Sanctuary Scoundrels

...This is not remarkable...

...The movement is spreading outward from the churches...

...Welcoming a Salvadoran family into sanctuary in Operation Push, he described the "concentration camps" in which the deportees were "awaiting deportation and certain death...

...Imperialism" is compelling to the sanctuary leadership, it is not enough to motivate the average churchgoer to defy the law...

...Conversion, they insist, is "unauthentic [sic] if it is content with halfhearted commitment or halfway reform...

...Yet this is precisely what is happening...

...vdhen a member of the torture class made fun of his accent, the American soldier _ \t/ iirr.shot him point blank...

...suport publick skools Honest Taxpayer Award TO KEEP a BEAR HOWITZERS Secure in his status as a former death squader, Hurtado said he had participated in killings, applied electric shocks, torn the skin off his victims, and even raped a woman on a public street...

...During this initial period, the refugees are supposed to be monitored around the clock...

...Seattle has one of the most active sanctuary movements in the country, and more than a hundred attorneys have offered their services, pro bono, to the movement...

...The grotesque disproportion between allegation and fact has not prevented the sanctuary movement from continuing to work upon the emotions of churchgoers...

...Golden and McConnell write that Americans need to develop "a revolutionary faith that The movement's organizers are troubled by the tendency of some churches to see sanctuary as simply a humanitarian effort...

...The National Council of Churches promptly posted most of his $50,000 bond...

...John O'Leary, who worked earlier with Vietnamese refugees, created an organization in Washington called New Exodus after discovering the ban that church and Central American solidarity groups had put on Nicaraguans...

...Not surprisingly the ACLU abandoned the study, claiming in 1985 congressional testimony that it had been undertaken simply to "raise questions" and create enough "doubts" to justify a suspension of deportations until a definitive study could be done...

...He told an interviewer that he would not become an American citizen because he would have to pay income taxes used for weapons for the anti-guerrilla Guatemalan government...

...It uses the asylum process only in unusual circumstances, such as when an individual in sanctuary, like Rene Hurtado, is taken into custody...

...In their book, for example, Golden and McConnell describe an unnamed Guatemalan sergeant in sanctuary in Ohio who also claimed to have learned the torturer's trade in military school from "U.S...

...Philip Willis-Conger of the'Rtcson Ecumenical Council's Task Force on Central America was arrested in 1984 after border police found him transporting four Salvadoran illegal immigrants...

...According to University Baptist's Donovan Cook: "From the midst of the politicized, secularized, assimilated church in North America, a new church is being resurrected—an `insurgent church.' " Golden and McConnell are similarly encouraged: "Liberation theology has walked over the border, incorporated into the exile refugee community...

...This realization has prompted the American Jewish Committee, the Center for Migration Studies, and the International Rescue Committee, although sympathetic to a more generous policy toward Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants, to label the confusion between refugee and foreign policy as among the most dangerous and discouraging trends in recent debate on the immigration issue...

...at a later hearing, also held before he entered sanctuary, he said he was on a guerrilla death list...

...How could we be most faithful to the Central American plea for solidarity—by stopping U.S...

...His unit, he reports, disposed of children under four by cutting off their heads, of those five and over by beatings (to save am-munition), and those twelve and over by torture...

...A majority of these refugees were Nicaraguans, a reflection of the shifting composition of the alien tide coming over the Mexican border...

...Take the case of Rene Hurtado, who described himself as a reformed Salvadoran death squad member...

...But no one should be misled by the tone—for them it is simply a matter of fact...

...As Michael 'Teitelbaum points out in Latin Migration North, Salvadorans earn in their own country only 5 percent of what they can expect to earn in the United States...

...But no one disputes that the Communist insurgency in El Salvador has made parts of the country dangerous: the claim of the sanctuary movement and the ACLU is that those who return are in special peril, singled out for torture and assassination...

...If Moscow tries to seal the border in the same way it holds the highways—a string of small outposts—it will have to send in at least500,000 troops...

...the sanctuary movement does not...

...intervention be the primary goal of the movement...

...Since most cannot prove they are individual targets of persecution they do not qualify for refugee status, a situation similar to that of the Salvadorans and Guatemalans...

...aggression or by saving a few more lives...

...Earlier the four-room shelter was considered over-crowded if it contained thirty people...

...soldiers...

...Adult sizes S, M, L, XL, XXL...

...Louis in 1939, thereby dooming most of them to death...

...A temporary problem arose when Rona Weitz, Amnesty International's Area Coordinator for Latin America, disclaimed the figures, saying "for the record, none of the facts or figures attributed to Amnesty International in the organizer's guide published by the Chicago Religious Task Force are accurate...

...for others mutilation...

...the United States, the great force for evil in the world, has "manufactured" the poverty of the south ("It had been imported and imposed upon them...

...Sister Garza told a Washington Post reporter: "The lawyers made it so clear that they would help some and not others that they made it difficult for us...

...This observation is usually made in a matter-of-fact manner...

...He complained also that the American people "do not concern themselves with liberty, justice, and respect for the individual...

...At this writing Chicago, Madison, St...

...For Jim Corbett, widely credited as the founder of the movement, "our message is simply that...

...callousness was probably nowhere dramatized more forcefully than in the refusal to accept the 907 passengers of the St...

...Our walk on the highway was also instructive about what it will take for the Soviets truly to win the war...

...But neither was it possible for the government to en-courage, by permanent inaction, the growth of a movement that flouts the law...

...In short, the sanctuary movement is in-tended to be profoundly subversive not only of our political and economic system but of our cultural values...

...To be sure, if such peace should come to El Salvador and Guatemala, one can be confident the sanctuary movement will show no more concern for subsequent migrants than they show for the large numbers now streaming from Nicaragua...

...Larsen did not like what had happened at Casa Romero: "The church has backed down and the place is run by Nicaraguans...

...It calls for a complete turning over of the self and the world—that is, revolution...

...Anti-Americanism and a romantic identification with Marxist guerrillas only partly explain the passion of sanctuary activists...

...Although the word mujahed literally means "one who undertakes a great effort," it is usually translated poetical-ly as "holy warrior...

...After the "Amnesty International figures" were discredited, the American Civil Liberties Union conducted a study which it hoped would serve as a substitute...

...What is different is that they have fled a "progressive" regime...

...The accompanying publicity is crucial, Rae/ Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...

...In a follow-up it noted the chief complaint of deportees has been the difficulty of finding work...

...But it has forced the ACLU and other movement spokesmen to shift ground...

...The interplay between the sanctuary leadership and the hard-core left does much to explain why political considerations tend to override humanitarian ones within the movement...

...A popular church is emerging in the United States mirroring the grassroots church that began in the wake of Vatican II in Latin America...

...Yet the INS director in Seattle told Holt Ruffin of the World Without War Council that in the last three years only two applications for political asylum by Salvadorans have been filed with his office...

...An exit poll conducted at the time of the last Salvadoran elections by the Spanish International Network found 67 percentof Salvadorans answering "yes" to the question, "Would you emigrate to the United States to work...

...Moscow might think that in international politics right and wrong are not decisive factors...

...The situation has clearly improved since then, for the numbers granted asylum have risen dramatically as death squad activity has declined sharply...

...At the head of the procession was a brown van, blaring marimba music and carrying Felipe and Elena Excot and their five children, illegal aliens from Guatemala...

...It began on March 24, 1982, the second anniversary of the assassination of El Salvador's Bishop Oscar Romero...

...Yet as Golden and McConnell point out, using funds for such purposes "means pouring into resettlement work finances that could go toward further organizing of conscientization effortstoward stopping the war...

...Her article on the Government Accountability Project appeared in the November 1985 American Spectator...

...Hurtado now had a problem...

...government succeeds in forcing him and his family to go back to certain death . . ." Are these charges in any way valid...

...We find that most Nicaraguans are really here because of the economic situation...

...The road from Ilopango Airport to San Salvador is known as the `road to death.' " The left-wing evangelical journal the Other Side is equally dire: "They return to near-certain persecution and death...

...Paul, Ithaca, Olympia, Duluth, Berkeley, Seattle, and Cambridge have declared themselves sanctuary cities...

...there are, which is why the State Department granted political asylum to several hundred Salvadorans last year...

...Consider also the transformation of Casa Romero, a Roman Catholic-sponsored shelter in San Benito, Texas...

...But it made clear to the familyin-sanctuary that it would not continue this type of rescue if other refugees made similar requests...

...In a series of press interviews with Minneapolis newspapers over several years, Hurtado portrayed his previous actions in a progressively more lurid light...

...The "return to death" themedominates the fund-raising efforts of the sanctuary movement...

...The sergeant himself pales compared with his uncle...

...After three years of operation, only twenty people in the sanctuary movement were indicted...

...The sanctuary movement's carefully screened refugees tell stories that, if true, should entitle most of them to status as political refugees under the existing system...

...In Seattle residents were told that declaring the city a sanctuary will not bring more refugees to it, will not make refugees eligible for any benefits, and will not bring federal penalties upon the city...

...As INS chief Alan Nelson pointed out, the government in 1984 arrested 18,000 "coyotes" (people who smuggle immigrants for profit) and 5,000 were sent to jail...

...But the chief practical consequence of these resolutions lies in the encouragement they give to would-be immigrants in Central America, where, according to the New York Times, word of these declarations has spread rapidly...

...For example, members of the Chicago Religious Task Force and the National Lawyers Guild combined forces to produce a legal handbook, Sanctuary and the Law: A Guide for Congregations, which looks forward to appeals to the United Nations (a favorite National Lawyers Guild ploy) to deter the U.S...

...On pulling into the monastery, Felipe Ex-cot told an Associated Press reporter that he felt "a duty to tell Americans how governments supported by their tax dollars force Christians in Central America to bury their Bible and hide their communion wafers...

...Similarly the Rev...

...and pacifying the countryside will require still more reinforcements...

...This caused some turmoil among church members when it was discovered that they were not married, an omission subsequently rectified...

...To the movement's leaders, sanctuary is ultimately a way to create revolution in this country: to raise the consciousness of the average church member, radicalize him, and prepare him to form base Christian communities on the Latin model, which will then lead to the overthrow of the established order...

...High Commission on Refugees sent a mission to monitor the processing of asylum claims of Salvadorans in California, Arizona, and Texas...

...Stung by the charges, the State Department conducted its own investigation...

...Stacey Merkt, one of the first sanctuary workers to be brought to trial for transporting aliens, describes her sense of "standing in the belly of the beast...

...The Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, led by its pastor, John Fife, publicly announced it would serve as a "sanctuary" for undocumented refugees...

...Felipe Excot, for example, the Guatemalan whom we encountered above, told a symposium of sanctuary activists meeting in Tucson last year that the people's oppressors in Guatemala "are in alliance also with wealthy families from the United States and also from Israel...

...Is Reagan Pharaoh...

...It has had no desire to follow the sanctuary leadership's script and, with TV cameras rolling, drag from a church, over the prostrate bodies of its parishioners, the members of a refugee family...

...In this literature one finds a cornucopia of radical cliches: Some are rich because others are poor...

...Himself a member of the National Lawyers Guild (the major U.S...

...While Nicaraguans are kept away from sanctuary churches, these church-es cannot wholly avoid other contradictions inherent in the movement...

...Why are we different?' " Jeff Larsen of Proyecto Libertad explained why they were different to the same reporter...

...Those selected for sanctuary are supposed to counter this tendency and often prove adept at it...

...by November 1985 it sheltered 205 refugees, including in almost equal numbers aliens who had eluded the border police and those who had been caught and were free on bond...

...In Seattle, sanctuary families have been greeted by the mayor while the chief of police assigned them a special escort...

...And Jesse Jackson is even more emphatic...

...The second is depth of conviction...

...His torture techniques, he said, were taught him in a month-long course by U.S...

...In a pattern typical of refugees in sanctuary, the couple, who gave their names as Ana and Federico, would wear bandanas over their faces at services, but walk in the street with their faces uncovered...

...But today's movement has other roots—mainly in the secular political organizations in "solidarity" with Central American guerrilla groups...

...in fact it does not care if it destroys the asylum system, if breaking it apart can serve to further its foreign policy goals.' And this is the second way that the sanctuary movement undermines political asylum—by using refugees as a tool to change foreign policy...

...Indeed, in his new application for asylum, Hurtado now claimed he had never been a member of a death squad and had never killed anyone...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...

...But if the figures had no basis in fact, they were nonetheless far too valuable to be abandoned...

...There is every indication that the government's major case in Tucson against eleven sanctuary workers (whose legal expenses are paid largely by the Presbyterian and Lutheran churches and the World Council of Churches) will have even worse results because of the extensive publicity focused on the government's use of paid informants...

...In Afghanistan, the Age of Faith never passed...

...This claim was first made in 1982 by the Chicago Religious Task Force in its organizer's manual, which cited an Amnesty International study 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 as evidence that as of August 1982, 30 percent of all refugees deported from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador had been "tortured, maimed, or murdered upon their return...

...Many of the congregations that have become sanctuaries first worked with refugees from Vietnam and saw helping Salvadorans and Guatemalans as an extension of their former activity...

...policies in Central America...

...Since individuals in sanctuary can have little doubt what the movement's leadership wants from them, it is inevitable that some beneficiaries of the movement have come to give their hosts an extra measure of what they desire...

...Although precise figures are difficult to discern, there are at present probably no more than 500 refugees in sanctuary in the U.S...

...JON CM NY SHOOT BE IMERAISB I HOLD THAT A LITTLE REBELLION NOW AND THEN IS A GOOD THING my wife -YES my dog -MAYBE my gun NEVER...

...Obscene Profits I EELIEVE IN SOCIAL SECURITY 'THE CHECK'S IN THE MAIL: POLITICAL PROMISES THE EASTER BUNNY ,-As .L.HEs Print and shirt colors are appropriate to designs...

...While the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and even the normally activist United States Catholic Conference have steered clear of the sanctuary movement, the Protestant mainline church organizations, ranging from the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church to the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, have lent official moral—and financial—support...

...Ana, Federico, and their young son Carlos played the Holy Family in the church's Christmaspageant...

...In May 1985, the Guild and the Center together filed suit on behalf of over seventy religious organizations seeking to end all deportations of Salvadorans and to block federal prosecution of sanctuary workers on the grounds that such prosecution violated their right to the free exercise of religious faith...

...And the refugee-in-sanctuary can indeed be kept busy...

...Gary MacEoin, one of the founders of the sanctuary movement, describes deportees returning to what is "for some, a mercifully quick bullet to the brain...

...After nine months of work the ACLU found only 113 "possible" matches among the names, and only twenty-five where in its own estimation there was better than an average chance that the match was accurate, i.e., one-third of 1 percent of the total...

...Ironically, some of the largest refugee flows of recent times have followed the "peace" imposed by Communist regimes in places like Vietnam and Cambodia...

...But justice is not irrelevant to the balance of power, for a just cause can create a powerful motivation to prevail, especially among troops who act more like warriors than soldiers...

...Rael Jean Isaac SANCTUARY SCOUNDRELS Movement politics in a humanitarian guise...

...Their themes are repeatedly emphasized in many of their writings: for example, in Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad, a new, Maryknoll-sponsored book by Renny Golden, a former nun, and Michael McConnell, a United Church of Christ minister, who together serve as chief "theologians" of the movement...

...virtue and hope are incarnated in Nicaragua, to which Golden and McConnell pay tribute: "We acknowledge the Nicaraguan people fighting for its life even now, and the church of the people, which has lived revolutionary hope in the midst of devastation...

...The record of the United States (as of most countries in the world) with respect to Jews in the Nazi period was a sorry one...

...And the Guild and the Center are involved in the case brought by the government against sanctuary activists in Tucson...

...In the words of the project's Suzanne Dorge: "We were caught on the horns of an ethical dilemma...

...the people of El Salvador and Guatemala are being tortured into resigning themselves to established pat-terns of subjugation—that is, to military rule of a wealthy elite that acts as the agent of U.S...

...Their importance obviously derives not from their numbers, but from the political use to which they can be put...

...By precipitating a broad church-state conflict with their claim to a religious exemption from immigration law, says Nichols, sanctuary leaders "guarantee reprisals rather than resolution, and the refugees will be the losers...

...The worst scenario from the government's point of view involves long trials ending in light punishment, which only create martyrs and deter nobody...

...It turned out that the source was Donovan Cook, the activist pastor of University Baptist Church in Seattle, who had used the figures in a sermon after someone mistakenly told him they came from Amnesty International...

...The charges were dropped after the judge ruled that border police lacked a "well-founded suspicion" when they searched his car...

...The unity of all humankind depends upon turning the whole world upside down...

...This is not to say that there are no political refugees from El Salvador...

...Such hoopla is typical of a movement that calls itself, incongruously, the new underground railroad...

...In short, it was unable to make a single positive identification...

...On March 24, 1984, as the bells pealed, a caravan of twenty-eight cars pulled into the grounds of Weston Priory, a Benedictine monastery in the Green Mountains of Vermont...

...In their 1985 book Golden and McConnell say of those forced to return: "They know that their chances of survival, once they disembark at the air-port outside San Salvador or Guatemala City, are slim...

...The last several years have seen a rising wave of Nicaraguan immigrants, largely made up, like the Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigration, of young men unwilling to serve in the army and eager to find work...

...One of these soldiers was apparently quick to take offense...

...Actually, these resolutions are more of symbolic than practical importance...

...Paul, noted that in his first application for asylum, made before he entered sanctuary and after his first apprehension by the Immigration Service in 1982, Hurtado had written that he was on a Salvadoran government death list...

...Another Guatemalan in sanctuary, an army deserter, told the same conference that sanctuary was a symbol of solidarity with the people of Central America in the struggle against "U.S...

...The Riverside Church in New York City harbored a Guatemalan couple and their son for sixteen months in the building's tower, moving them only recently when the Immigration Service showed up to serve a summons requiring the couple to testify in Tucson at the trial of eleven sanctuary workers...

...It may well be that something similar will happen in the First World—and much sooner than we now expect...

...Frequently, for example, those taken into sanctuary seek to bring over other members of their family...

...Guinness, however, requires some authentication...

...One deportee had been killed by the guerrillas, apparently in a case of mistaken identity...

...As one of those present noted, the congregation then asked itself, "Is the U.S...

...Quite simply, to prevent his being identified and murdered in cold blood if the U.S...

...On hearing the story of one Salvadoran in sanctuary at a Seattle church, an impressed church member arose to say that he was reminded of the people of Israel: the refugees had left Egypt (El Salvador), wandered through the wilderness (other countries), and finally reached the promised land (the U.S...

...Leaders of the movement make no secret of their hopes that a government crackdown could make members of sanctuary churches develop the desired "sense of oppression...

...In Latin America this process was greatly accelerated 1 LIBER—TEES o A collection of somewhat outrageous T-shirts All designs copyrighted by B.M.G...

...WE MAKE MONEY THE OLD FASHIONED WAY WE STEAL IT...

...But guilt over our failure in 1939 does not require us to equate deporting a Salvadoran today with sending a Jew to Auschwitz...

...Arguing that Congress should grant extended voluntary departure to all Salvadorans and Guatemalans (i.e., suspend deportation until dangerous conditions cease to exist in their countries), the ACLU now asserts that even if a deported Salvadoran faces no dangers greater than a person who never left El Salvador, conditions there are such as to make it unconscionable to send people back...

...This is not to say that the sanctuary movement consists of religiously motivated humanitarians manipulated by left-wing secularists...

...The point of departure for a Soviet strategy is to control the Afghan-Pakistani border, thereby cutting resistance sup-ply routes...

...At a Presbyterian conference on sanctuary, the refugees in attendance formed their own work group to demand that stopping U.S...

...Luke's Presbyterian Church in suburban Minneapolis (and of whom, more shortly), related his story to more than 150 groups, ranging from union assemblies to meetings of the Fort Snelling Air Force Reserve, in places as far afield as Illinois and Oregon...

...Weston Priory was the destination of a week-long, 1700-mile journey to eight cities, in which the caravan had been met at each stop by TV cameras, reporters, and hundreds of church supporters...

...policy but "express a willingness to relate their experiences publicly on arrival in the United States...

...It being an article of faith that such people are in acute danger, requests like these should be considered matters of life or death...

...Prices listed below include postage and handling within the U.S.A...

...The movement's literature warns that young women have been frightened by vigorous romantic overtures from their wards...

...Moreover there have been, and probably still are, grounds for complaint in the way Salvadoran claims are treated...

...The uncle apparently disliked his in-laws, and offered the sergeant a chance for advancement if he would dispose of them by massacring the entire village they lived in...

...Graphics 125 Liberty St...

...The sanctuary movement promises an end to refugee flows from Central America if its policies are followed...

...Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, who are selected in Mexico after referral by groups in El Salvador and extensive interviews, must not only oppose U.S...

...Richard Shaull, who has attempted to create such communities in the U.S., writes: "Our own conclusion was that for middle-class persons in the First World, dealing with their own oppression will be a long and painful process...

...Some truly extraordinary tales have come to be told...

...Secure in his status as a former death squader, Hurtado said he had participated in killings, applied electric shocks, torn the skin off his victims, and even raped a woman on a public street...

...Typically, when the government finally took action, the movement cried that it had been "targeted...

...It also turned out that Hurtado's story after his arrest differed in crucial respects from his earlier testimony...

...But Federico was solid politically...

...The cooperation extends from organizing efforts to publications to legal support activities...

...For this a powerful emotional appeal is necessary, and activists have found it in the claim that church-goers who fail to declare sanctuary will be sending individuals back to torture and death...

...The cars were adorned with signs: "U.S...

...After the arrests last year of two directors and an assistant on charges of smuggling aliens, Bishop John Fitzpatrick appointed a new director, Sister Ninfa Garza...

...The Hurtado episode reveals how eager sanctuary activists are to believe in American evil-doing...

...Sentenced to 179 days in jail, Merkt appealed and never served a day...

...When it came to obtaining legal help, Casa Romero found that Proyecto Libertad, a legal group helping the area's sanctuary movement, wanted no part of the Nicaraguans...

...Some see the process as already under way...

...Faced with such a request, the Cincinnati Sanctuary Project decided to redouble its fundraising efforts so as to bring over the other members of the immigrant's family and continue organizing work against Reagan's Central America policy...

...And below a picture of a small child with a scarf tied over its face, the letter begins: "Why is this child wearing a mask...

...A day earlier the church threw down the gauntlet in a letter to then Attorney General William French Smith: "We are writing to inform you that Southside United Presbyterian Church will publicly violate the Immigration Nationality Act 274 (a...

...Elder spent 150 days in a half-way house...

...Indeed, as recently as March 1985, the Religious News Service was still reporting that "the proliferation of sanctuary church-es across the country has resulted, in part, from the announcement by Amnesty International . . . that up to 30 percent of Salvadorans who are deported disappear after their return...

...In other cases, refugees are not harbored in churches at all, but kept in homes of congregation members or placed immediately in apartments...

...The movement does not want to make the system work better...

...Not surprisingly Hurtado was in great demand as a speaker...

...For example, none of the eleven Reform synagogues that has declared itself a sanctuary has actually harbored a refugee...

...Afghan resistance forces have two advantages...

...The mechanics of sanctuary vary from church to church...

...The first is depth of defense Afghanistan is a large, rugged country...

...is "shipping them home to firing squads...

...The uniqueness of the sanctuary movement, write Golden and McConnell, is in providing a forum for the oppressed to call the Anglo church "to conversion...

...government with those of the Nazi regime...

...Out of Central America," "Stop the Guns to Central America," "This is a Freedom Train...

...Jim Corbett, for example, speaks of "the Pentagon's final solution to the Third World problem" and asserts: "Sad to confess, we Anglo-Americans seem to share some of the Third Reich's moral insensitivity to technocratically organized mass murder...

...El Salvador ranks fourth in the number of asylum claims granted...

...The Nicaraguans would ask, `What is wrong with us...

...Remarkably, sanctuary activists do not complain of U.S...

...New Exodus now gives help to Nicaraguans as well as Salvadorans and Guatemalans...

...Jack Elder and Stacey Merkt, both of whom had worked at Casa Romero in its activist period, were indicted and convicted but emerged basically triumphant...

...Embassy in San Salvador follow up on a random sample of 482 deportees...

...Now if the prospect of "victory to the people" and "an end to U.S...

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...Critics of the State Department study have made much of the fact that seventy-three returnees could not be interviewed because they lived in areas deemed dangerous as a result of guerrilla activity...

...As the Post reporter observed, Larsen sounded just like the lawyers for the INS describing Salvadorans and Guatemalans...

...UnforIn Seattle, sanctuary families have been greeted by the mayor while the chief of police assigned them a special escort...

...Green Berets...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 21 tunately, his tale of torture lessons given by the Green Berets caught the eye of General John Vessey, then chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose subsequent investigation led to Hurtado's arrest by the Immigration Service in February 1985, as he attended an adult education class...

...A lot of people in this office would be upset taking their cases...

...Nowhere are the sanctuary movement's real priorities more apparent than in the double standard it applies to Nicaraguans who appeal to it for help...

...By last winter approximately 250 churches and twelve synagogues had declared themselves "sanctuaries...

...Robert McAfee Brown has declared flatly that the U.S...

...The movement's cynicism is also revealed by the way in which it draws the analogy to refugees from Nazi Germany, an analogy incidentally responsible for much of Jewish support for the movement...

...Of these, 145 could not be reached because they had given fictional or incomplete addresses, and thirty-nine (according to relatives) had returned to the United States...

...government should it crack down on churches in the movement...

...However remote the sanctuary movement's prospects for "turning the whole world upside down," even short-term victories by the movement may have profound consequences—particularly for a humane immigration policy, because the movement makes the category of political refugees meaningless...

...The refugee countered: "Far from feeling I have left Egypt, I feel I have come to Egypt...

...many more have such declarations in the pipeline...

...As Golden and McConnell put it: "Sanctuary, at its best, has not been a place to hide in, but a platform to speak out from...

...To a considerable ex-tent the National Lawyers Guild, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a "public interest" law firm created by guild activists, have served as the legal arm of the sanctuary movement...

...for while officially its goal is purely humanitarian, the real goal of the movement is to achieve guerrilla victories in Central America and to bring the "revolution" home—to the United States...

...In confronting churches ostensibly engaged in a humanitarian crusade, the U.S...

...The Geneva-based Inter-government Committee for Migration, which since the end of 1984 has met all deportees upon their arrival, has found no cases of human rights violations of deportees...

...commitment in Vietnam, his military advisers told him it would take 700,000 to one million troops and seven years to do the job...

...A letter sent to 1.3 million people uses, as its banner head, the lines: "Shall the guest in our house be sent away to certain death...

...The refugees generally come from Mexico via Tucson through the efforts of the Tucson Ecumenical Council...

...affiliateof the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, an international Soviet front), O'Leary says the guild leadership told him that "it was not politically correct to criticize the Sandinista government, because it would damage [the Sandinistas'] credibility...

...It compared the names of 8,500 deportees with a list of 22,000 victims of human rights violations...

...David Beebe, deputy director for the INS in St...

...The Chicago Religious Task Force asks that the church keep on the premises for at least two weeks the refugee or refugee family assigned to it...

...His new attorney denied there were any contradictions and argued that newspaper interviews had seriously misrepresented what Hurtado had said...

...The sergeant's uncle also boasted that he had killed 3,500 people single-handedly—which certainly qualifies him for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records...

...In practice, security problems are more apt to plague the guard...

...Refugee selection has been described by Rob Huesca, whose credentials as a former intern for the Nation magazine earned him a part in theprocess during his year's stay in Mexico...

...and Israeli imperialism...

...That is an apt characterization...

...More impressive than the relatively small number of participating churches (compared with the 339,000 churches in the U.S...

...No wonder that Golden and McConnell point to the importance refugee testimony has had in compelling "most sanctuary congregations into direct at-tempts at trying to stop United States intervention in Central America...

...government has been uncertain how to proceed...

...Egypt...

...indifference to suffering caused by the evil Nazi regime—rather they equate the activities of the U.S...

...Sometimes several churches (or church-es and a synagogue) take joint responsibility for the needs of a family housed elsewhere, making the declaration of sanctuary only symbolic, an assertion of moral virtue without risk...

...El Salvador has traditionally been second only to Mexico as a source of illegal immigrants to the United States, with 350,000 of the presently estimated 500,000 illegals having come before 1979, when the civil war began...

...The first way it does this is by refusing to accept a distinction between economic and political refugees...

...Given the selection process, it is not surprising that the Salvadorans and Guatemalans in sanctuary tend to speak a uniform rhetoric...

...The Chicago Religious Task Force has expressed its frustration: "What is the value of a sanctuary church that continues its support (by silence, by vote or by whatever) for U.S...

...It had the U.S...

...And for the sanctuary movement, this makes all the difference...

...Actually, the fictitious 30 percent figure is modest compared to some of the predictions made by sanctuary activists concerning the fate of the 500-1,000 people the INS returns each month to El Salvador and Guatemala...

...Conversion" is the key...

...The movement's organizers are thustroubled by the tendency of some churches to see sanctuary as simply a humanitarian effort, a form of refugee resettlement work...

...Of the close to 200 who were interviewed (or whose families were interviewed), none reported harassment upon their return...

...rape, and the drawn out agony of torture...

...To avoid deportation he had to apply for political asylum under the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980, which specifically excludes those who have persecuted others...

...Rene Hurtado, for example, a Salvadoran in sanctuary with St...

...In the past several years, we have seen how local communities have grown accustomed to forging their own independent foreign policy in accordance with the nuclear freeze movement (hundreds passed freeze resolutions or declared themselves "nuclear free zones...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 23 demands lifelong resistance to United States structural oppression, domestic and international...

...Only a handful of people were granted political asylum in 1980 and 1981 when the death squad activity was at its height...

...Allentown, PA 18102 %when repressive regimes began to persecute groups in which such awareness was growing...

...But the sanctuary movement does not test the asylum process for those taken into sanctuary...

...while linking itself to resistance traditions of the past...

...There they are wrongly construed to mean that if an immigrant can reach any one of these sanctuary cities, he is safe from the immigration authorities...

...Once at the cutting edge of the sanctuary movement, it has now become a genuine humanitarian shelter open to any immigrant...

...On the contrary, the religious leadership of the sanctuary movement shares the politics of the secular left...

...The mujahedeen tell all visiting journalists that because the Koran orders the faithful to "fight the invader" the Soviet Afghan war will continue as long as even one Russian is still in Afghanistan and one Afghan is still alive to fight him...

...In some cases, however, refugees are kept in churches for a much longer period...

...The question of whether to become a sanctuary is sometimes decided by a vote of the church membership as a whole, sometimes by a parish council or church (or synagogue) board...

...By 1985 he felt sufficiently secure from arrest by immigration authorities to have his own apartment and even his own listed number in the Minneapolis telephone book...

...domination...

...The Center for Constitutional Rights also served as counsel in a similar suit filed in January by the Presbyterian Church and the American Lutheran Church...

...A commission staff memo complained that INS practices were designed to secure the return of Salvadorans irrespective of the merits of their claims...

...For all the peripheral civic activity, churches remain at the heart of the 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 sanctuary movement...

...in fact, for a long time it had been singled out for immunity from prosecution...

...As Bruce Nichols of the Council on Religion and International Affairspoints out, in so doing the sanctuary movement undermines a "tradition of political pragmatism religious groups have evolved in working with the government on refugee questions" since World War II...

...This Guatemalan sergeant makes Hurtado sound like a Boy Scout...

...American organizers of the movement speak, if anything, an even harsher rhetoric...

...The reality of destruction, oppression, and injustice is so tightly and subtly woven into the fabric of our lives that we don't see it...

...has been the endorsement of church bureaucracies...

...It is worth recalling that when President Johnson was contemplating the major escalation of the U.S...

...Seeking simultaneously to satisfy activists and reassure ordinary citizens, politicians sometimes find themselves in the position of claiming that what they describe as a tremendously important humanitarian undertaking will, nevertheless, have no ramifications for the taxpayer...

...Once a church decides to become part of the movement, the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, the coordinating body of the sanctuary movement, usually undertakes the responsibility for "matching a church and a refugee, with the church, like a would-be adoptive couple, sometimes waiting for up to two years until an appropriate match is made...

...The refugee, for example, may be housed in a Sunday school room converted into a bedroom, while in an adjacent room someone is continuously on guard, providing companionship and security from the Immigration Service...

...In 1981, the U.N...