 in the years when, like, you ratted your hair all up. And she had the Manzo Ladies Club. So there was a raid at the bakery one day right there, the Rio, the Miigra King. And Contreras got all the Villanas out of the church. They surrounded all the Border Patrol vans. They couldn't drive them away. And like, that was the spirit of Manzo. And then these two kids came. Sobel Garcia and Margarita Bernal. And they're like in law school. Like, we're just rocking the world having fun. And these sisters come and they're going to avoid you. They want to volunteer. Well, of course, we couldn't. Now it would happen. It was a really, really special moment. I think it was in this historian thing, too. It was a special moment in history. And it was a really special moment that brought together just all sorts of people with all sorts of gifts that came together with me. Ricardo, Raquel all came and had a wife. You did that. I used to have the greatest fight with John. They were great. It was a spot for magic. I was just curious about maybe even just taking the first part in terms of this play we just saw. What kind of lessons did you learn? Oh, what kind of lessons did you learn? The question was, what kind of lessons did you learn as you were thrust into this work? Well, I think the most important thing that we learned, we called it civil initiative, to distinguish it from civil disobedience. All of us thought we were doing civil, this lasting sense of Dr. King. And I quoted King and Gandhi and the Bible to establish the principle of civil disobedience under these certain states. And then I get a call in my office. And this guy says, my name's Ira Gullivan. I'm a human rights attorney from New York. And you've got to stop talking about civil disobedience. You're not doing civil disobedience. And I said, yeah, right. I'm just waiting for the indictments to come down because they told us that's what refugees back to El Salvador and Guatemala. So he said, stop talking about civil disobedience. And I said, well, I think I understand. But what do we call it? And he said, I don't know. Make it up. And so of course I went to Corbett and told him about the phone call. And Jim took it from there. He developed the whole concept of civil initiative to distinguish it from civil disobedience. And that was the ground we walked on for the rest of the sanctuary movement. Would anyone else like to chime in on that? We weren't just left just like we bonded out people who were in the death squad. We represented the national chest, everybody, everybody. Because we understood that we didn't live their life experience, that we could never comprehend. Part of this, I don't recall that it was written out, but was that charge you let out to the Corralon 115 degrees in El Centro that King put in the motel. OK, so Father Ricardo's wanting me to tell stories. I won't tell too many, but I will tell one little story. In those days, there were five detention facilities in the whole United States. It's hard to believe, five. And so the one that took care of our area was in El Centro, California. And they had huge, I don't know, 25 foot chain link fences. They had cots outside. In the summertime it would get to be your feet would stick in the asphalt. It was just horrific. So when John was doing his best work raising bond money, we'd bond out like 75 or 100 people at a time. And so then we'd throw a picket line around the facility with the same guys that just bonded out. Yeah. And that's how we kept everybody's anymore, everybody's spirits up, because we said, we're coming for you. This week we got these guys, and next week we're coming for you. And what was really, really beautiful was that we took those people to a Catholic church, a black Catholic church in Watts. And their families came and met them there and reunited with them there and then went off across America. So all the little pieces of our mosaic that are so powerful contributed to that magic. So these nuns, I will tell you one little story. Because this one's too good to pass up. So they didn't have internet, and they couldn't communicate and all that, INS, in those days. And so we kept bonding out with people all over the place, and they would have call-ups. So they'd say, you have to be in the Manhattan Federal Courthouse in two weeks from when you were out of El Centro. So there's this church in Brooklyn called the Church of the Transfiguration Catholic Church. And in those days, the nuns did their whole thing. They had their whole, their uniforms, right? And so I told them, you've got to find these 18 boys, because I'm coming. See, one thing we did is I held all the notices of appearance for everybody who was in detention so they couldn't have multiple hearings so I could control the calendar. And that kind of backfired after a while, because when they got bonded out, then there'd be hearings in states all over the place so I had to run around for a while. So I told these nuns, gather up these guys, and I'll fly in, and we'll go down, and we'll present them, and then I'm going to have to go somewhere else. They couldn't find them. So they brought 18 other guys. And you know, these women are like, you're not going to say that they're running a game. I mean, you're just not going to say it. And they didn't have fingerprints. They didn't have photographs. They didn't have the internet. They didn't have anything, file by file. Pose so-and-so, presente, you know. Juan so-and-so, presente, you know. And these nuns are just real serious. They did stuff like that, you know. And it worked. And then came the amnesty of 1986, and everybody legalized, and it was a gift. And you know this guy, we have a clinic at Pueblo High School. In case anybody wants to volunteer, Thursday nights at 5.30, keep Tucson together. And so this guy comes in, and he says, no te recuerlas en mí? You know, you don't remember me? No. He said, you got me out of El Centro, and guess what? What? My daughter's a lawyer, and she works for the Florence Project. And over the years, we've heard all sorts of stuff like that that comes back. And I just share that, because when we do this kind of stuff, you know, maybe we get somebody out of detention. Maybe we get some green cards. But we really, really don't know what we do. The stuff that we do is incredibly powerful. I just wanted to mention something about these first-person stories, that are three-story telling, is essential. I did want to ask John's play ends when the church, this first play in the sequence, and it's a discussion in the play about how we're going to get this word of us a little history of your interactions with newspapers, or TV, or things, how fast did that happen? I don't think you can manage that. But a couple of significant things did happen. One was, I had this, he's been alluded to earlier. I had this seminary intern who was on my staff, who was supposed to assist me in the ministry of the church. And so we had to sit down and write a job description for the seminary about what he was supposed to accomplish while he was here for that year. And at the end, I said to him, Tim, this is his name, Tim Nott. And I just happened off the top of my head, say, Tim, one thing that you might just add to that job description, if you have any time, we have been doing all of this crazy stuff and making it up as we go along. And we've never had a time to sit down and really think about what it is we're doing and why we're doing it and what we need to do in the play Vizel is going to do the keynotes with media and of sanctuary. I get a call in my office from 60 Minutes, who say to us, we think it's an interesting story about priests and nuns smuggling refugees across the border out there in the wilds of Arizona. And so we'd like to come out and film a border crossing. Can we do that? And so we all sat down. And it was a long conversation because how do you take the care for a refugee family for that additional risk of taking 60 minutes? And so what happened was we did the crossing down in Douglas. Then there wasn't a wall. There was just a raggedy old fence. And the cemetery in Douglas was right next to the fence. And so we'd dress up people as mortars with flowers and cross them through the pop them through. And they'd spend some time in this. And 60 Minutes filmed it. And when they showed a couple of episodes of Jim and Pat which were very powerful, then a movement started. And we had never imagined that we were doing anything but self-defense before we got indicted. That was everything up to that moment. And then when 60 Minutes really did those couple of episodes of Jim and Pat and the crossing, I get calls from all over the country, what's this sanctuary idea and how do we do it and that's where the whole rest of it. I've got a question for Pat. Sanctuary really started when Corbett came to me and said, my wife says she's gonna divorce me if we don't get 17 refugees out of our trailer. And can we bring them to the church and keep them there? And that was really the beginning of sanctuary and I don't know, Pat, was that a true story or was Jim just? Well, it was funny some as I recall. And the other thing, no, I didn't threaten to divorce him but I did threaten other other things which I won't mention here. But I just thought, well, there's some more but it was like at their house asking. If anybody comes up, I do have a question. There's a microphone right here by where Mark is. If somebody has a question, please come up, please. Great. Actually, because I belong to a religious order and they kind of leave us alone. At that time our order had a Western province. Among the men's Catholic religious orders there were the Mary Knolls in New York, headquartered in New York and our Oakland province that publicly said we do sanctuary. The problem with the hierarchy with the bishops is that two bishops at that time, national names, one of them was also still a licensed civil lawyer and they sent out this letter all over. Don't get into this. The ones that did across the country beautifully were the most. Steve, that's a really important question because I was fortunate to, I had just finished up eight years on the National Policy Council of the Presbyterian Church. So I had personal relationships with the leadership of the denomination. So when we started this, well, even before we started this, Margo would come to the office as you could see and say I need $30,000 more for the action in El Centro or we need, yeah, tomorrow or it's on my credit card. It was yesterday or whatever it was. And so I was able to just make those contacts easily. Because of those personal relationships. And then the denomination was great in terms of support. Many of our volunteers later on after, in the next version, the next iteration. The guy who was the head of the office of young adult volunteers for the Presbyterian Church, I mean, literally gave me a blank check. He said, you tell me how many young adults you need to come volunteer on the border and we'll make it happen. And there was a whole community of folks that grew out of that blank check. So I was very lucky, but most other denominations struggled with the idea of sanctuary for some time. But eventually there was pretty broad unanimity among all of the denominations. If it wasn't sanctioned by the bishops, there were convents and monasteries and churches and parishes and bishops and archbishops that said to hell with the national conference, we need to do this. And so it really was a grassroots rising and movement that eventually the denominations and the hierarchies had to recognize, I guess. I have a question about, because it sounds like when you, and just from what you've shared with me when I interviewed you all, that churches, there was a network of churches throughout the country that were doing this kind of work. And can you talk about how that network has moved through the years and if it's still happening right now and how that functions? Well, as you all know, this idea of sanctuary is currently a much broader and a much deeper movement than we ever envisioned or experienced in the 1980s. The big difference now is that it's primarily a secular movement by cities and states and counties and colleges and universities to protect the community of whatever that secular institution is. But there are also thousands of churches and synagogues and mosques that have declared that they will be a sanctuary. In the 1980s, the leadership was by faith communities that were declaring sanctuary and formed the network that was faith-based. And cities and the state of New Mexico as secular institutions did so in support of those faith communities. But the leadership was clearly from the refugees and the faith communities that were a part of the sanctuary movement in the 80s. Now it's the opposite side of that coin. It's cities and states and colleges and universities that are primarily the leadership in the sanctuary movement now. And I keep telling them secular humanists that they stole our idea. But it's fine, we're delighted they stole it. But as you know, sessions is already in the Justice Department attacking those secular institutions. And colleges and universities are every bit as vulnerable as cities and counties and states. So we'll have to, so far the courts have upheld their right to do that. But if that fails in the courts, then faith communities are gonna be the strategy of next resort. And we're gonna have to be there and we're gonna have to step up in ways we never imagined in the 80s. So it's a different context that we're dealing with now but it's a much broader and much deeper movement than we ever envisioned in the 1980s. I think what John said, and it's, there's a different kind of sanctuary in some churches. It's not, some cities around the country do public sanctuary. I believe that's very, very dangerous. I think especially in Tucson, that's where the birthplace sanctuary. I feel like that's putting a target on a church in this political moment. But what we see is we see many churches willing to say that I wanna take you, your family, into our family of faith. And our embracing people and our protecting people. And we see that, we see that in many, many, many different kinds of configurations. And so it's interesting that we see the secular institutions being very challenging but we see the faith-based community also very engaged but not feeling a need to get into that public kind of fight. So it's a real interesting policy shift, I think. But the bottom line is a whole lot of folks are being helped and protected. I think we also have to understand the different conditions that we're living in. The militarization that we all predicted was coming before us that we first experienced is on us. Okay, and so what we have is now a police state. You know, and so that was different from that time. We could cross people over, we could take people up to Los Angeles, whatever, because literally like John was saying, the fence was just a rickety wire line. It's different today. It's different in the courts. It's different in the detention camps. It's different on the line. I mean, when you consider that the border patrol is now up to 20,000 agents and ICE is rolling around everywhere, so the pressure on those even doing political asylum going into the courts is horrific. We are living in different conditions. That's something to that. Those of you who don't know the fence in those days, you could go into the, right into Narada Sonora, downtown, sit in a restaurant called El Vida and watch just as the sun went down, men, women and children, they would come and go, but they would cross the street in the restaurant, go down a tiny gully from here to the bench and then up a little hill and they're there for sanctuary, one of the ways of moving people, they would stay at a church in Narada, I said, a parish. And then they'd move toward the east hill. The cook in one of the parishes helped on this. Sunday morning, because of large holes in the cyclone type fence, they would carry a Bible or a missile, a prayer book, go through there and you can see Sacred Heart Church on this side of the tower and walk as if they're going to church. And there the next day, you know, they'd be the arrangement to move, check out the roads, roadblock, move from there. They're going through that fence and they would sometimes seal it with new wire. And the next day, chop, chop, somebody in sanctuary, I've really forgotten who it is now actually. Nobody had the big clippers like this with the nose on it, you know, we're not brought to Newark. I have a rebuttal to John, which is kind of my job. But a point of clarification, I think when we look at sanctuary today, I think the real leadership isn't necessarily coming from colleges and universities, but from communities organizing directly effective communities who are using this idea of expanding sanctuary because like Lupe said, it's different conditions. And so they're saying to their cities, they're saying to people like Rahm Emanuel, you can't say we're a sanctuary city and then hire all these more police officers that just become part of a criminalizing community of color, which ended up being this pipeline to the tension. So I think we're seeing a lot of leadership from directly effective people who are helping us deepen and expand sanctuary. And but I still think that there is a strong faith role in all of it. There's 50 people publicly in sanctuary across the nation and they're having successes in their cases amazingly because every case is so different and the situation is just a different situation. But I still think we're seeing a strong faith. Yes, if I can say so myself. So I think that I have one last question for the panelists, unless there's a burning question out there in the audience because I think it's time that we wrap up a little bit. So my last question is, would any of you like to talk about the work that you're doing now, how you built on the roots of the 1980s and then continue the work? We'll just pass it down. Okay, all right. Well, the work that grew out of the sanctuary movement in the 80s is really the work of Samaritans and no more deaths in humane borders out in the desert. And the practice of civil initiative, asserting our right to provide humanitarian aid and lifesaving aid out there in the desert and document the human rights abuses of the border patrol out there in the desert and in the detention systems here and then lawyers suing them to stop the abuses. And I'm talking about physical abuse and verbal abuse and withholding food and water and medical care from desperately poor and wounded people from the desert. So that work is directly related to the sanctuary movement and I think it's the really important, one of the really important aspects of what we learned in the 19 years. And I'm just amazed because I sort of continue to do today what I was doing then and you know, that's very, very sad. It's very sad. I always thought it would just be, it would be different but okay, so it's not, so we have to keep doing it. We have a clinic, it's sponsored by No More Deaths and my office, the Pima County Public Defender and it meets at Pueblo High School every Thursday at 5.30 and it meets in this church the first and third Saturday from two to five. We have Peter, Pat, all sorts of people are volunteer. We file asylums for people. We file cancellations for people. We do bond work. We reunite families and get them out of custody as soon as we can. We have volunteer lawyers in court every day in three cities. I mean, we're on it, you know, and it's horrific and we lose every single one and we don't care because all we care about is getting them out. Peter cares, he does asylum. He has this, he does mushrooms or something. He has this dream, you know, that we're gonna win an asylum case and you know, we didn't win him during the Central American Wars but then everybody got legalization so in the end, hey, we won. And it's the same deal, you know. Whenever you do this kind of legal stuff in a little box you have to put it into the context of the political moment. And so I really don't care if we win. What I care about is no families get separated. That's the only thing I care about because this will pass. This moment can't be sustained, no. It can't be sustained just like the 80s couldn't be sustained and when it passes we wanna have as many families together as humanly possible and that's really what we're doing in. You know, we need a lot of help. I mean, so, and it doesn't matter what you can give an hour or whatever you can give. Let me tell you, we have a job for you. I've been concentrating for 15 years about with healthcare but I don't wanna take time to go into that because before this group breaks up there's something else I wanna add. As century evolves, so many people starting with Jim Corbett that were at the heart of it have died. Rabbi Weisenbaum, for example. Gary McCoy and sisters that, I can't, I could sit here, I think I'd shoot out a lot of names but in my life, because of studies and all I've been exposed to a lot of, I think, great minds but honestly, and I've felt this for decades, the greatest mind I've known in my life is Jim Corbett that's what I believe and his writings, you know, we have the presence of things going on, drama, studies, presentations and all but those writings of Jim, I think, his writing is so important urgently that that remains available. To me he was really the soul of the movement. Somebody else who believes that. Ricardo, I'll tell you though, there's an expression that might be worse and even more. One of the things also out of the sanctuary is like to get back to what has emerged from the Monzo experience and that it went through a transformation and from there we went to organizing under La Mesía, organizing projects and after that Pueblo por la Paz, working with the Chiapas, uprising fighting against NAFTA, Derechos Humanos, Alianza Indígenas y Fronteras so that the work, the political work and advocacy and education of community continues in face of this horrendous movement from many different directions and that as Jim taught us that the basis of all of this is hope, that is in the love that we have. There is one final ending of a Jim's story. He and I would travel to California often taking refugees and one night he said to me, I'm tired. He said, so we're gonna stop, tell people we're gonna stop for a couple of hours. I said fine, he just drives into the desert. The next thing I see is he walks down and he clears a little path among these cactus and he just falls asleep on the desert floor. That was Jim, that was Jim, I mean, you know, and but anyway, let's remember that we have to be hopeful and we have to maintain our passion. I think that's a great note to end on. So thank you very much, HowlRound folks for tuning in and all of you for coming out so we can all take a photo.