The arrest of Elvira Arellano put the small but determined sanctuary movement back in the headlines. The fallout—and how its members hope to capitalize on the attention to put immigration reform back in play.
By Jennifer Ordoñez
Newsweek
It has been three and a half months since Juan “Santuario” stopped using his real last name and moved from the home he owns, the young daughters he loves and the business he runs to live in a cramped room on the second floor of a Lutheran church in North Hollywood, a suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles. Some weeks pass slowly—the 38-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala tries to keep busy reading the Bible, cleaning and doing odd jobs within the church’s gates. Other weeks, a steady stream of camera crews and reporters show up, eager to find out how he’s holding up in his self-imposed exile.
This has been one of the busy weeks. On Sunday, Elvira Arellano, an illegal immigrant who for the last year has been holed up in a Chicago church, was arrested and subsequently deported to her native Mexico after she traveled to Los Angeles to attend several speaking engagements. Like Arellano, Juan is one of 22 carefully chosen illegal immigrants living on the grounds of various churches as part of what’s being called the New Sanctuary Movement. It’s a group vetted by a team of lawyers working with the religious congregations involved in the movement, which range from Roman Catholic to Jewish to Mennonite.To be the face of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now living in the United States, as organizers call them, the small crew now in sanctuary have either overstayed their visas or never had one in the first place.
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