It was another searing, cloudless day in Santa Maria on Aug. 13. Dozens gathered in protest outside the initial arraignment for Victor Ramirez, an undocumented immigrant who pleaded not guilty in the assault and killing of 64-year-old Marilyn Pharis. Some carried signs calling to “defund sanctuary cities.” Across the street, counter protesters chanted, “Don’t hate!” Demonstrators yelled, “Don’t murder women!” in response.
What is a sanctuary city? There’s no legal definition. San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, and Los Angeles are recognized as sanctuary cities by the Congressional Research Service because they have laws on the books instructing their employees not to cooperate with informal requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless that request is backed by a federal judge.
There are also “defacto” sanctuary cities, where unofficial policy is to limit compliance with ICE to build trust within communities with significant undocumented populations.
“Sanctuary cities are just turning them loose—that’s the catch-and-release deal,” said a demonstrator from Santa Barbara who identified herself as Judy. “We brought in all those people, probably illegal, under the guise of sanctuary from Guatemala and God knows where.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is calling for congressional hearings on sanctuary cities. Santa Barbara County Supervisor Steve Lavagnino is calling for the same in his county. And Santa Maria Police Chief Ralph Martin has denied that the SMPD deliberately shirks federal immigration policy.
Santa Maria doesn’t have an ordinance that instructs city employees to ignore ICE requests. Some at the protest argued it still qualifies as a “de facto sanctuary.” One protestor who didn’t give the Sun their name pointed to the fact that Ramirez was booked on drug charges a few weeks before the murder, then released—despite a request from ICE that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office place an immigration hold on him and keep him in jail.
SMPD Chief Martin strongly disagrees with the protestor’s synopsis.
“Because we have a 70 percent Hispanic population does not make us a de facto sanctuary city,” he told the Sun. “We do not make any exceptions when we’re investigating crimes or anything else.” He said his department always cooperates with ICE and other law enforcement agencies.
While not everyone agrees on whether Santa Maria is a sanctuary city, the sanctuary movement is older than the current discussion and goes well beyond the state of California.
To learn more, the Sun spoke to the Rev. John Fife. He cuts the figure of an iconic cowboy who wears pressed slacks and keeps a tin of snoose tucked in his snakeskin boots. He’s the pastor of Southside Presbyterian, a church in one of the oldest barrios of Tuscon, Ariz., and during the ’80s he felt that his congregation was in crisis.
“We began to meet folks from El Salvador and Guatemala who were living in the barrio and who had fled the death squads that were killing tens of thousands of people,” he told the Sun. “The United States refused to recognize those fleeing the massacres of villages and repression as refugees.”
ICE was picking up Central American migrants and returning them, through deportation, to the ongoing violence.
What were those migrants fleeing from? In Guatemala, a deadly civil war where more than 200,000 were killed or disappeared. The Guatemalan army, waging a scorched-earth campaign, exterminated entire Mayan villages suspected of harboring insurgents. Today, the United Nations and the Vatican call that war a genocide. In El Salvador, the U.S. funded and coordinated ongoing efforts to stamp out the left-wing guerrillas of the FMLN. Some 75,000 people died.
During this time, according to Fife, the federal government didn’t recognize those fleeing the violence in El Salvador and Guatemala as having legitimate refugee claims.
Southside Presbyterian decided to respond. “We declared the church a sanctuary for Central American refugees,” Fife said. “A movement started. Hundreds of churches and synagogues—Jewish synagogues were an essential part of that movement—declared themselves sanctuaries and protected refugees from capture and deportation by immigration officials.”
Cities across the U.S., recognizing the crisis, declared themselves sanctuaries and instructed their employees not to cooperate with federal immigration officials. Eventually, an underground railroad was formed to transport people across the U.S. to Canada, where they had a better chance of securing asylum.
Today, those Central American states remain wracked by violence. In 2007, Guatemala’s homicide rate beat out Iraq. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported a total of 40,000 homicides in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in 2012. In Mexico, the War on Drugs declared by President Felipe Calderón in 2006 and the ensuing violence perpetrated by drug cartels has left tens of thousands dead.
Refugees fleeing the ongoing violence in Mexico and Central America who successfully reach the U.S. can’t secure asylum unless they can prove a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Immigration courts in the U.S. are discouraged from recognizing those fleeing criminal or political violence as protected classes that would qualify for asylum on those grounds.
Does Fife believe the humanitarian crisis in Mexico and Central America is still happening? “Absolutely,” he said. “That’s just not my opinion—that’s the opinion of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, of Amnesty International. That’s the truth of the matter.”
But for many at the protest, the importance of the sanctuary movement was not in the past but the here and now, and the suspicion that Santa Maria was an effective haven for criminally inclined undocumented migrants was persistent.
“There’s de facto sanctuaries,” insisted a protestor named Tony who came up from Santa Barbara with his wife. “It’s where illegals can go and commit a lot of crime, and they know it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Santa Maria’s one.”
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2015.