Dozens of people gathered Feb. 6 at Loyola University Chicago’s Corboy Law Center to learn about “Sacred Ground, Contested Space: The Sanctuary Movement Past and Present.”
The key, speakers said, is relationship. That includes relationships between those offering and those seeking “sanctuary,” broadly defined as a space where everyone’s human dignity is honored, and between and among those offering help and support.
“God is concerned with the affairs of our world. God is concerned with the oppressed and marginalized,” said Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, executive director of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership. “The most radical thing that we can do is connect and build relationships with one another.”
Okinczyc-Cruz spoke as part of the second panel at the event, which was hosted by Loyola’s Holistic Immigration Hub, which brings together experts from law, health care, education, public health and social work.
Loyola law school dean Michèle Alexandre welcomed the audience by reminding them of Loyola’s mission statement, which says the university is “a diverse community seeking God in all things and working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice and faith.”
“It is with that compass that we work to accompany those most in need,” Alexandre said. “We are living in tumultuous times. People may disagree on laws and policies pertaining to migration and immigration. I hope we can agree on the dignity of every human being.”
Jesuit Father Dan Hartnett, who ministered in Lima, Peru, for many years, returned to the Chicago area and he became pastor of Most Blessed Trinity Parish in Waukegan, which has a large Spanish-speaking population. He also pastored a parish in Cincinnati that sponsored immigrant families.
He learned, he said, that the gifts flow both ways.
“Solidarity has always been a two-way street,” he said. “Just as we benefit, bless and help the families that came in, they renewed the parish.”
Hartnett, who spoke on the first panel, addressed the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, saying it really began after members of the Salvadoran National Guard killed Maryknoll sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan on Dec. 2, 1980.
“Those deaths prompted a slew of actions in many cities,” said Hartnett, citing the Religious Task Force that was formed in Chicago, one of many organizations that were networked around the country. “The sanctuary movement wanted to criticize the fact that the women being killed in El Salvador was partly due to U.S. foreign policy.”
Katherine Kaufka Walts, a law professor and codirector of the immigration hub, moderated the panels.
Chicago, she said, has a long-standing tradition of sanctuary, of people working together across denominations and holding to the principle that “people should not be reduced to legal categories or political arguments.”
Claretian Father Byron Macias, codirector of the National Shrine of St. Jude at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, said that he believes the idea of sanctuary — of seeking safety, especially safety in a religious setting — is as old as humanity.
His own family left Ecuador when he was a teenager in the 1990s.
“My parents lost everything,” he said. “My dad said, ‘We have to do something. We have to leave. We can’t stay here.’ … I don’t think people want to leave a place just because they want to leave it.”
Sanctuary, though, is more than a place to stay.
“This idea of sanctuary is the affirmation of the sanctuary that each of us provides to one another,” Macias said. “That fundamental reality and right and privilege that we all have to be a safe space for someone else.”
People who need sanctuary must know they are loved and supported, he said.
“We have to deal with people having mental breakdowns because they are afraid,” he said, adding that in the current immigration enforcement environment, “the kids are already bearing these loads.”
Rabbi Rachel Weiss of the Jewish Reconstruction Congregation in Evanston said she first worked with Spanish-speaking migrants while studying at Grinnell College in Iowa, using her Spanish language skills to help an agency that worked with agricultural workers in nearby Marshalltown.
“The idea of migration is very normal in Judaism,” she said, going back to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and continuing with the Jewish diaspora.
“It says 36 times in the Torah, ‘You should not oppress the stranger, because you once were strangers,’” she said. “Our entire faith tradition is that we are a diasporic people.”
In every age, the key is relationship, Weiss said, listening and talking and getting to know people, both those who are vulnerable and those helping.
Hartnett said those who would help the vulnerable must not put themselves at the center; rather, they must see “from the outside in.”
“You realize there is a bigger world beyond your agenda,” he said. “That changes everything and it brings things together.”
Hartnett and Okinczyc-Cruz are among the plaintiffs in a suit filed by CSPL against Trump administration officials seeking access to provide pastoral care to people detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broadview.
“That suit is a legal claim that the government can’t determine when people pray and who they pray with,” said attorney Thomas W. Geoghegan, who was on the second panel with Okinczyc-Cruz.
The CSPL lawsuit came after a Eucharistic procession and a Mass held outside the center during which immigration officers refused to allow representatives to bring the Eucharist to detainees.
“We have reached a brick wall with a response to our message,” said Okinczyc-Cruz, also an adjunct at Loyola’s Institute of Pastoral Studies. “We brought 1,000 people, and our message was rejected. We brought 2,000 people, and our message was rejected. We could have brought Pope Leo himself to Chicago, to Broadview, and we still would have been denied.”
On. Feb. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman issued a preliminary injunction saying that DHS would have to allow a delegation of pastoral ministers to bring ashes and Communion to detainees on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 18.
To explain CSPL’s effectiveness, Okinczyc-Cruz gave the example of a woman who is not comfortable being out in front of cameras or speaking publicly, but has worked behind the scenes, organizing and encouraging people to participate. She was instrumental in bringing about 200 of the 1,000 people who attended the October Eucharistic procession.
“We recognize that not everyone is called to do everything,” Okinczyc-Cruz said. “It’s important to recognize what is yours to do and to do it well.”
The Jan. 24 killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse — “an act of martyrdom”— raised the question of whether health care professionals are obligated to take a public stance against current immigration enforcement tactics, said Mark Kuczewski, director of the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and professor of medical ethics at Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine.
For Kuczewski, the answer is that people should do what they are called to when it comes to protest. But they do have a responsibility to stay engaged with their professional organization so that they can influence those organizations to take positions that recognize the humanity of all their patients.
In past years, he said, hospitals focused on creating “front door” policies for how to handle situations in which immigration officers tried to gain access to patients.
That hasn’t happened, Kuczewski said. What has happened is immigration officers bringing patients to the hospitals because they have been injured while being apprehended.
That means that hospitals must review their policies for patients who arrive in custody, by, for example, setting a standard of privacy during medical exams.
“If we say very clearly, ‘This is the way we do things,’” many of them will comply,” Kuczewski said.
Kuczewski has also seen that hospitals and other institutions are more reluctant to publicly display information advising patients of their civil rights, he believes because they don’t want trouble with government authorities.
A group he works with has transitioned to printing wallet cards that medical practitioners can distribute directly to patients instead of flyers or pamphlets.
“Now it’s about the professionals,” he said. “The institutions aren’t really with us. They want to fly under the radar.”