You're listening to season three of

Future Ecologies.

Hello, and welcome to part two of

Goatwalker. In the last episode, we met Jim Corbett, a rancher,

philosopher, and desert survivalist. If you haven't

already heard it, I strongly suggest you give it a listen.

Because understanding a bit about Jim will go a long way

towards understanding the radical social movement he

helped to spark.

The story of that movement is the subject of today's episode.

My co host, Adam will take it from here.

So what comes to mind when you hear the word

sanctuary?

For me, up until just the past few years, the word would have

conjured images of this scene of Quasimodo rescuing Esmerelda in

the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney version, of course.

Sanctuary has almost a medieval feeling as if it's a historical

artifact of a bygone time. But by around 2016, the word

sanctuary had assumed an entirely new meaning, at least

in the United States. At the time, the status of so called

sanctuary cities was getting a lot of press. driven by a former

reality TV show star turned politician.

We will end the sanctuary cities that have

resulted in so many needless deaths.

If this somehow flew under your radar, sanctuary

cities are basically jurisdictions that pledged to

offer municipal services and conducts law enforcement without

cooperating with immigration enforcement. Meaning,

theoretically, that if you were living in a sanctuary

jurisdiction in the United States without legal status, you

could still access housing or legal services and interact with

law enforcement without fear of deportation. By 2018, over 500

US jurisdictions had adopted some kind of sanctuary policy.

The Trump administration made several attempts to fulfill a

campaign promise to withhold federal funding from these self

identified sanctuary cities. But like most things the Trump

administration tried to do. Their attempts to cut this

federal funding got bogged down in the courts and eventually

blocked, in whole or in part, depending on the provision.

Underneath all of this noise, you might be wondering how this

idea of sanctuary made the jump from the Abbey's of medieval

Europe to the supercharged rhetoric of US immigration

policy sanctuary

For these criminal illegal aliens.

Thankfully, for nearly every question like this

nowadays, someone has produced a podcast to answer it. And in

2017, producer Delaney Hall of the podcast 99%, Invisible,

released a two part series profiling something called the

Sanctuary Movement, and organizing network of churches

and civil society groups that formed in the 1980s to help

refugees from Central America evade US immigration

authorities. The series focused specifically on the church state

issues this movement raised, and on the eventual trial of its

leadership, chief among whom were John Fife, and Jim Corbett.

The 99% Invisible series puts the spotlight on John, which

makes sense, he remains a powerful voice in defense of

migrant rights. And of the two men, he's the one who's still

able to sit for an interview. But for me, this has the

unintentional effect of downplaying Jim's foundational

role in the movement. In fact, when Jim suddenly started

relating his experiences as part of the Sanctuary Movement, about

halfway through Goatwalking, his first book, I actually had to go

back and listen to the 99% Invisible story to see if he was

in there at all – because if he was, it hadn't really left an

impression. It turns out they had included him, but I could be

forgiven for forgetting, other than some details surrounding

the decision to declare sanctuary and the trial. This is

how producer Delaney Hall summed Jim up at the time.

Jim Corbett died in 2001. But back in the 80s, he

lived on the edge of Tucson, he raised goats, and he knew a lot

about philosophy. He was also a Quaker.

Now, don't get me wrong. She definitely had Jim

pegged. He did raise goats and was a Quaker and he knew a lot

about philosophy. The series is excellent. I highly recommend

listening to it and I think she made the right call and not

getting too deep into the weeds with Jim.

But on this podcast, getting into the weeds is what we're all

about. And in my estimation, Jim's philosophy and his goat

walking aren't incidental to the story of the Sanctuary Movement.

They're essential, and they prefigure everything that

follows. All of his life, Jim had been tilting at windmills,

seeking opportunities to live out his philosophy of errantry

and nonviolence in practice. And in the early 1980s, Jim finally

picked a windmill that turned out to be a lightning rod. All

it took was a chance encounter. From Future Ecologies, this is

Sanctuary.

The origin story of the Sanctuary Movement in the United

States might begin with a small goat milking cooperative that

Jim Corbett had brought together in the early 1980s. Jim and his

wife, Pat, we're living in Tucson, Arizona, and Ann

Russell, the Quaker student who went on a goatwalk with Jim in

the 1970s happened to be attending the University of

Arizona at the time.

I started my master's degree, and they were

living close by. And so I started to go over because I

missed the goats and I missed Jim, and I would go over and

milk in the morning, and he would make oatmeal. And the

three of us would have breakfast,

Ann was working in the department of plant

pathology when she met Tom Orum. And it didn't take long for her

to introduce Tom to Jim and the goats.

And so he started coming over and the group

started getting bigger and then it was a goat co-op.

The members of the goat co-op jokingly referred to

themselves as Los Cabreros Andantes.

Jim read Don Quixote, he saw himself as Don

Quixote, and in Spanish, a knight errant, which was what

Don Quixote was – in Spanish, that's Caballeros Andante. So we

were Cabreros Andantes – Cabrero being goat herd, and Caballero

being gentlemen,

These self-proclaimed "goat herders

errant" would meet regularly to schedule milking slots, and the

chance encounter I've alluded to occurred on the evening of May

4, 1981. At one of those meetings, Tom Orum was there and

he remembers the night well,

We were having a goat group meeting – Los Cabreros

Andantes. We were passing the signup sheet around, and this

guy who was connected with our Baja project,

a Quaker named James Dudley.

He was driving a van up from Sonora, and picked up a

Salvadoran guy and came into goat group meeting and described

what had happened.

Dudley had been driving from the border town of

Nogales north to Tucson, and had picked up a hitchhiker from the

small Central American country of El Salvador. Almost

immediately, they reached a border checkpoint, and border

patrol agents seized the Salvadoran, who had no papers

[unitelligible] a high area for us, that's why

we're pulling almost everybody over.

And that was that. Dudley kept driving, stopped by

the meeting, and told the story to the group. At the time, it

seemed like it could have been an isolated incident. But Jim

took it seriously.

Well, it was like serious, but it didn't get real

serious until Jim woke up the next morning and decided to go

down and find the guy down in Nogales.

Jim was determined to speak with the Salvadoran,

who was being held in custody by the I N S, or the Immigration

and Naturalization Service. This was before it was subsumed

within the Department of Homeland Security, post 9/11. To

figure out where the man was, Jim started making cold calls.

And he quickly realized that nobody in the INS or Border

Patrol was going to give him any information. He was able to

reach a local aid organization, and he was given a form called a

G 28 that the Salvadoran could fill out in order to seek legal

assistance. But first, he'd actually have to find the man.

Then, an idea came to him. By coincidence, Jim shared both

first and last names with a former mayor of the city of

Tucson. And so he called the IRS back and with his best, most

commanding voice, he declared himself to be "Jim Corbett", and

demanded information on the location of the Salvadoran. And

he got it. They'd taken the man to the Santa Cruz County Jail in

Nogales on the border to await deportation. Jim went down there

that very afternoon. When he arrived at the jail and

requested to see the Salvadoran, they set him up with another

prisoner who wasn't the man in question. And once he realized

this, they sat him in the waiting room, and they made him

wait. Finally, when Jim became frustrated and demanded at last

to see the man he'd come to see, the guard said that he was gone.

While they'd kept him waiting, they'd taken the Salvadoran and

shipped him off to El Centro prison in California.

And that just really hooked Jim. If they hadn't

tricked him and just let him talk to the guy, who knows? But

being tricked was – really set the tone for oh my gosh, this is

not right.

That's how it started with him was he met a

guy who was taken away, and he had to find out what happened to

him. So it was like one person, he met a person and then had to

look for him. And then that's the thing about Jim, everything

has a logical next step. And you follow it even though it may not

be comfortable, and it may take you places that people tell you

you can't go.

At this point, I think it's important to note

that in the 1970s, the border just wasn't as militarized as it

is today. Movement was much more fluid between Mexico and the

United States, and a certain amount of permeability was seen

as socially and economically advantageous for border

communities. But in 1980, 2 things happened that set the

stage for Jim's chance encounter. The first was the

outbreak of civil war across Central America. In 1979, the

Sandinistas, a revolutionary leftist Socialist Party,

overthrew the government of Nicaragua.

Despite everything the government forces

have thrown at them, their morale is high. And when the

guns stopped firing for a moment, their chant is a

victory.

[Chanting]

military leaders in El Salvador, fearing similar

movements in their own country, instigated a coup d'etat a

couple of months later,

News Announcer 2 00:12:16

This kind of butchery, which is generally the

News Announcer 2 00:12:18

activity of those on the right wing in this country, is the

News Announcer 2 00:12:21

sort of thing which can be found on any roadside throughout El

News Announcer 2 00:12:25

Salvador at this time.

Meanwhile, a civil war that had been ongoing since

the 1960s in Guatemala was flaring up. And the military

government in Honduras was waging its own dirty war against

leftist groups. The Reagan administration in the United

States openly supported these right wing military governments

– viewing them as friendly to US foreign policy interests, and as

a bulwark against so-called communism in the region.

News Announcer 2 00:12:53

Below in the yard of the police station,

News Announcer 2 00:12:55

heavily armed police returned from making their rounds. There

News Announcer 2 00:12:59

are countless instances of deaths and disappearances, in

News Announcer 2 00:13:02

which they have been found to have played a role. Yet, they

News Announcer 2 00:13:05

are armed with NATO weaponry, which the United States is

News Announcer 2 00:13:08

continuing to supply.

We now know that the CIA was covertly funding and

arming death squads, and other right wing paramilitary groups

throughout Central America, the most infamous of which were

Battalion 316 in Honduras and the Contras in Nicaragua, the

namesake of the eventual Iran-Contra scandal. This

history is complex and multifaceted. But the end result

was the violent displacement of millions of Central Americans in

the 1980s. Due to civil war, US backed death squads, and

government campaigns of terror aimed at political dissidents

and indigenous peoples. And so, in 1981, refugees from Central

America started arriving in the US-Mexico Borderlands: seeking

asylum and foreshadowing the 10s and 100s of thousands to come.

The second thing that happened was the passage in 1980 of the

Refugee Act in the United States. This law, shepherded by

outgoing President Jimmy Carter, brought US immigration law into

alignment with international human rights standards: more

than doubling the number of refugees that the United States

would admit each year, and establishing a well-founded fear

of persecution as the standard by which to judge asylum

applicants. This legislation expanded eligibility for many

refugees and asylum seekers, but unfortunately, was not immune

from the politics of the day.

Under the newly-elected Reagan Administration, refugees from

countries that the US considered adversaries, such as Cuba and

Iran, were accepted and naturalized in large numbers

thanks to the Refugee Act. On the other hand, the Reagan

Administration's overt support for the right wing governments

of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, meant that It refused

to acknowledge the atrocities committed by those governments

against their own citizens.

By extension, throughout the 1980s, nearly all asylum seekers

from Central America were considered by the Reagan era ins

to be, quote unquote, economic migrants, regardless of their

well-founded fear of persecution. In 1981, a refugee

from Cuba would find the door wide open under Reagan's INS.

But the Salvadoran that Jim was trying to locate, didn't have a

chance in hell.

Jim would drive all the way to El Centro present in California

to try to help the Salvadoran refugee to no avail. That's a

story in and of itself. But while Jim is out there, I'm

going to take a moment to give John Fife, the pastor I spoke to

in the last episode, a proper introduction. Because if Jim was

the spark that ignited the Sanctuary Movement, John would

provide the hearth that sustained it.

My name is John Fife. I grew up in the mountains of

southwestern Pennsylvania, near West Virginia, and small town,

rural farm life was my heritage.

John wanted to be a pastor. So he enrolled in

seminary, and when he started looking for internships, he got

a call from a man from Tucson, Arizona.

And he says "we have an internship out here and got

your name and wondered if you'd be interested in". I said "well,

tell me a little bit about that." And he did the job

description and a little bit about the desert in the border.

And, and he said "Do you have any questions?" And I said,

"Yeah, I got to what's an Indian? And what's a

reservation?" And he went, "Oh," and I said "well you need to

know, I'm from Western Pennsylvania. I don't know

anything about the Southwest. I've never been in the

southwest. I don't know anything about Native Americans." And

there's a kind of long silence. And he says "well, church has

done a lot of damage to Native Americans over the years, you

probably can't do too much more in three months once you come

out." And so I said "I'd love to, if that's if we understand

each other."

John left the mountains of southwestern

Pennsylvania for the Borderlands of southwestern Arizona, and

never looked back.

The Sonoran Desert was a wonder and the border and

the multicultural context of Native Americans and Latinos and

African Americans and gringos all in here in the border

region. All of the advantages of that kind of multicultural

context and multi ecological context from the tops of the

mountains to the Sonoran Desert. And so I just couldn't believe

there was a place like this and my wife and I moved out here

after I finished graduate school and stayed since 1969. Yeah, I

love it.

Before long, john would become the pastor for

Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson.

This church is located in the oldest and

poorest barrio in Tucson, and it had a history of beginning as a

Native American congregation in the Native American village

outside the south of the city of Tucson because Native Americans

weren't allowed to live in the city of Tucson, and then is the

city grew around here and it became a Mexican American and

Native American barrio, the congregation became

multicultural and bilingual or trilingual.

By the time that John arrived, a once thriving

congregation was now struggling to sustain itself and was at

threat of being closed by the Presbyteriat. Under John's

leadership, though, the church grew strong again, supported by

this multi ethnic, multi lingual community. And then came 1988.

[Archival speech in Spanish]

In March of 1980, the Archbishop Oscar Romero was

assassinated in El Salvador by a US-backed death squad for

speaking out against military violence.

[Spanish continues, followed by applause]

His death was the most high profile in a series of

attacks against Christian priests and nuns across Central

America. And the event galvanized John Fife and his

congregation at Southside

And so we started weekly prayer vigils in front of

the Federal Building, and guess who showed up – Jim Corbett – at

some point at those weekly prayer vigils saying "I just had

an experience with a refugee young man from El Salvador that

I tried to help and was unable to because the Border Patrol

moved him to a detention center in California, and I wasn't able

to prevent his deportation like I'd hoped to." So Jim was

essential right from that point on. He actually talked to the

head of the Immigration Service here in Tucson, and reached an

agreement with him that if we would take in voluntarily

Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees who wanted to apply for

political asylum, he would not detain them, he released them to

our custody.

At first, Jim worked with a small women led

organization called Manzo Area Council in Tucson, to try to

render aid to refugees through legal channels. But because of

his experiences with how law enforcement treated migrants,

Jim was cautious.

So I was apprehensive because I didn't

trust him. I, you know, I'd been to El Centro and I knew how they

operated. But it seemed to us the best option for most of the

refugees to file for asylum, as long as they were reasonably

sure of getting two or three years, in terms of appeals.

It was more of the time – buying time than the

idea that they would get it?

Yeah we knew they wouldn't get and that had

already been established that the Reagan administration was

not going to give Salvadorans asylum. But the thing was that

this would allow people to be out in the open, move around at

will and not risk being simply grabbed and deported anymore. At

least not risk it in the same way others would.

Jim negotiated an arrangement with an officer at

the local Immigration Service, he would bring in refugees and

the proper paperwork. And they would begin processing the

asylum claim and let the refugees go on conditional

status.

Sit down and wait your turn. And then eventually

they call you up and you present the person and the I 589. And

they look through it and give you a little receipt.

And then one day, when Jim brought in several men

seeking refugee status, this arrangement seemed to fall

apart. After making Jim wait longer than usual, that same

immigration officer came out and said

"We're gonna go downstairs to investigations and

–

Did he tell you right there that he was going to

arrest them or...

He said we're gonna make an inquiry. At any rate, it

was clear that things were going sour.

They took the men that Jim had brought with him

into custody. All parties agree upon that point. The reasons for

this are disputed, though, according to the INS, it was

because the men had criminal records. However, Jim recalls

the decision being wholly unjustified.

At no point did he give that as a reason for having

done this.

In Jim's mind, the US government had already

declared war on Central American refugees. But this, this was the

moment when it also cut off any legal pathway for US citizens to

try to help them

And made it fairly clear that this was a position

that we could expect in the future as well for the people we

brought in.

And Jim came to me at that point, and said, "John, I

don't think we have any choice under the circumstances except

to start smuggling refugees safely across the border. So

they're not caught by Border Patrol or immigration

authorities." And I basically said, "really, how do you figure

that Jim?" And his rationale was compelling. He said, "look at

two moments in history." He said, "The first is the

abolition movement, when some people of faith helped runaway

slaves cross state lines safely, without being captured, and then

formed an underground railroad to move them to safer and safer

places, so they wouldn't be captured under The Fugitive

Slave Act and return to slavery." And he said, "as we

read history, those folks got it right. They were faithful."

And then he pointed to almost the complete failure of the

church in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. To protect Jewish

refugees who were fleeing the Holocaust, crossing national

borders, without documents – being captured as illegal

aliens, and returned to the tender mercies of the Holocaust.

And he said to me, "that's one of the most tragic failures of

faith of the church in history." And I said, "Well, yeah, that's

how I read history." And his response. He looked me right in

the eye and said, "I don't think we can allow that to happen on

our border in our time". And after some sleepless nights, I

went back to him and said, "Yeah, you're right. I, I cannot

claim to be a person of faith, or even a pastor of a faith

community. If I tell you no, I, of course, you're right. We have

to do this."

Beginning in the summer of 1981, Jim Corbett

undertook the first of what would become hundreds of risky

trips to the border to help Central American refugees safely

across and up to Tucson. He didn't do it alone. He had the

help of Los Cabreros Andantes. As he writes in Goatwalking.

Few groups could have been better prepared,

bonded together and predisposed than the Cabreros Andantes to

help the refugees get through. Errantry shifted from goat

herding to refugee aid.

I really want to stop and emphasize this point

for a moment. In my own reading of history, people who cultivate

intimate relationships with the more-than-human world often

become leaders, and resources in times of disaster, of

deprivation, and of demagoguery. In this respect, I would argue

that you could draw a straight line from St. Francis of Assisi

to Henry David Thoreau, and right on to Jim Corbett. Few

people would have made the decision that Jim and John made,

and fewer still would have actually been able to pull it

off. Jim's years of roaming in the desert with his goats turned

out to be a singular contribution.

Oh, it meant everything. I mean, what does

some gringo from Western Pennsylvania know about

smuggling refugees across the border? It was all Jim's

conception and Jim's practice. And then Jim's training of other

volunteers in that practice. That was the foundation of

everything we did.

By this time, Jim and his inner circle had already

formed relationships with a Catholic priest, Father Quinones

at the Sanctuary of Guadalupe church on the other side of the

border in Nogales, Father Quinones would do weekly visits

to the local Mexican prison, where migrants were held

awaiting deportation. And Jim would join him, new groups of

migrants would arrive and depart every week. And the conditions

in the jail were not good.

Yeah, it was just a concrete holding tank with

nothing to sleep on. And normally, when we started

working on it at a later point, no, no blankets or anything they

just slept on the concrete floor. It was open air, so it

got very, very cold in the winter.

Once there, he do refugee support work, helping

supply blankets and mattresses and sanitary products, as well

as assisting the refugees and connecting with family members.

He'd also use these visits as an opportunity to learn about how

they traveled from their homes to the border, and how they

crossed – and how they got caught. This research ended up

being really crucial, because in the summer of 1981, the

floodgates opened, Central American refugees began arriving

in the Borderlands in unprecedented numbers.

And so with a group of about, I don't know, 20 or So

folks, in cooperation with a Catholic priest in Nogales,

Sonora, who had been running a shelter for Central American

refugees to protect them there in Mexico. He would refer

families to us, we would cross them bring them to Tucson,

Jim and other volunteers were making daily

trips to Nogales to help them across.

It was just almost every day people were just

coming through so fast.

They'd do this all sorts of ways. For example, Jim

learned of a hole in the border fence on the east side of

Nogales – and when it would be watched.

And there were certain times when the hole was

really just left unattended. So if you knew the times when they

weren't going to bother, you'd just always make it and then in

'81, you know just day after day after day people were going

through...

And Jim would find those people and transport them

safely past the Border Patrol to Tucson. Throughout summer in

fall of 1981, Pat Corbett remembers him being in constant

motion.

Oh gosh there for a while. He'd be just, you know,

three or four trips a day to Mexico. Really, I don't know how

he did it,

We'll probably never know entirely. But in

those early days, he did it mostly just by picking folks up

and driving them north in his truck.

At that time the Border Patrol wasn't so you

know, on the lookout for that kind of thing. So it wasn't as

hard as later became.

As sanctuary activities became more public

and the situation worsened in Central America, the border

tightened up. Civilized ports of entry were fortified, forcing

migrants to attempt to cross the border in extremely dangerous,

sparsely inhabited stretches of desert, where untold numbers

would die over the coming decades.

This policy of prevention through deterrence, and its

deadly results are well documented today. But in the

early 1980s, large groups of migrants dying in shocking

numbers in the desert was still a novel phenomenon. In response

to this fortification, Jim used his incredible knowledge of the

Sonoran Desert ecology and geography to help groups of

migrants cross by foot. Those lucky enough to cross with Jim,

were in good hands.

I've spent days and up to a week with him in the

desert. It wasn't goatwalking, it was smuggling refugees. So I

learned a lot from him in those brief periods, about desert

survival and about what he was thinking, and about what he was

teaching.

Jim's knowledge would carry the group's safely

across this harsh terrain. Of course, it wasn't easy.

I think the refugees, you know they were

pretty accustomed to a tough life. And even so I think they

found Jim's idea of how to pack across the desert in the

mountains pretty tough.

Eventually, the iconic quality of these desert

crossings would make front page news. Journalists from major

publications like the Chicago Tribune, would follow Jim into

the desert to get the full story.

But that didn't stop them from taking refugees

from the border up into the Chiricahua mountains wearing his

sandals. On one time there was a TV crew from LA out with him and

they couldn't hack it. And there's Jim with his sandals and

his arthritic toes, just walking through the mountains.

But that was just getting folks safely across the

border. Then there was the question of what to do with

them. At first, Jim would bring the refugees to his and Pat's

apartment in Tucson, which quickly filled up. Here's a

recording of a talk that Pat gave to a group of Quakers

reflecting back on that time,

A reporter in Washington DC once asked me what

my role was in the Sanctuary Movement, which kind of

befuddled me and it still does. But I thought a while and I

said, Well, I guess I was the plumber. The reporter looked

quite stunned by this. And after a while, I realized that she

thought I meant a watergate type of plumber, when I was speaking

quite literally of the problems involved in having sometimes 20

or more people using a septic system meant for two.

While Pat was dealing with the immediate

problems presented by hosting too many people under one roof,

Jim and the other Cabreros Andantes reached out through

their networks to find temporary accommodation for these

refugees. One of the people who answered that call was Gary Paul

Nabhan

My first year in Tucson – after living on

ranches and national parks in southern Arizona – I ended up in

a community garden group with Jim and his wife and many of

their dear friends – at least half of them literally friends,

Quakers. And we not only shared garden space, but we helped with

goat milking. Because Jim was still doing his goatwalks.

But he was really the first philosopher I knew who had such

a deep grounding in western and eastern traditions, that he took

principles from perennial traditions and adapted them to

social justice here in the Borderlands. And he did it in a

very non egotistical way. He didn't announce things he'd say

something like, "Gary, I have some friends that I'd like you

to meet that are just passing through town and they share a

lot of your same interests. Could you meet us at the Denny's

a few blocks away from your house?" And I'd get over there

and there'd be a Guatemalan family that needed help filling

out the refugee papers in one state for a month with us and

finally got reunited with their extended family in California.

Like many people who befriended Jim and

participated in sanctuary, the experience was life changing for

Gary.

And I realized that well, at that age of my

20s, I thought it was just a good thing to do. I had no sense

of how much suffering they had gone through, and how even

coming to the United States ended up not to be a solace or a

sanctuary immediately, but a struggle to feel legal, and to

feel like they had their dignity and overcome the post traumatic

stress of not just what took them from their homeland, but

all the trials and tribulations they faced in Mexico. And Jim

somehow knew that from his own life and sort of guided those of

us who are facing it, for the first time – that it's not a cup

of tea, hosting refugees. They're going through deeply

troubling issues that you need to accompany them with. And I

thought it was giving them a room, and I realized afterwards

that was giving them my heart and my attention and my

listening.

We'll return to Gary later in this series. But

for now, I'll just say that Gary's experience is typical of

those who became drawn to sanctuary work by Jim helping

people felt good, but the traumas that those people

carried were with them all the time.

Oh, the stories you would hear from them were

appalling.

These were people who in many cases had directly

experienced unimaginable violence against their person or

their close family members, and who felt that remaining in their

homes was more dangerous than the perilous journey northward.

Traversing Mexico was and is extremely dangerous for Central

American migrants. The US had put increasing pressure on

Mexican authorities to prevent Central Americans from even

reaching the US border. And this criminalization of migration,

subjected migrants to organized crime, police corruption, and

worse things. It was especially dangerous for female refugees.

So a lot of it really had to do with the whole

problem connected with women in that it if they are young and

saleable, they're indefinitely exploitable, and as refugees are

completely vulnerable,

For these female refugees, they risked not only

being killed, but also being exploited and trafficked for

sex. If they were deported back to Central America, or captured

by police or criminals in Mexico, they were in an

incredibly difficult position. So while there were folks like

Gary, who took refugees in, in those early days, most of the

Central Americans still ended up living with Jim and Pat in their

tiny apartment,

It was just a really a very difficult thing to

cope with all the folks and at the same time. Someone was

arriving new on virtually every day. And most of my energy was

going into getting them through without there being caught,

which meant I brought them into Tucson and then hope someone

would do something. And frequently Pat and I were doing

it at the apartment that is in terms of the people crowded in

there. And if I was going to be responsible, in some sense for

trying to cope, it was easier to cope with 20 people crammed into

the apartment where I lived and to try to run around town,

figuring out what to do with folks somewhere else. So it

simply reached a point of extreme overload.

With their apartment full, and at their

wit's end, it was clear for Pat and Jim that something needed to

change. In hindsight, what happened next was a stroke of

sheer brilliance. Jim told it like this.

Oh, yeah, there's been a period of several weeks

where Pat had been talking about the need to find some church or

someone who could take care of the refugees. And that was

especially urgent because I was planning to go down to Chiapas

and Guatemala. And it became clear that it just wouldn't be

good to leave Pat alone, trying to tend to the apartment down

full of refugees.

Pat tells it like this.

At one point, I finally was saying to Jim, that

you should go talk to some of these church people who were

also concerned about the refugees. Because they have

these churches with lots of room, lots more room than we

had, and better plumbing. And so poor John five, Jim picked on

him. And he went to his congregation and they had a

congregation discussion about it and decided that they should

start housing refugees, so I was able to let them have my 21 or

22 refugees. Great sigh of relief

And John – he tells it like this:

And then both Pat and my wife got together and

threatened divorce and said, "Come on, guys, we can't be

trying to provide all the care that refugees present to us in

terms of their needs in our homes." And so that's when Jim

came to me and said, "can we bring those folks to the

church?"

By all accounts, I think we can conclude that Pat

was responsible for moving sanctuary from a tiny apartment

to the churches of America, setting the stage for a national

modern day Underground Railroad.

That's probably an accurate rendering of history in

my judgment, yeah.

From this point on, sanctuary would be spelled

with a capital S.

On March 24 1982, Southside Church publicly declared itself

to be a Sanctuary for the oppressed of Central America. By

1985, over 500 congregations joined creating a national

movement, with 1000s of volunteers working to shelter,

transport, and house refugees from war torn Central America.

Jim, the solitary Quaker, had finally found a home in the

church, and his principled stand had created a movement that

defied the most powerful government on the face of the

earth.

You might have a few questions at this point. For example, how

did Sanctuary volunteers ensure that the migrants that they were

helping were actually refugees? The answer is the church. When

he wasn't helping folks cross the borderm Jim traveled

extensively throughout southern Mexico and Guatemala during this

period, tapping into a network of churches that extended from

Latin America, north to the United States. The pastors of

these congregations took incredible risks to help

migrants on their way north. And in the process, they would vet

the migrants to make sure that they weren't unknowingly

sheltering people who had no legitimate claim to asylum. By

the time these folks actually reached the US border, the

Sanctuary network would be able to vouch for them as refugees,

regardless of the US government's intransigence on

the issue.

Later in this series, we'll critique this notion of

deserving refugees versus undeserving economic migrants.

But for Jim and the other sanctuary volunteers, it was

important that they took extreme care to make sure that sanctuary

volunteers weren't unknowingly doing the work of coyotes, or

other smuggling operations.

Another question, how did these churches organize themselves?

The answer is through lots of meetings and letters. The

horizontal structure of the Sanctuary Movement meant that no

one was in charge. And although John and Jim tended to act as

national spokespeople, each congregation functioned

voluntarily and autonomously. This sometimes led to issues

such as certain congregations wanting to politicize the

refugees they helped, by asking them to speak out against the

right wing governments of Latin America. Jim was strongly

against this politicization of sanctuary.

It was very firm with everyone here, that that

particular approach was one that was morally wrong, that it

really is wrong to deny people aid because they don't fit your

political purposes. It's wrong to pressure people into fitting

your political purposes, who are in desperate situations.

In Tucson, at least, Sanctuary would be

offered to asylum seekers, regardless of their political

orientation. At the time, this elevation of human life over

political expediency contrasted sharply with both US government,

and more ideological leftist groups and congregations.

But the question that I'd like to examine for the rest of this

episode, is how did the Sanctuary Movement choose to

justify its actions to the citizens and the government of

the United States?

Well, when we finally in March of 1982, declared

Southside Church's as Sanctuary for Central American refugees

and received a mother father and two kids – two little kids – in

publicly into the sanctuary of the church, I thought and Jim

thought, at that point, that we were doing civil disobedience in

the tradition of King and Gandhi and Thoreau, and going back to

Moses's sister who hit him along the Nile to keep Pharaoh from

killing all male children back there

Civil disobedience, as many of us are

taught in grade school, is a term popularized by 19th century

American author Henry David Thoreau. You know, the guy who

lived in a cabin on Walden Pond and went to prison for refusing

to pay his taxes.

And so I talked about King and quoted Gandhi and went

on and on when we did the public declaration of Sanctuary here.

And about a month after we had done that, I get a call in my

office, and this guy says, "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

laughed, and I said, "What do you mean, the government says

they're going to indict us any day now. They keep saying that,

and I'm just sitting around waiting for the documents." And

he said to me, "Listen, dummy." That's a direct quote, "you're

not doing civil disobedience. It's the government that's doing

civil disobedience. It's the government that's violating

United States refugee law. So every time you talk about civil

disobedience, people get it all mixed up. So stop it." And I

said, "Oh, I think I understand. But what do we call what we're

doing now?" And he said, "I don't know make it up." And so I

went to Jim told him about the phone call. And he kind of

smiled and came back about three or four days later, with this

whole paper that he called on civil initiative.

In his essays on the topic, Jim converses with

Thoreau, Gandhi, and Hobbs to articulate a new paradigm for

radical justice. He called it civil initiative.

Civil initiative maintains and extends the rule

of law. Unlike civil disobedience, which breaks it,

and civil obedience, which lets the government break it.

Civil initiative reframed the discussion, casting

the government as the one that was violating its own laws, and

higher laws as well.

Conventional civil disobedience would simply

concede to the government the destruction of the refugee laws

– that what was at stake was international human rights and

humanitarian law and the domestic refugee law. And that

it was very important not to take a traditional civil

disobedience approach. If we were going to save the laws,

because if when the government violates the law that way, and

is attacking it, you simply concede their legitimacy and say

that you're breaking the law, then that just does it in.

You're not going to save the law, any of the law at that

point.

This framing was crucial in convincing so many

people who would not otherwise engage in quote, unquote,

illegal behavior, to take up Jim's proposition of

collectively enacting US immigration law at the

grassroots level, even as the US government itself under the

Reagan administration violated it.

I mean, it's one thing to go to Presbyterian

churches or Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues and say, "we'd

like you to join us in doing civil disobedience with all of

the negative and risk aspects, that that would have entailed,"

it's quite another thing to go to them and say "it's the

government that's violating human rights and United States

law. Join us in an active public resistance to government

crimes." That puts a very different incentive and

prospective for risk taking under those conditions. It meant

we were able to build a movement quickly.

This movement, grounded in international human

rights law, US law, as it was written, and the divine laws of

the church, joined a long tradition of people, especially

Indigenous people and people of color, who had risked everything

to defy a US government, which, throughout time, has steadily

refused to live up to its own laws, principles, and founding

documents.

Oh, sure, if you look back, you can make a clear case

that Dr. King was not doing civil disobedience. He was doing

civil initiative, as we understood it in our movement.

You can go on and on and on throughout history and say, "no,

no, that's not civil disobedience."

Today, when I think of mutual aid movements,

and so many people coming together to resist the wholesale

destruction of human and biological communities. I think

of the power of this reconceptualization of civil

disobedience to civil initiative. It acknowledges a

fundamental kind of work that we can only do when we act as a

community. Jim would later write:

Individuals can resist injustice, but only

community can do justice.

Of course, the US government acknowledges no

higher authority than its own, in practice. And it was only a

matter of time before Jim, John, and a number of other sanctuary

volunteers were brought to trial. The Sanctuary Movement

had been infiltrated, and covert tape recordings were made,

followed by charges. The judge was prejudiced and wouldn't

allow Jim and his co-defendants to present a defense at all –

ruling that no discussion of sanctuary or refugees would be

admitted. The story of the trial is fascinating, and has been

thoroughly documented in other media, including the 99%

Invisible series. The outcome:

several folks were convicted,

Invisible series. The outcome:

including John Fife, but Jim and others were found innocent, and

Invisible series. The outcome:

the charges were later overturned, or sentences

Invisible series. The outcome:

reduced. Ironically, Jim Corbett, the man that the

Invisible series. The outcome:

government had wanted most to convict, hadn't been in Tucson

Invisible series. The outcome:

when the government informit infiltrated the sanctuary

Invisible series. The outcome:

network.

He was spending all of his time border south to

Central America, putting that part of the Underground Railroad

together so we could get people safely out of Central American

and to the border. And so they had no evidence against him. So

that's why he was found innocent

In the end, what the trial served to do was to

strengthen the Sanctuary Movement, giving it a national

stage and the righteous narrative of the church standing

up to a tyrannical government. Sanctuary in this incarnation

would continue into the late 1980s, until the number of

refugees seeking asylum began to decrease. For Jim, the end of

the trial also signaled to him that he could finally start to

step back from Sanctuary work.

In some measure, I can, I think, now turn back to

the things that I choose to do. My agenda has been set by the

refugee situation, I wouldn't have simply chosen this out of

the various social concerns. If I have been choosing, and

environmental concerns and rediscovery of the Sabbath, are

some of the things that I am very interested in pursuing now,

I think I have the chance to attend to, I might even do a

new, revised, updated version of Goatwalking manuscripts.

This would be the time that Jim would finally

finish his first book, Goatwalking. But he also had a

new project in mind. One that spoke more to Aldo Leopold, than

to Henry David Thoreau.

And the whole development of the land ethic in

which there is protective, symbiotic community at work. So

that, I think my attitudes with regard to the refugees, the

reasons I took the course of action I did were very much

formed by this other broader attitude towards the fact that

human beings have an enormous responsibility to bring into

full, reflective consciousness that community that does exist

among all living things. That life is in fact among us rather

than in us. And that definitely has a bearing on my

understanding of what Sanctuary is. And Sanctuary in its

broadest sense extends far beyond Central America and

specific human refugees, to the need for a harmonious community

among all living things,

Extending Sanctuary to all life. That's

next time, in part three of Goatwalkar.

Goatwalker is produced by myself, Adam Huggins and Mendel

Skulski for Future Ecologies. Ilana Fonoriov is the Associate

Producer for the series. For photos, citations and more

information about the people and events described in this

episode, including some truly incredible photos of Jim from

the Sanctuary years. Please visit futureecologies.net.

In this episode, you heard Ann Russel, Tom Orum, John Fife, Pat

Corbett, Gary Paul Nabhan, Jim Corbett, and Miriam Davidson.

Narration was by Philip Buller

Music was by People with Bodies, Meteoric, Hidden Sky, and

Sunfish Moon Light. The Goatwalker theme is by Ryder

Thomas White, and Sunfish Moon Light. Special thanks to Theresa

Madison, Susan Tollefson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy

Ferguson, Tom Orum, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gita Bodner, Amanda

Howard and the University of Arizona, Sadie Couture, Phil

Buller and Danny Elmes

Future ecologies is an independent production supported

by our patrons. To join them, go to patreon.com/futureecologies.

This series was recorded on the territory of the Tohono O’odham,

and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territory

of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and

other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples.