Sanctuary and Its People: Reform and Resistance in the Fight for Asylum

Abstract This article explores the North American Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, a transnational network of churches and volunteers who used civil disobedience to spotlight the United States’ harmful policies in Central America, provide a non-statist form of protection for forcibly displaced Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and challenge the unequal provision of the US’s recently enacted asylum laws. Some of the research questions are deceptively simple: why did the Sanctuary Movement (or movements) exist? And, who were its leaders? Others are more utilitarian: what does the movement imply about the history of asylum in the US, and particularly the efficacy and equity of the protections set forth in the 1980 Refugee Act? Through these varied but related inquiries, this article suggests the 1980s Sanctuary Movement existed in the US because equitable asylum laws did not. The analysis concludes by underscoring sanctuary’s continued resonances today.