Foundations For The Future

JIM CORBETT started bringing Central American refugees into his home in 1981, after discovering that U.S. immigration officials regularly detained and deported them. Corbett shared his experiences with John Fife, and in 1982 the "underground railroad" became the public sanctuary movement. A Quaker and a Harvard-educated philosopher, Corbett was forced into early retirement from ranching by severe arthritis. —The Editors

Sojourners: What are your feelings about the trial?

Jim Corbett: The trial is thoroughly rigged. I don't think they could find another judge in the Ninth Circuit who would be as firmly against us and determined to gain a conviction at any cost as is Judge Earl Carroll. But even if we do get convicted this time, juries down the line will find out the truth.

The strategy that the government has had to rely on involves keeping the jury from discovering what is going on. The government has had to abandon all those tape recordings that were made and use as its star witness a person who is reporting on conversations in English that he admitted he couldn't understand very well. The government has done all that because it could not afford to let the jury discover what is happening. And I think that a strategy based on suppressing the truth is a flawed strategy.

What we're in the process of doing now is establishing a new tier of legal order, one that was mandated at the Nuremberg trials [of Nazi officials] but which has never been systematically established on any kind of institutional foundation. The institution in this case is the church, and the mandate is that communities and individuals are responsible for the defense of human rights, above all when their own government is violating human rights. Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor when the Nuremberg tribunals opened in 1945, emphasized that it's essential to hold ordinary citizens responsible for compliance with human rights and international law when their own government is in violation of those rights. As he pointed out, the only way states have of enforcing international law against one another, when you come right down to it, is through warfare. So if we're going to have a peacemaking expansion of the legal order to include an international legal order, we're going to have to rely on ordinary citizens in communities to do that.

There have been numerous occasions since Nuremberg when individuals have tried to appeal to the Nuremberg principles, but there hasn't been the institutional foundation to carry through on it. But now we have the church increasingly taking a position that is going to carry through and that isn't going to go away if the 11 of us are in prison.

So I'm very optimistic and very positive about what's happening in the court here. There's a great deal that's extremely negative about the fact that the judge and the prosecution have rigged the trial. There's a great deal that's negative about their having put infiltrators into the church and declared that any time the government wishes, it can take any kind of petty criminal and put that person into a confessional situation in the church and record what's going on.

But what it comes down to is that the very worst they can throw at us is probably going to prove to be inadequate. We can prove our point perhaps much faster simply because the trial is rigged and because the government has stooped to every kind of sleazy operation in order to try to make its case. So my perspective is that, whether or not we're convicted, we've started breaking needed ground. The foundations are being laid, and it's going to go ahead.

Is it true that the fact that this institutional foundation is being established by the churches rather than by isolated individuals is the reason the government has cracked down so hard?

It's certainly why the government sees the church as such an enormous threat now to many of its policies. The church is, in fact, capable of holding the government accountable for human rights violations in ways that individuals cannot begin to do.

The government likes to believe that it has the facts and the rest of us are uninformed and will follow like sheep. But if you want to know what's going on in a village in Central America, the State Department can't tell you. Go to the Maryknoll missionaries, to the church; go to the folks who have actually been there. The church has a strong foundation of information and communication.

It seems that through the indictments and the trial, the government wanted to put a big crack in that foundation. Has that happened?

I think that the foundation is very steadily building. The government wanted to intimidate people, but there hasn't been any intimidation at all. It has wanted to generate a public perception that this is a criminal activity. I think that very rapidly the public is recognizing that this is a civil initiative in which the people who are providing sanctuary are defending good laws which the U.S. government is violating, massively and systematically.

What are some of the results of the government's decision to prosecute you and the other defendants?

One of the really important developments has been the fact that many major cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities, and the state of New Mexico has been declared a sanctuary state. These declarations are crucial because they are coming at an important juncture. I would go so far as to say that in terms of what is currently happening in the United States with regard to refugees and U.S. intervention in Central America, the declaration of a border state as a state of sanctuary is far more relevant historically than whatever the verdict in the sanctuary trial is going to be.

Over the years we in the United States have developed a form of thoroughly systematized injustice connected with people whom we call "illegals." Now, this is something we thought we could live with as a society when they were Mexican undocumented workers, who were periodically caught and perhaps separated from their families, then just sent back to the other side of the fence.

But now we've had an influx of people whom we call "illegals" who are refugees running for their lives. This means that they are extremely fearful of being caught and deported. Not only are they subject to extreme violations of their rights if they are caught and deported, but anyone in this country can rape them, rob them, and otherwise deny them basic human rights. They really have no recourse, because what they have to fear if they are caught by the authorities is far greater than the injustice they are currently suffering.

This creates an underclass that fractures the foundations of society in exactly the same way that slavery and apartheid do. That is, a group of people exists that is below the law and can be mistreated and abused at will by those who are considered within the law.

Time and again we've seen this on the border. A whole class of people is below the law, because of this extreme terror that's mixed with the basic injustice of a system which treats them as "illegals." We're facing the decision point right now in our society, and I think that what's happening is that folks are deciding to defend human rights against the U.S. government's violations.

But at the same time we have Harold Ezell, western regional commissioner for the Immigration and Naturalization Service saying, according to a Time magazine report, something that's kind of a slogan in the Border Patrol: "When you catch illegals, don't just throw them back; clean 'em and fry 'em." Someone in San Diego told me that all of a sudden, they're finding Hispanics "accidentally" run over and killed along the border.

I think it's crucial that every level of government—city, county, state—take a stand. It's not a foreign policy issue. It's a question of whether that governmental unit will assert its integrity and its responsibility to protect all persons within its jurisdiction.

Where does the sanctuary movement need to be going now?

I think that we need to educate at every level. We have to be aware that the violation of Central Americans' human rights in the United States is integrally tied to the violations of Central Americans' basic rights in Central America. Just as Ezell is saying that we are going to handle the problems along a long border by means of police methods—turning our law enforcement patrols into goon squads attacking people and becoming their own courts and executioners—our military strategy in Central America is based on exactly the same approach to social problems, in which we try to use military methods to force docility and compliance. And of course this is what is creating the refugees.

Now, if we deal with the problem and maintain our integrity, even at the city level, we are also dealing with that larger problem. If refugees' rights are respected in the United States, there's no way that the United States can continue to follow a policy of military intervention based on pacification techniques designed to create refugees. If we put a stop to it right where we are, right here and now, we are going to find that the violation of human rights cannot be compartmentalized in this one part of the world. So it's especially urgent that we insist on the respect for Central American refugees' rights everywhere in the United States.

I think that we also need to continue to be extremely open about our practice of sanctuary. We should make a point of making the government well aware of the fact that we're continuing to aid refugees and even keep them informed of exactly what we're doing, so that they can be welcome to take us to trial again if they wish. We should not start operating as though we are a clandestine, criminal conspiracy. We are, in fact, the church in its broadest ecumenical sense of the term, and the church has to operate on the basis that volunteers who wish to help are freely incorporated into the process.

What has been the best thing about the trial experience for you and for the sanctuary movement?

For me, the discovery of the refugee situation has been a discovery of the church in its broadest sense. I didn't know any priests, or pastors, or nuns, or religious education secretaries, or anyone of that kind; Quakers tend not to know much about such things. The interaction from identifying the refugees' needs, trying to respond to them, and getting together and reflecting on how we best could do that has been a process of rapid growth for me that I had no way of anticipating.

I think that we also are seeing the sanctuary movement at this point beginning to fuse with broader peace and justice issues, in the sense of beginning to understand civil initiatives and what it means to establish a community that is ready to respond to violations of human rights. I think we're going to see a very rapid broadening and fusing of issues, and I think that's been accelerated by the government's attack on the church.

This interview is one in a series of interviews with sanctuary trial defendants conducted in Tucson by Vicki Kemper two weeks before the verdict.