The birth of a sanctuary-city: a history of governmental sanctuary in San Francisco

Abstract

Across the United States in the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, religious congregants and order members of a variety of faiths decided to take firm action to help Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees enter the US and resettle their families in ‘public sanctuaries’ (Coutin 1993; Cunningham 1995, 1998). The congregants did this in defiance of US immigration authorities that had denied over 90 per cent of the asylum requests from Guatemalans and Salvadorans fleeing the violence of US-supported anti-communist military regimes (Bau 1985; Coutin 1993; Crittenden 1988). Sanctuary activists throughout the country claimed that the US federal government, by denying these claims for political reasons, was breaking international and domestic refugee law. As a result, some sanctuary activists stepped in to unofficially restore legal order by stationing volunteers in Mexican border towns as informal immigration agents to interview refugees and choose those whom they would help cross the border. Others throughout the country set up safe houses and publicised refugee testimonies to a national audience. The sanctuary movement’s hope was to pressure the US Department of State to end its active involvement in the Central American civil wars and also to pressure the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to stop deporting Central American refugees fleeing the violence. In San Francisco, California, a city farther from the border, the sanctuarymovement was less focused on helping refugees cross into the US and more focused on easing refugee transition to American life and organising local citizens to oppose US foreign and immigration policy (Perla and Bibler Coutin, Chapter 5 in this volume). San Francisco’s sanctuary movement also cultivated alliances with key officials in the municipal government, effectively incorporating them into the movement as sanctuary activists. The city government became a key ally of the movement, providing venues from which the movement could amplify the voices of refugees and counter the discourse and policing practices of the INS. Through the work of city officials and grassroots sanctuary leaders, the sanctuary movement infused the municipal government’s culture of tolerance towards immigrants with the sanctuary movement ethics of providing ‘support, protection, and advocacy’ (Catholic Social Services 1982: 6) for undocumented refugees. Informed by this ethical framework, the municipal government thenassembled a regulatory apparatus, a sanctuary-city, to manage and improve the precarious situation of undocumented Central American refugees. This effectively institutionalised sanctuary as a governmental strategy, an ‘art of government’ (Foucault 1991), for governing a mixed-status city population.1