1980s · Refugee rights
The American Sanctuary Movement
In the 1980s churches across the United States sheltered refugees fleeing the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. Danny Sheehan and the Christic Institute helped defend Sanctuary workers in Texas who were prosecuted for that work.
Background
Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled violence in the early 1980s, but very few were granted political asylum in the United States. Churches and religious communities responded by offering sanctuary, and the federal government prosecuted some of the people who helped.
The Texas cases
In 1984 and 1985 federal prosecutors in the Rio Grande Valley charged Sanctuary workers Stacey Merkt and Jack Elder, who worked with Casa Oscar Romero, a refugee shelter run by the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, with transporting refugees. Danny and the Christic Institute helped defend the church workers. Merkt and Elder were convicted, and the cases became national symbols of the Sanctuary Movement.
Danny has described the defense as a challenge to what he called a secret Reagan administration policy of denying asylum to Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. The investigation into who was funding the wars the refugees were fleeing led directly into the Christic Institute’s next case, Avirgan v. Hull.
Watch Danny’s lectures on this case
- The American Sanctuary Movement case (May 22, 2012)
From his UCSC lecture series. All lectures.