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| 131 5 Immigrant Rights Activism During a meeting of a small group of religious activists in attendance at a national conference on immigrant rights sponsored by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) the discussion centered on the emerging “New Sanctuary Movement.” During the gathering, Flor Crisóstomo, a young Mexican woman, stood up and spoke tearfully of her decision to enter sanctuary at Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. “I just want to be an instrument and send a message. Elvira [Arellano] left this movement in my hands. My children are fine— they’re with my mother in a free country. I ask you to open your churches to help parents who are like you—we are here out of necessity to care for our children.”1 Like millions of others, Flor had entered the United States without a legal visa so that she could find work to send money to her two daughters in Mexico. Flor’s work had provided the income to pay her daughters’ school tuition, books, and uniforms. She became the second person to enter sanctuary at Adalberto, a small, predominantly Latino, storefront church on Chicago ’s Westside. More than a year earlier, in August 2006, Elvira Arellano had entered that same church, becoming the first person to enter sanctuary in what was being called the new sanctuary movement. Elvira, along with her American-born son, Saul, had chosen to enter sanctuary as a means of highlighting the injustice of an immigration system that was ripping apart immigrant families. Elvira understood this issue deeply, not only out of her own experience but because she had served as the first president of La Familia Latina Unida, a community-based organization that focused its organizing on highlighting the trauma that deportations were imposing upon another group of people with hybrid identities, families composed of both undocumented and documented members. By making their pending deportations public, Elvira and Flor chose to engage in a form of civil disobedience. Rather than allowing themselves to be victims, they hoped to “become instruments” by showing the nation that immigrants would not willingly self-deport. As undocumented immi- 132 | Immigrant Rights Activism grants, they were engaging in prophetic activism by choosing to turn their deportation orders into an indictment of a broken immigration system that had labeled them as criminals. After spending a year in sanctuary, Elvira finally decided to leave in August of 2007 after congressional Democrats abandoned their efforts to enact immigration reform legislation until after the 2008 presidential election. After speaking at several sanctuary churches in Los Angeles, Elvira was arrested at gunpoint by a team of Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) agents, separated from her son, and quickly deported to Mexico. From there she has continued her activism, writing regular newspaper columns in the Mexican and Latino American press, meeting with Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president, and addressing both houses of the Mexican Congress. From Mexico she wrote, “I am still in Sanctuary because Sanctuary is the faith and solidarity we share as people and as families in the struggle for justice.” By speaking out and telling their stories, Flor, Elvira, and many other immigrant activists are putting a human face to one of the most controversial national policy issues facing the United States. There are hundreds of organizations working on various aspects of immigrant rights, from humanitarian groups, lobbying organizations, and legal defense organizations to community-based justice organizations. Today much of this work is rooted within immigrant communities and the various organizations and networks that they have established. Many of its leaders are second- and third-generation people, raised in the United States with hybrid identities, enabling them to bridge between first-generation immigrants and native-born Americans. These leaders generally recognize that immigrant rights are intertwined with larger movements for civil rights and racial justice . They are aware of this nation’s history of dehumanizing people of color, engaging in acts of genocide against native peoples, and denying them access to full citizenship rights. Many also conceive of themselves as the inheritors of the civil rights movement and participants in a global human rights movement among people of color. Those doing grassroots work in immigrant communities are reconceptualizing the meaning of leadership by building various processes of consultation and popular education models into their work. Religiously grounded activism is a distinctive component of the larger immigrant rights universe, yet its significance is widely acknowledged even by the ostensibly secular justice organizations. In...

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