ASSAULT ON SANCTUARY

...I've talked with the Immigration Service and they have no interest in him," Rubio told Lundy, according to the minister's notes...

...With its social and financial ties, and with the strength of the church's balance sheet, the St...

...When I went to El Salvador to investigate his allegations, at the advice of the U.S...

...Army investigation...

...That's a blind policy...

...Rubio pushed for a personal session with Hurtado, and asked for particulars on Hurtado's unit and service record...

...Luke's managed to rescue Hurtado's family from El Salvador...

...Rene Hurtado was not impact level one, two, three, or even four...

...And his is the only case in which no action was taken against church members providing sanctuary...

...Hurtado is now free on bail and awaiting a hearing on his application for political asylum...

...Hurtado made little effort to hide...

...My job was to clear the Army's name," says Ismar Rubio, the Army Criminal Investigation Division agent picked to conduct the probe, "and I was going to do whatever necessary to do that...

...Rubio called Lundy and asked to visit the church...

...But they will be responsive to my requests...

...Upon hearing the news from Arizona, Hurtado left his apartment and went into hiding at the home of a member of the St...

...In a highly unusual move, Vessey personally launched an investigation of Hurtado and his allegations...

...Government...

...It's a learning process...

...They seem very interested...

...Hurtado and Lundy interpreted that statement as a threat to Hurtado...

...We may well use it...

...Lundy flew to El Salvador and made the arrangements personally...

...I wasn't really going to jeopardize his safety," he told me...

...Luke's stewardship committee was able to land an unsecured $32,000 loan from an area bank for the unconventional purpose of posting bond for a political refugee...

...This is no ordinary immigration case, and Hurtado is no ordinary refugee...

...Army, answered some of Rubio's questions but refused to meet him in person...

...chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...Their fears turned out to be warranted...

...Today, the sanctuary movement draws many of its activists from the mainstream...

...Coyle talked to everybody up to and including members of the White House staff," Beebe says...

...Luke's congregation...

...But Rubio denies it...

...Forty minutes later, when they arrived at INS headquarters in downtown St...

...Hurtado's charges came to the attention of such high-ranking Washington officials as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and eventually led to his arrest...

...collaboration with the Death Squads, the CIA acknowledged it had indeed trained members of the Salvadoran security forces in methods of interrogation...

...The rise of religious activism on Central America has brought a whole different group into direct confrontation with the Government...

...He said they told him that his case "hadn't been a priority before, but now the situation had changed and it had become more important...

...Most impressive of all, the sanctuary movement at St...

...People will ask you about it in casual conversation, over dinner, at bridge," he says...

...We have no intention of going to the church seeking him...

...Coyle, however, denies speaking with the White House...

...According to one member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated the charges of U.S...

...The orders "didn't come from here, they came from higher up," Hurtado recalls the agents saying...

...Allan Nairn, a free-lance writer in New York City, wrote "Behind the Death Squads" for the May 1984 issue of The Progressive...

...Paul, protesters were jamming the hallways and television cameras were rolling tape...

...Paul, initially took a hands-off approach...

...Luke's congregation was the Administration's crackdown on the sanctuary movement...

...Indeed, on February 3, Coyle was asked about Hurtado at a sanctuary debate in St...

...you see a lot of support...

...Democrat Gerry Sikorski and Republican Bill Frenzel, pressed the INS to grant Hurtado a hearing and refrain from disclosing his identity to the Salvadoran authorities...

...Beatings, electric shock, suffocation, and mutilation were routine Treasury Police practice, Hurtado said, and he provided detailed descriptions of the methods used...

...With limited resources, it's hard to get excited about another illegal alien," Coyle told the St...

...Hurtado that the Congressman has given him very costly advice," Rubio said...

...Lundy, however, says that Rubio directly threatened Hurtado with retaliation from the INS...

...The two Representatives whose districts straddle St...

...personnel gave an intelligence and interrogation course in 1980 that included instruction in some of these techniques...

...According to Coyle and Beebe, two of the local office's four agents planned and carried out the arrest on their own in response to an anonymous telephone call...

...After the arrest, "Mr...

...The INS had been aware of Hurtado from the moment he arrived in the Minneapolis area on December 12, 1982...

...That same day, in sweeps across the country, the INS apprehended about sixty Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had passed through the Tucson sanctuaries...

...predominantly moderate Republicans, many of them socially well-connected and active in civic affairs...

...Even if we didn't participate, it amounted to a tacit endorsement...

...The CIA in effect just averted its eyes and kept on supporting these guys with money, equipment, help in lots of areas...

...We operate by our official guidelines," says Beebe, "the Program Priorities for Internal Enforcement...

...Hommeyer says that despite Administration attempts to portray sanctuary activists as lawbreakers, community reaction to his involvement has been positive...

...For years, our policy has been to support a government no matter how bad, even a dictatorship, as long as it was anticom-munist and backed stability in the region...

...Ambassador, I did not talk to members of the Salvadoran military...

...The sanctuary members also brought their pleas to Washington, marshaling support from Democratic Senators Alan Cranston, Paul Simon, and Edward Kennedy, as well as Republicans Arlen Specter and Richard Lugar...

...Though not officially commenting on its strategy, the INS has indicated it might contest Hurtado's application by invoking a legal provision that bars asylum for those who have persecuted others...

...The church set up a telephone tree designed to reach—within thirty minutes—congregants, friends, the press, other sanctuary churches, all levels of the nationwide Presbyterian hierarchy, Congressional offices, and Central America peace groups...

...He granted interviews and spoke at more than 150 public forums ranging from union meetings and lodge functions to a session of the Fort Snelling Air Force Reserve...

...At the end of the meeting, Lundy recalls, Rubio casually handed him a Spanish language anthropology book, suggesting that Hurtado might enjoy reading it...

...Indeed, he took great pains not to cross paths with his district's most celebrated illegal alien...

...Luke's Presbyterian Church in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata...

...After Hurtado's arrest, the church's political network swung into action...

...Getting involved in the sanctuary movement and speaking with Rene has definitely raised the consciousness level here and gotten more people informed," says Chuck Hommeyer, an insurance executive and member of the Republican National Committee, who sits on the St...

...Paul and stated emphatically that the INS had no plans to take him into custody...

...Luke's sanctuary committee...

...INS headquarters in Washington—in consultation with the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House—began a series of investigations and prosecutions directed at the sanctuary movement...

...But the fact of the matter is that the Treasury Police and the army and the rest of the security forces were torturing all the time, and kept on doing it...

...training in torture...

...he said...

...In speeches to churches and civic groups, Hurtado gave first-hand accounts of brutality and assassinations by Salvadoran government forces...

...Lundy informed Rubio of this in a telephone call and, according to Lundy's notes of the conversation, Rubio responded sharply...

...Luke's, the Reverend Richard Lundy, called a press conference to introduce Hurtado to the community and announce the congregation's decision to declare sanctuary...

...And Hurtado received national attention for his account of U.S...

...I don't agree with that...

...The National Council of Churches, at the urging of the national Presbyterian hierarchy, put up the remainder of Hurtado's $50,000 bond...

...He was given sanctuary by the parishioners of St...

...Hurtado's arrest brought on just the sort of reaction Coyle had sought to avoid...

...personnel had trained the Treasury Police in "methods of physical and psychological torture...

...We had to know that...

...After Rubio's initial inquiries, the congregation consulted with a member of Congress, who suggested that for Hurtado's safety and that of his family (still in El Salvador), Hurtado should not cooperate with the U.S...

...The INS agents refuse to comment, referring all questions to director Coyle...

...By Beebe's account, the caller "basically said, 'I'm upset with the continued presence of this individual being sheltered by the St...

...In the state legislature, forty-eight Senators and forty-two members of the House signed the petition...

...Less than twenty-four hours later, Hurtado was in handcuffs and scheduled for imminent deportation...

...Luke's has a congregation of 400...

...A follow-up interview with Hurtado, published last July in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, drew the attention of another branch of the U.S...

...Hurtado's own revelations may thus be turned against him...

...The pastor of St...

...Immediately after Hurtado's arrest, Lundy and the sanctuary committee—without the knowledge of the rest of the congregation-began planning a legal and discreet exit from El Salvador for the thirteen members of Hurtado's immediate family...

...Paul Pioneer Press...

...The campaign culminated January 14 with the indictment in Tucson, Arizona, of sixteen sanctuary activists, including founder Jim Corbett (a Quaker rancher) and the Reverend John M. Fife, minister of Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church, the first to declare public sanctuary...

...Gerald Coyle, director of the INS district based in St...

...There were a lot of people who knew somebody who knew somebody," Nancy Berneking explains...

...A congregation member who worked in the state legislature circulated a petition asking for a stay of deportation and a hearing of Hurtado's case...

...I was really surprised that they arrested him," says Nancy Berneking of the St...

...Even as a clergyman," says Lundy, "I was smart enough not to let him [Hurtado] touch it...

...If they wanted to shut him up, this is not the way to do it...

...Luke's Presbyterian Church, and would like to see the Immigration Service do something about it.'" The agents, Beebe contends, then proceeded to arrest the district's most famous alien three days later without informing their superiors...

...In that story, Hurtado repeated his torture account, adding the charge that the trainers were members of the Green Berets...

...What's more, said Hurtado, U.S...

...In the face of the church's intense political pressure, the deportation was stayed and the hearing granted...

...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) came to the door of an adult education class in Hopkins, Minnesota, and led one of the students away in handcuffs...

...In the 1960s, those in the forefront of antiwar protest were political outsiders—blacks, youth, the radical Left, the counterculture...

...They say we were teaching the Salvadorans that there are other, more effective ways than torture to extract information," the Senator told me...

...Coyle told me he tried to avoid "creating an incident" with Hurtado...

...For five years, under his real name of Gonzalo Lara, Hurtado had moved near the inner circles of the Salvadoran military, first as an intelligence agent in the Treasury Police and later as chief bodyguard to a member of the October 1979 junta...

...Tell Mr...

...If I go again and talk to the military, we don't know who will be hurt, do we...

...He is the only sanctuary refugee to have been arrested alone—the others were taken in groups...

...Our policy is not to go searching for illegal aliens in churches...

...Luke's...

...The handcuffed student, a young Salvadoran going by the name of Rene Hur-tado, was told he would be deported in seventy-two hours...

...And the local chapter of Clergy and Laity Concerned helped organize a demonstration of between 800 and 1.000 protesters at the INS office the day after the arrest...

...Though the local INS office was anxious to avoid the controversy of arresting Hurtado, two developments were taking Hurtado's case out of the local setting and into the national arena...

...That same day, in a letter to then Attorney General William French Smith, the congregation formally notified the Justice Department (which oversees the INS) of its intention to harbor the undocumented immigrant...

...There's ten or twelve million other [illegals] running around the States...

...Lundy refused, but went to see Rubio in Bloomington...

...But unlike the daily seizures of less visible Salvadoran refugees, this one did not go unnoticed...

...Every utterance that he has ever made is germane," says Assistant District Director Beebe...

...Rene Hurtado would be a low-priority consideration for expending our limited human and fiscal resources...

...In Minneapolis, the Administration ran up against a campaign that epitomizes some of the sanctuary movement's most novel and powerful characteristics...

...That night, February 4, 1985, Hurtado attempted suicide in his cell...

...They shot themselves in the foot...

...Unsettling as the Army inquiries were, still more ominous for Hurtado and the St...

...The INS and area politicians were deluged with calls and letters...

...On July 25, Rubio flew to Blooming-ton, Minnesota, checked into a hotel, and called Hurtado at his apartment...

...After a fight with a superior officer, Hurtado deserted, eventually arriving in Minnesota in December 1982...

...There's no reason for us to go bothering people in churches...

...It sparked a confrontation between the Reagan Administration and an upper-middle-class, largely Republican parish capable of mobilizing political and financial resources to support Hurtado and the sanctuary principle...

...Before we returned it, we thought about making messages with our thumbprints...

...Luke's sanctuary committee...

...During the next twenty-six months...

...This caught the eye of General John Vessey, a Minnesotan and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...And in an interview with The Progressive, published in May 1984, Hurtado charged that U.S...

...Even in the context of the Administration's crackdown, the Hurtado arrest was unusual...

...Hurtado lived in an apartment off the church grounds, and he was listed in the Minneapolis telephone directory...

...Coyle and his assistant director, David Beebe, state to this day that they have no policy of moving against the sanctuary movement or against isolated individuals like Hurtado...

...Hurtado, rattled by the Spanish-speaking caller from the U.S...

...Three months later, when word finally came that the family had left El Salvador safely, Lundy informed the congregation and held a press conference at which Hurtado revealed his real name...

...At the local INS office, Director Coyle's position had not changed...