. But in the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War period, these are church people who have to demonstrate that they're not those crazy radicals that are trying to engage in the most fringy types of political activity. They argue, no, no, no, this is within the DNA of the nation. And this is, of course, what social movements have had to do in American history since the beginning of the founding of the nation, which is to say we're engaging in this practice that should be familiar for all of us because we've done it in our past. And so at a time when the Reagan administration wants to posit these people as being communists, as being reds, as being supporters of an effort to overthrow the American government, they say, no, no, no, this is in fact what we are obligated to do because people in our nation's past have done this before, and it is part of what we are called to do, not only as people of faith, but also as Americans.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 15:20

So the

– The New Sanctuary Movement and Sanctuary Cities

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 15:21

sanctuary movement starts as a means of helping refugees who are fleeing violence from Central America, but the movement changes in the 21st century to what we might recognize more now. Talk about that change, maybe a little bit about how it happened and what is it today.

Guest, Sergio González 15:36

It's important to first note that the movement of the 1980s is extremely successful. It's a decade-long movement, and it culminates in the early 1990s with a series of court cases that forces the federal government to readjudicate these asylum cases that they had basically kicked off the books, and are also able to pass in 1990 a novel immigration status to help people who need safe harbor in this country, and that's called temporary protected status. That is the work of these sanctuary activists. The movement is basically dormant throughout the 1990s, and it's reborn again post 9-11 in a period when Americans are again turning toward a restrictionist idea of how they want to treat immigration policy. This is, of course, in light of the terrorist attacks, as the country is hunkering down into this fortress mentality, a direct connection between terrorism and immigration, and now undocumented individuals living in the country, and that number, of course, has risen to more to a more than 11 million people by the early 2000s. There are people who are caught in the crosshairs of the federal government. And so people of faith are again called as detentions and deportations are rising in the post-9-11 years to do this work again. But the major difference between the early 2000s, the period known as the New Sanctuary Movement, and the 1980s, the original sanctuary movement, is that now houses of worship are engaging in safe harbor with people who have perhaps lived in this country for an extended period of time. These are not necessarily people who are applying for political asylum. They're not refugees. Many of them are undocumented immigrants who have deeply embedded themselves into the communities they call home. They perhaps have had children, who were born in the United States. They are part of the fabric of this nation. And so the argument that the new sanctuary movement is making is that we have an obligation to help these individuals who exist in this country, who live in this country, as Americans in many ways, regardless of what their immigration status is. The thing that is consistent, of course, is that the house of worship remains as that place of sacred refuge for those individuals who fear the power of the state to detain and deport them.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 17:24

Where do sanctuary cities come from?

Guest, Sergio González 17:26

The secular variant, they grow up at the exact same time as the sanctuary movement begins in the 1980s. It's an effort to kind of move the sacred tradition into the secular space. And the idea is very much you have to think of it within the context of a social movement analysis, which is to say these are activists who are thinking what are the different pressure points by which we can meet our goal, which is to stop the violence in Central America and offer an opportunity for people to be safe in their home countries. And so the way they do that is they go to their city councils, their county boards, their state governments, and they say, you need to do everything you can to not become an arm of immigration enforcement. And so they will go to their city council and they say, we want you to pass a resolution that at a minimum says you support what we're doing as people of faith, but perhaps at the maximum says we will not check a person's immigration status when they're applying for local aid here at the city level. We're not going to use our police officers to help immigration enforcements to detain and deport individuals. And so we have these manifestations, city councils across the country in places like Madison and Chicago and Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin that are debating whether or not they're going to pass these policies. And they really do become a thorn in the side of the Reagan administration, oftentimes not so much in the practical material sense that they're doing a lot of work to stop the detention of people, but again, they're raising the profile of this movement and they're putting it on the agenda of most Americans. Today, I think many people are more familiar with the idea of a sanctuary city than they are with the sanctuary church, which is to say they've heard this idea of their city council members engaging with the exact same conversations. And I think most importantly, of everyday citizens who are going to their elected representatives and saying, if we're not going to enact comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, if we're not going to be able to stop this runaway detention machine that's happening in 2026, what can we do in our backyards and the places we call home to effectually provide some sort of, at a minimum, a wrench in the gears of the detention machine to make sure that we're doing something, with the idea that we're building political consciousness and hopefully working towards something bigger in

– Contemporary Criticism of the Sanctuary Movement

Guest, Sergio González 19:25

the future?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:25

Critics say that entering the country unauthorized, starting a family, having a life, living here for decades does not entitle people to the right to remain. How do people involved in the sanctuary movement address that?

Guest, Sergio González 19:39

I think at the heart of this conversation is a questioning of the very construction of what the law actually is. The law is socially constructed. It's something we kind of understand as being this resolute iron rule that we have to follow, but rules are made by the people who live within the system. And so in the 1980s, the question, of course, was always about what is the rule? How did we make it, and are we even living up to it? And today, Americans who engage in sanctuary activism, whether it's within their houses of worship or whether it's in sanctuary cities, are questioning the very substance of these rules that we've constructed. We live again in this post-9-11 world where immigrants have been created as a sort of vilified boogeyman. They exist in kind of this ephemeral state where they are the container for all things that are wrong in our country, whether it's economic, social, or cultural. People who engage in sanctuary activism say we need to step back and think about the laws that we've constructed. Why do they vilify this entire class of people who are oftentimes migrating for reasons that are completely out of their control? Why are we vilifying this class of people who have become integral members of our communities? Why do we hold up this civil status, this idea of being a documented immigrant, as the end-all-be-all way in which we judge whether a person deserves to live amongst us and be a member of our communities? And so I think what makes sanctuary so powerful, and specifically the intersection between immigration and faith justice, is to trouble the very boundaries that we think make up who is them and who is us, and to kind of force us to conceptualize a different way of thinking of political and social belonging amongst ourselves.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 21:11

And one of the persistent criticisms you get from New Sanctuary Moving Organizers is that the immigration system is broken. But back then they were saying it to suggest that the immigration laws as we have them now are broken and they're creating broken families. And what I find to be one of the most interesting moves is how they take this discourse or this big conversation about family, family values. And they say, shouldn't we care to keep people in the country, to keep families together? People who contributed to the communities, people who are paying taxes. So they leverage a lot of that logic of we have tax paying people, responsible citizens. This is exactly the kind of people that Sanctuary is bringing in, and Sanctuary is trying to lift up as examples of people who, if we were to have some comprehensive immigration reform, would directly infuse the economy, would directly in more legible ways benefit society.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 21:58

So one of the criticisms of sanctuary is that it shields people who are criminals, who should be deported. How do sanctuary jurisdictions deal with the question of who they protect?

Guest, Lloyd Barba 22:12

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, you can look to September 1st of this year and a Senate hearing titled Sanctuary Policies Tragic Consequences. These were critics who were brought in as opposed to mayors of sanctuary cities. But the idea has largely been to put out a narrative that sanctuary cities foster crime, that sanctuary cities are crime-ridden. If you were to look at the speeches that Trump delivered for his 2024 bid leading up to the election, it's hard to find a campaign rally where he's not targeting sanctuary cities. And so consider what sanctuary policies actually say, what's written in the sanctuary resolution versus how they're spoken about. Ron DeSantis in 2022, he arranged for the transportation of about 50 just recently arrived. I mean had just come over the border, Venezuelans from Texas, not even the state of Florida, from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. What he said in the interviews immediately thereafter was if leaders of sanctuary cities are so eager to bring in migrants, I'm gonna send them to you. They're gonna promise them hotels, Airbnbs, and jobs. This is a case where he's just flat out disinformation to make sanctuary something that it's not. So in this case, it was faith communities that mobilized quickly to provide some kind of temporary relief. So Martha's Vineyard is not a sanctuary city, it's not even a city. It's five towns. None of those are sanctuary jurisdictions. But that didn't matter because DeSantis was able to mobilize this idea of elite liberals living up the good life of Martha's Vineyard. They they want to be a sanctuary, which they're not, but they want to be a sanctuary. Well, let them deal with this problem. And so I'd be really careful how one reads what a sanctuary city is versus how it's portrayed.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 23:46

So that was really just a stunt.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 23:48

Completely a stunt. It was a dehumanizing stunt. People as political pawns. He was going about afterwards bragging about the stunt, and it was quite disconcerting to see that.

Guest, Sergio González 23:56

And the point I'll add, Jennifer, is as disconcerting as that stunt might be, it was extremely effective. I mean, this is a policy that DeSantis followed, that Governor Abbott followed out of Texas, and they used it all the way leading up to the 2024 Republican National Convention, which was held in my home city here in Milwaukee. That was the constant refrain about how effective these policies had been. And they were exactly right. And it's effective, I think, for one of two reasons. One, because it preys upon Americans' worst fears about the outsider who was coming in to take things that they believe is rightfully ours, but also because the opposing political party had not posited an alternative, a positive vision for what immigration policy should look like for our country. And so at a time of rapid flux, if we think back to 2022, 23, 24, when Americans are still in a state of disarray after the COVID-19 pandemic. And when they see what they believe to be a border crisis happening under the Biden administration, these political tactics to not only vilify immigrants, but also to vilify those people who want to help immigrants are really effective at getting a political side across the line and eventually into the White House.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 25:02

I mean, Jennifer, just think with this for a second, right? DeSantis, a Harvard law-trained attorney, did he really read sanctuary resolutions, sanctuary policy, and say, okay, this is what a sanctuary city is. Let me go find one. None of that happened, right? None of that happened. In fact, in in 2019, Florida became an anti-sanctuary state in a bill that was signed by DeSantis. So this sort of pathologizing sanctuary has been a longer plan really since Trump's first term. I mean, we can go back and we we do a little bit of that in the book, but a concerted effort is pretty clear from that point. So it's not what it's made out to be. And that's one of the reasons why we wrote this book is to give a clear understanding of what sanctuary is and what it's not.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 25:39

So the

– What Is Different About Sanctuary in the 21st Century?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 25:40

modern sanctuary movement emerged under the Reagan administration. You explained in the book it has resurgences at times when immigration crackdowns come along. I'm wondering, is what we're seeing now under the current administration a continuation of that? Or are we seeing something different?

Guest, Sergio González 25:57

It's a yes and answer to that, which is to say that there are, of course, threads that bind the story that we see today to 1980. Lloyd and I, as historians, we're always very averse to this idea of unprecedented times because, you know, we as historians can always find examples of at least similar instances. I think the thing that is extremely different right now, and this is how we end our book, is thinking not so much about the Trump administration, but to the question of sanctuary, to think about the status of people of faith and houses of worship in this country, and to think about whether or not they have the tools that they need to continue this long tradition of engaging of sacred refuge. And there are plenty of ways in which you could say that houses of worship and people of faith have been caught flat-footed, that because there are fewer people who are in church pews, that perhaps religion has a lower valence in our political climate in 2026 than it did in the 1980s, that perhaps the sanctuary movement has less purchase in our country today. But of course, we end our book by thinking about places like Minneapolis in late 2025 and early 2026, and to think about the role that people of faith played in offering a sort of rebuttal to Operation Metro Surge. And people of faith continued to play this very important role, not only being on the front lines, organizing, making sure that people of faith were there alongside everyday Minnesotans who were fighting back against these deportation raids, but also again offering a clear moral message on why Americans had an obligation to push back against any sort of language and any sort of ideology that vilified those who have been pushed to the margins of society. That again, a person's immigration status should not define their moral worth in this country. And so, despite there being different conditions today in 2026, there are clear ways in which people of faith continue to draw upon these longer paths to organize a different vision for this nation.

Guest, Lloyd Barba 27:40

We still see this pathology of sanctuary very clear in this discourse about sanctuary cities. So to follow up on what Sergio said about Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, the White House responded very clearly to the death of Alex Pretti in a message with the title "Minnesota Sanctuary Defiance Has Consequences". Trying to place the blame on the folks who were standing up for those who were in the crosshairs of Operation Metro Surge. I think we're still going to continue to see Sanctuary as a center point of debate about immigration, about immigration reform, about immigration restriction. Sanctuary is always right there in the middle of this conversation. And the better we understand it, I think the better we can understand people's criticisms of immigration and why people do staunchly stand for immigration reform.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 28:26

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