On January 23, while the Inter-American Symposium on Sanctuary was taking place in the same city, John Fife, Jim Corbett, and Phil Willis-Conger were arraigned in Tucson, Arizona. They and 13 other sanctuary workers had been charged with 71 counts, including conspiracy and harboring and transporting "illegal aliens." Evidence against them included tapes surreptitiously recorded by informants planted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Their trial date is set for April 2.
Stacey Lynn Merkt was convicted of transporting refugees in May 1984 and given two years' probation. She went to trial again in February on similar charges.
John Fife is pastor of Southside United Presbyterian Church in Tucson. Jim Corbett is a retired rancher. Phil Willis-Conger is project director for the Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force for Central America. And Stacey Lynn Merkt works at Casa Romero, a hospitality house for Central American refugees in San Benito, Texas.
As participants in the sanctuary symposium, Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday had the privilege of meeting and conducting the following interview with the four indicted church workers the day after the arraignment in Tucson.
—The Editors
Sojourners: Could you talk about how your faith relates to the work you're doing, and particularly to your determination to continue doing the work in light of the threats you have received from the government?
Stacey Lynn Merkt: I think that I would start by saying that my faith is my work, and my work is my faith. I believe in the sanctity of life, and that has carried me through the last 10 years or so.
It started out when I lived at Koinonia [in Americus, Georgia]. That's when I learned about living in community and about the social issues that we need to look at as Christians and as responsible persons today. More than that, I learned about the nitty gritty of seeing Jesus reflected in the face of my brother and sister. That is the essence of what faith is to me.
For me to start responding to the cry of the people in Central America meant that I had to start living and working and touching these people. When I went to work at Casa Romero, these people became more than names and numbers and faces and events. They became Maria, and Jose, and I put living flesh onto statistics.
I just seek to be a person who lives what I believe and who lives what God has asked me to live. It's clear to me that God asks me to love. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And my neighbor is a world community of persons. That means I have to offer food to the person who's hungry, clothes to the person who has no clothes; I have to welcome the stranger in my midst, and I have to work for the day when those needs, when those deprivations, those injustices won't be. It's an outpouring of myself more than anything else. I believe that I am to love and in so doing, here I am.
Phil Willis-Conger: I grew up in a church that was real concerned about the social gospel and talked about social justice. My parents had been missionaries in Latin America. In growing up I gained some consciousness about some of the major social justice issues, such as racism and U.S. imperialism.
I have a definite sense of what is right and wrong, and I believe that comes out of the very core of me, which is God-centered. If there are people out there suffering, I can't ignore them. My upbringing won't allow me to just close my eyes to that.
I'm inspired by the words of people around me and the faith I see in the refugees, the hope that comes out of the incredible suffering and incredible hardship that these refugees are experiencing. They are Christ crucified, and yet the hope is still alive and still there. That keeps me going; that is an important part of my faith.
Sojourners: Jim, could you tell us how the sanctuary movement got started and how you got involved in it?
Jim Corbett: How it got started? You'll have to consult Exodus on that. It's very important to realize that the sanctuary movement is not something that someone, somewhere, suddenly invented. It has been around better than 3,000 years.
Those of us who are involved in the sanctuary movement have never, I think, really accurately anticipated what sanctuary would become when it was declared. It has been a process of discovery that doesn't seem to be over yet.
On May 4, 1981, a friend of mine was returning from Sonora [Mexico]. He had borrowed a van from me, and he picked up a hitchhiker in Nogales, Arizona, who was a Salvadoran, a refugee. At the road block just a little north of Nogales, this refugee was taken from him by the border patrol.
He returned the van that evening. Another friend was there, and we discussed what might happen to the Salvadoran refugee. I think the other friend may have been the one who had read an account of a planeload of Salvadoran deportees—deported from the United States—having been shot down right at the airport outside of San Salvador on arrival in December of 1980.
I'd been working prior to that with some semi-nomadic goat ranchers. I wasn't a Central America activist—I probably at that time could not have given the name of the bishop who had been murdered in El Salvador—but I had seen enough news that I knew that things were pretty bad, people were getting murdered. And that's where we left it that night.
But I woke up the next morning convinced that I really ought to find out where this guy was, what could be done for him. I was naive enough that the first thing I did was call the border patrol and then the INS and said, "You picked up a Salvadoran yesterday at a roadblock, and I want to find out whether there's anything I can do to help him." They said, "No, there's not, and you cannot even see unless you have his name and are an authorized legal representative."
Well, my name is the same as the name of a former mayor of Tucson, now a judge, a person who is politically prominent here. So I found the name of the top people in the INS and called and said, "This is Jim Corbett here in Tucson. You picked up a Salvadoran at the Madera Canyon roadblock yesterday. I need to know his name and where you have him." The guy looked it up and told me.
He was in the Santa Cruz County Jail. Father Ricardo Alfred was suggested as someone to contact. I asked him if something could be done, and he got me a G-28 form, which establishes legal representation.
I took the G-28 and went down to the Santa Cruz County Jail and managed to talk my way in to see the refugee. I discovered there were more refugees there, and they in turn told me about other refugees who had been picked up at the same time or that they knew about—relatives, and women who were being held in another place. One woman they had heard about was being held more or less in isolation to try to break her, in the women's part of the Santa Cruz County Jail. About 50 in all had been caught in the previous few days.
The first step I took was to get that one G-28 signed and get out and get some more G-28s for these folks, these other refugees I'd run into. I went back to the Santa Cruz County Jail, and they had me wait and wait and wait, and it was getting close to the time I needed to rush to get back to file these things in Tucson. And so I said, "Look, when can I see those guys that I asked you about 30 minutes ago?"
"Oh, the border patrol came and got them 30 or 40 minutes ago," they told me. "There's no way of telling where they've gone."
So then I had to start searching. I found one in south Tucson and the other one up in El Centro [refugee detention center in California]. I was starting to get an education about the border patrol and INS.
There was a Salvadoran with me [on a visit to El Centro] who had a little recorder, which I took from him. The recording would have indicated that they [INS] had systematically denied these people their legal rights. So they locked me in El Centro and said they wouldn't let me out if I didn't give up the tape. Eventually they called their supervisor, who apparently said, "You've got an American citizen in there. You better let him out."
By early June my wife and I had set up an apartment in our house where refugees could stay while they were doing their I-589s, their asylum applications. I got a call from one of the refugees, who by that time was in Phoenix, who said that she had some relatives who had turned up on the other side of the border who were in trouble and didn't know what to do, and could I do something? I didn't know what I could do, but I went down on the other side at midnight and found them hiding under a house. I didn't know how to smuggle, but I got them through the fence.
I went over to visit the priest in Nogales, who is now indicted. He said, "There are refugees being held in the Nogales-Sonora Penitentiary. I give the Mass every Thursday, but they're held in a holding tank separately, and they have an urgent need regularly to contact relatives in the United States, relatives back in El Salvador, and so forth. If there was someone who could go in with me while I give the Mass and talk to these folks ..."
So I was "Father Jaime" each Thursday. I'd go in and get letters to Central America and telephone numbers of relatives in Los Angeles. We distributed a sheet with my name and number on it, names of organizations giving legal services, and what their legal rights were if they got across the border in the United States. This evolved into an ongoing program. Phil inherited that.
Willis-Conger: The difference perhaps between some of our actions and those of other Americans is maybe only that we've been more persistent about it. It's all about responding to your neighbor, Christ in each one of us.
Corbett: The personal contact makes the difference. The first week after I learned about the refugee problem, I learned that there was a Salvadoran woman with a bullet in her, who was hiding out and who needed a doctor but was afraid to get help. She'd been shot in El Salvador just a couple of weeks before, and the bullet was still in her. I just started calling doctors to see who was willing to risk license, prison, and so forth in order to let us know what to do about this woman.
That's how it was all along. We didn't ever organize by running around and asking, "Will you become an active member of this secret organization?" When someone is in need, a lot of people respond.
Sojourners: How and why did you get involved in the sanctuary movement, John?
John Fife: I think that what Jim has suggested has been common to all our experience. Our encounter with refugees has been the point at which we had to make some decision about whether we would turn our back on this overwhelming need or whether we were going to meet that need. As soon as you begin that with one refugee, you begin to hear about others. As we started off, we didn't realize we were standing on the edge of a whirlpool that just drew us in as we began to see the life-and-death plight of the people of El Salvador and Guatemala.
That started for me when a professional coyote [smuggler] abandoned 25 or 26 Salvadorans in the desert west of here in the middle of the summer [of 1980]. Half of them died of dehydration in the desert, and the other half were picked up by the border patrol and brought to Tucson to be hospitalized. INS put a hold on them, so that as soon as they were released from the hospital, INS would put them in a detention center and start the deportation process.
Some immigration lawyers came to the churches and said, "We've been talking to these people, and they're terrified of being sent back to El Salvador. The churches need to help us."
At that point I couldn't have put El Salvador on a map. That encounter meant that I had to hear about death squads, and about churches being machine-gunned, and about priests being murdered. The real driver for me was the persecution of the church.
The only thing we could think to do was what I assume people of faith have always thought of first, and that is, "Let's pray." We said we'd start a prayer vigil for the people and the church of Central America, and we'd do it every week, and we'd invite our congregations and others to come and join us. That's been going on for four years now; every week we meet to pray for the people of Central America. That became a gathering place where people who had bumped into refugees, or immigration lawyers who encountered them in the detention centers, would come, and we'd talk about the latest need and how the churches could start helping.
That went on until somewhere around April or May of 1981. Then the government's policy in terms of treatment of refugees changed. As we encountered that hardening of policy, it became clear that we couldn't do the work as individual congregations any longer.
We pulled together a meeting of people who were at that prayer vigil from different churches. We formed a task force under the Tucson Ecumenical Council—65 Protestant and Roman Catholic churches—and said we're going to try to meet those needs. We entered into an agreement with a paralegal organization. The churches would raise money for bonds, try to meet the expenses of the paralegals, and they would do the work in the detention centers, filling out political asylum applications and filing I-589s.
The next step was to go to the regional detention center. We made an absolutely crazy decision at that point. I don't understand how rational people can sit down at a first meeting and say, "Okay, we're going to raise $35,000 in the next month, and $120,000 in collateral, and we're going to take a bunch of volunteers from Tucson and go over to California and bond out all the Salvadorans that need to be bonded out in one group a month from now." And we did it!
We raised that much money. Some people put up their homes as collateral. On one day we brought 140 Salvadorans and Guatemalans out of that detention center, and then said, "Now what do we do?"
We had this enormous social service responsibility to relocate people and get them in touch with families if they had any, and bring them to Tucson and Los Angeles and put them in the churches. It took about a month before everybody was settled.
The paralegals went back to the detention center, and the government had another 200 refugees. We obviously couldn't sustain that kind of effort or that kind of fund raising, so we put together a long-range plan. We set a policy in place that we'd try to raise enough money in collateral to bond out 10 people a week, those who had been in the detention center the longest. What we needed to do was give refugees who were under threat of deportation or in the detention center some sense of hope that if they held out, we'd get to them eventually. Hanging on in there was really tough, with the conditions in the detention centers and the harassment and coercion.
That effort continued for two years. And we've got somewhere around three-quarters of a million dollars—just the churches in Tucson—in collateral, in bonds. We've been expending somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000 in legal defense efforts. And that effort goes on. So if you hear from INS that what those church people ought to do is try to work within the law first, we did it. And we did it with as much energy and imagination and creativity as we could.
At that point everything I was doing was very Presbyterian. Presbyterians understand legalities. We live and die by a book of order and legal procedures in our institutional life. I was doing everything possible within the bounds that had been set by government and culture to serve refugees.
Then Corbett started talking to me about theology and ethics. He said, "If you're really serious and you really think God is calling you to serve the needs of refugees, then you're working at their needs on the wrong end. After they're captured and in detention centers, the process of deportation is inevitable. All you can do is buy time." And he was right.
"If you really think that God is calling you to serve the needs of refugees," he said, "then you must meet their most critical and apparent need, which is to avoid capture and inevitable deportation and death." He was already doing it, helping people cross the border safely, bringing them to his home. When I first went to Corbett's house, he had 21 people living in one room.
At any rate, Corbett says to me, "We've filled up our house. I've got other Quakers' houses filled up in town. Can I bring people to your church? You're already keeping Salvadorans that you've bonded out of detention centers in your church." And I said, "Yeah, but that's legal." And he said, "Yeah, I know; can I bring Salvadorans who are undocumented to your church?" I said, "Gee, Jim, I don't make the decisions around here, the elders of my church do. You'll have to ask them."
And we did. The elders and I sat down and spent about four hours discussing that question. I was real clear with them, "If the government catches us doing this, it's five years in prison for every refugee we bring in this church." They voted to do it.
Some of the refugees would come to worship on Sunday, and I'd introduce them to the congregation as we introduce all guests, and tell their story briefly, and say to the congregation, "Your government says that these people are illegal aliens. It is your civic duty when you know about their status to turn them in to INS. What do you think the faith requires of you?" We'd just leave that question hanging Sunday after Sunday.
The congregation would take people home after church for dinner, call me up later that afternoon and say, "People can't live in a church; that's not a decent place for this family to live. They're going to stay with us for a while."
By the time the next critical step came, I was driving some refugees from the border up, and so were other members of my congregation. Other church people were involved with that whole work that has since come to be called the "underground railroad."
But we were all a bunch of amateurs. My training is in Bible and theology, not smuggling and covert activities. We did all the things we saw on television that we thought we were supposed to do. We had codes and code words, and it never worked out. We got a telegram in code from Corbett in Mexico one time, sat down with a whole group of us, and couldn't figure out what he wanted us to do. It took us two hours.
We got a very clear and direct message from INS and the border patrol, delivered from an INS attorney to one of the paralegals who was working with us. It said, "Look, we know what Corbett and Fife are up to. You tell them to stop it, or we'll have to arrest them." We sat around my living room saying, "What do we do now?" I said, "I can see the headlines in the paper now—'Presbyterian minister indicted for smuggling illegal aliens.'"
We couldn't stop. We'd already made the decision when we got involved in that whole effort that the life-and-death needs of the refugees overrode any other set of risks that we might encounter here in the United States. The conclusion we came to is the only other option we have is to give public witness to what we're doing, what the plight of the refugees is, and the faith basis for our actions.
And then the question came, "Well, how do you do that?" Do you call a press conference and say, "Hey, we'd like to acknowledge that we've been smuggling people into this country for some time"? It didn't seem to make any sense.
Out of that discussion emerged the idea that what we're really doing is the ancient historic tradition of sanctuary in the church. We decided to publicly declare the church a sanctuary and publicly receive a refugee family into the sanctuary of the church. The only thing we could do was tell our story so that at least when they arrested us, they'd have to play on our turf. They would have to deal with the reasons why we did it. And the community and the church would have to deal with that too.
Then I left to make coffee, so they all decided that Southside Presbyterian Church ought to be the one to try it. But then we took about two months—December 1981 and January 1982—and we did Bible study, prayer, discussion, and agonizing over that two-month period. At a four-hour congregational meeting, we took a vote by secret ballot so nobody felt intimidated by anybody else. They voted to declare sanctuary. I think there were 59 affirmative votes, with two negative votes and four abstentions.
Somebody at the congregational meeting said, "Why don't we ask other churches to do it, too?" And I said, "That's a good idea! Great idea!" We wrote a bunch of letters to churches across the country and said, "We're going to publicly receive a family into the sanctuary of the church at worship, and we've decided to do that on March 24,1982. It's the anniversary of [Archbishop Oscar] Romero's assassination, and the attention of the church is going to be at least partially focused on Romero and Central America."
Four other congregations wrote back and said, "Yes, we'll do it on the same day." They were First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles; University Lutheran Chapel in San Francisco; Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C.; and an independent Bible Church in Long Island, New York.
Because we were public, more refugees knew there was a place where they could get help. So we were swamped at the border, and at the same time we were getting requests for information on sanctuary from all over the country. One of the groups that called was the Chicago Religious Task Force, and that relationship developed, and the movement took off.
In 1982 I went to Central America for the first time and got converted. That's the only way I can describe it. I discovered a new way of reading Scripture, of seeing the community of faith under enormous pressure and persecution respond with courage and hope.
The refugees began to tell us about the comunidades de base, about their experience in the church in El Salvador and Guatemala and the new spiritual vitality and strength that was being given to the people in Central America through their faith. My first sermon to the congregation when I came back was, "This may come as a shock to you, but I have been converted to the Christian faith since I last was with you."
I think that part of what the sanctuary movement means in North America is that there are covenant communities, congregations who are being converted to the Christian faith, to that spiritual reformation that is now being brought to North America from Latin America and other parts of the world. I now am convinced that there is a genuine reformation, and it's going to change our world as much as the 16th-century Reformation changed our world.
Sojourners: You are all under indictment. What are your reflections now?
Merkt: These days are showing us more clearly what it means to be a faithful person. I think we're all aware of what the cost is, but the reality of that becomes a little bit clearer as days go on. What I have learned from the people of Central America is that I believe in a God of love and of life and of faithfulness, and that means that I live each day, come what may.
I think so far as the sanctuary movement goes, everyone has been up front in saying that this [the indictments] can only strengthen and galvanize the response of everyone to meet the needs of the refugees both in El Salvador and here in the United States. I have also become aware that the "subversiveness" of the church that we have experienced through the eyes of the refugees from El Salvador has become more clearly what is happening here in the United States.
I also have been asked about the fears that one individually might have being in this seat. We as people of faith need to examine our fears in light of the stories of why the refugees come to us. If we don't take that small step and act regardless of our fears and regardless of whether or not we have courage, we'll never know what courage is. It is step by step and inch by inch that we struggle in our process to live out our faith.
In contrast to that word "fear," I try to look at hope. We are a community of people that God has mandated to act in a certain way—for the best interest of others and also to proclaim that we are a faithful people. Those are pretty powerful things.
Willis-Conger: For me it's been a deepening of faith and conviction. I know what's right, and I started in the right direction, and it's the faith that keeps me going down the road that I've already started on.
The way that the government is going about attacking the church and attacking the refugees, they're making it easier for people to understand—by the fact that they infiltrated a church and that they've deceived us as to how they would deal with us. I think it means that the church under persecution is going to respond, and it means a lot of organizing and educating. The religious community—including the Jewish faith and people of conscience who wouldn't even consider themselves religious—is going to respond, and is going to rise to the challenge. I see it happening already.
Corbett: We very quickly discovered in the process of declaring sanctuary that sanctuary is not a place, but that it's the protective community of a congregation of people with the persecuted. It has infinite dimensions.
What we're doing is called for in large measure by our place here on the border. There are all kinds of sanctuary congregations around the country who are discovering new dimensions of sanctuary outreach, of what is most appropriate for them in the way of entering into a protective community with the persecuted.
The sanctuary covenant group that formed in the [San Francisco] Bay area also on March 24 of 1982 instantly launched a program to maintain a protective presence in the refugee camps. The Seattle covenant groups are trying to establish congregation relationships with churches in El Salvador. The Madison [Wisconsin] covenant congregations have led in establishing protective outreach to the border, especially to the Rio Grande Valley. I think we can be pretty confident that sanctuary will continue to be so dynamic that we'll be uncertain at any given moment what it's going to become.
Sojourners: What will be your response in light of the infiltration and deception of the government?
Fife: The refugees have set the agenda; their needs have set our agenda continuously since 1981, and I suspect that the will continue to do that. Depending on what our government decides to do in Central America, depending on what the death squads decide to do in Central America, and depending on what immigration officials decide to do on the border and in Tucson—that will set our agenda and we'll just have to walk into it one day at a time. We struggle in the midst of those things that are out of our control to discover what it means to be faithful from day to day. I now understand that spiritually and emotionally.
I think the other thing we've discovered over the last three years is that we serve refugees more effectively the more we "testify to our faith" publicly. Clearly the government would like through intimidation and harassment, indictments, arrests—now through placing spies and agents inside church worship services and Bible study groups with wire taps and bugs—to drive us more and more into ourselves and our own little "trusted," close-knit organizations. I think we've got to resist all that. I think we've got to be more public in our testimony and in our witness to what our faith is and what we believe.
And I think—I've learned this from a couple of people at Sojourners whom I have just now met—we need to understand what resistance is these days. We have to be more and more creative in finding ways in which the church community can actively resist the evil that is so pervasive around us. Central America and Central American refugees are only one facet of the call to resistance at this point, and Sojourners has helped us to understand that calling.
Willis-Conger: My concept of sanctuary is not just resisting, but a forward-moving, positive kind of thing where we're going out and doing justice as a community. And the reason we've survived here in Tucson is because we've been able to take the initiative instead of just resisting what the government's doing.
Corbett: We're discovering that while as individuals every one of us can make that choice to resist, if we are going to make that choice to do justice, we have to come together in community—and sanctuary takes that step. It's not a step that allows us to avoid that decision between resistance and collaboration, but it's a further awareness—that as communities provide sanctuary, or enter into protective community with the persecuted, the poor, the marginalized of the world, it may result in our becoming "illegals" along with the refugees.
Fife: I think we've all grown in understanding that sanctuary is what God created this world to be. Reverend Marta Benavides [of El Salvador] first told me what we really need to do is work with them to make Central America a sanctuary for Central Americans. Nuclear freeze people have come to me and said what we really need to do is make this earth a sanctuary from nuclear armaments.
I think sanctuary is beginning to capture people's spirits and imaginations. It is the way the church community can really be a covenant community and a way we can understand ourselves and our faith and our role in this world. I'm looking for the whole community gathered to put our souls to work in discovering just what that symbol can mean and how it can explode in our consciousness and lead us into all kinds of creative pilgrimages.
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