Part One: Introduction

I discovered the sanctuary movement through the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York City
in early 2017, during a massive resurgence of mobilization after the 2016 elections. New
Sanctuary’s Director, Ravi Ragbir, was just becoming widely known (show slide with photo of
Ravi & faith leaders article) for organizing rallies of hundreds of community members and faith
leaders to accompany him to his deportation hearings and ICE check-ins, and several thousand
new volunteers were beginning to show up to participate in New Sanctuary’s nascent legal
clinics, accompaniment program, community meetings, and Jericho walks, all practices that Ravi
himself uses in the campaign to prevent his own deportation. The New Sanctuary Coalition of
NYC, along with NSCs in several other cities, had been founded in 2007 by the pastors Juan
Carlos Ruiz, Donna Schaper, and Alexia Salvatierra, after Elvira Arellano was the first person to
publicly take physical sanctuary with her son in Chicago since the well-known 1980s sanctuary
movement with asylum seekers fleeing US-backed right-wing dictatorships in Central America.
When I initially came to New Sanctuary in February of 2017, I quickly began participating in all
these organizational practices on a daily basis, and because I was one of the first of this huge
wave of new volunteers, as this period of rapid and somewhat chaotic organizational growth
intensified, I had already developed close relationships and access with both Ravi as well as
Juan Carlos, the co-founder and lead organizer.
While, technically, Ravi is in charge of all New Sanctuary activities, Juan Carlos was
responsible for coordinating the Tuesday community meetings and Thursday Jericho Walks, and
also carried a certain moral authority in his capacity as co-founder and Lutheran minister that
complicated Ravi’s singular control over organizational decision-making (show slide with
photos of legal legal clinic, Jericho walks, community meetings, accompaniment, and physical
sanctuary). Also, and importantly, as more and more congregations joined the coalition, almost
100 by May of that year, Juan Carlos began to take the lead on the more legally-precarious
activities that exposed undocumented people like Ravi to greatest risk, including what’s known
as “physical sanctuary”, when an undocumented person essentially locks themself in a house of
worship, to prevent being deported.
By August of 2017, when Amanda Morales Guerra became the first person in New York to
publicly take physical sanctuary since the 80s – taking sanctuary at Luis’s church in fact – I had
been regularly observing and shadowing Ravi and Juan Carlos – in addition to meeting and
collaborating with them – for almost six months. Around that time, I increasingly found myself
playing the informal role of facilitating communication and coordination between the two of
them, including around basic decisions regarding structure, strategy, and vision for
organizational growth and institutional partnerships. Even before Amanda’s case of physical
sanctuary, and then Patricia’s, Aura’s, and Debora’s which followed soon after, Ravi and Juan
Carlos had communicated to me some of their concerns and hesitations about the vision and
organizing approach of each other. On the one hand, Ravi repeatedly articulated his
determination to mobilize a “mass movement”, which would be coordinated and led by New
Sanctuary, (with himself at the head). His ostensible supervisor, Donna Schaper, the senior
pastor of Judson Memorial Church (where NSC is based), and also the Chair of New Sanctuary’s
Board, referred to Ravi’s approach to organizing a mass movement as being in the style of Saul
Alinsky, a description that bears particular weight since she was the first woman to be trained
by Alinsky in the 70s.
Juan Carlos, on the other hand, is a Mexican priest deeply influenced by liberation theology.
Having migrated to the U.S. without documents in the mid-80s, he became a protogé of the
famous activist priest Daniel Berrigan in Chicago, and he also worked for several years with the
Zapatistas in Chiapas in the 90s, before permanently returning to the U.S. with legal status in
the early 2000s. During this time, he was also defrocked for conducting political activities in his
clerical capacity, he subsequently converted to Lutheranism, and was in the process of
completing his ordination as a minister when I met him in 2017. In contrast to Ravi, Juan
Carlos’s vision was of a locally-controlled network of semi-autonomous neighborhood groups, a
sort of synergy between the “base ecclesial communities” of decolonial-era Latin America and
the Zapatista confederation of autonomous community assemblies, somewhat akin to what
Dave and Luis theorize as “street political organizations”. Donna Schaper, again, who co-
founded the New Sanctuary Coalition with Juan Carlos, referred to his organizing approach as
“Gandhian” or “Romero-style”, referring to the assassinated liberation theologian and
Salvadoran Archbishop. While Juan Carlos would rarely challenge Ravi directly, he frequently
expressed questions and concerns to me regarding Ravi’s inclination to centralize all decisions
and control of the “mass movement” he was trying to organize.
Having spent almost two years trying to find common ground and translate between Ravi’s
vision of a “mass movement” and Juan Carlos’s commitment to a “confederation of
communities”, I began to notice that these leadership styles, organizational forms, and political
orientations, seemed to reflect more diffuse patterns embedded across movement groups, that
would sometimes surface as subtle or even as glaring tensions between distinct objectives,
mobilizing repertoires, and logics of practice. For example, those who align more closely with
Ravi’s mass movement orientation frequently foster collective identity by defining the
“sanctuary movement” only in relation to the demand for legal rights by undocumented
people, while those closer to Juan Carlos’s “confederated communities” orientation are more
inclined to ground collective identities in mutual aid practices and local neighborhood
relationships that require calling on neighbors to transgress social boundaries like legal
immigration status or criminal record. To make the underlying tension as explicit as possible,
Ravi builds collective identity by reinforcing the significance of the distinction between citizens
and the undocumented, while Juan Carlos constructs collective identity by doing precisely the
opposite: subverting and denaturalizing this distinction.
Having observed and worked so closely with different sanctuary actors and leaders around
New York, and to some extent in seven or eight other cities across the U.S., Canada, and
Mexico, I began to wonder about this pattern that seemed to emerge not only between Ravi
and Juan Carlos, but across all these different contexts. This led me to frame my initial research
question in very basic terms: how are sanctuaries experienced by distinct movement actors, and
what are the different logics and trajectories of sanctuary mobilizations? Through several years
of participant-observation, many interviews and focus-groups, as well as extensive historical
document analysis and interdisciplinary lit review, I further elaborate this question in the
proposal with two additional ones: (1) how do sanctuary actors experience the tensions and
complementarities between distinct sanctuary orientations, and (2) what tools and resources do
they develop to generatively navigate these differences? By specifying the question in this way,
my goal is to begin with a conceptual apparatus that can account for patterns across sanctuary
mobilizations while also opening as much space as possible for the hidden transcripts or
subjugated discourses to emerge during research. Also, specifying the question this way elicits
questions and insights that are directly useful to movement actors themselves, in part by
opening space for my initial proposition that can be tested, extended, and challenged, along the
lines of the extended case method.
While, initially, the “mass movement” vs. “confederated communities” distinction was a
helpful way to understand some of the differences between Ravi and Juan Carlos, as I
encountered other tensions between them, as well as with other sanctuary actors, I came to
see Jim’s “citizenship”/“post-citizenship movement” typology as most useful in making sense of
Ravi and Juan Carlos’s dynamic in the context of the larger movement (maybe include Sacco
anecdote here.) So I offer my proposition in relation to this typology: that the core tension
between sanctuary mobilizations’ citizenship and post-citizenship logics of practice constitutes
the movement’s hybrid (or syncretic) political orientation. This tension is “core” in a dual sense:
(a) wherever these mobilizations exist, actors will encounter it in some form; and (b) when
navigated generatively, it is precisely this tension that can become the dynamic engine of
sustainability, growth, and connections within and between sanctuaries. I plan to investigate
this tension in New York, Tucson, and Montclair, three locations that vary in relation to three of
the most significant factors in the literature and in my own observations. These are: (i)
proximity to the U.S./Mexico border; (ii) the existence and type of “sanctuary city” policies; and
(iii) municipal size, administrative capacity, and demographic composition. I plan to divide the
4-5 months of research in each location into three phases.
I’ll briefly discuss a couple of the benefits and drawbacks of conceptualizing the core
tension in this way, especially in relation to the first phase of research in each location. Then,
I’ll describe how the second research phase employs Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s
epistemologies of the South, which go a long way in redressing these drawbacks. Third, I’ll
present a more birds-eye view to explain the rationale for the methodological design, with
particular emphasis on the third research phase. And I’ll end by touching on a handful of
contributions I hope to make.

Part Two: Benefits and Drawbacks of Citizenship/Post-Citizenship Distinction

The first phase of research in each location connects directly to my decision to frame the
proposition through the “citizenship/post-citizenship” movement typology. During the first
month in each location, I’ll conduct participant-observation in at least three sites of sanctuary
mobilizations, in addition to roughly ten narrative-style interviews with experts of the local
sanctuary landscape. I will also collect, code, and analyze historical and contemporary
documents from sanctuary archives in universities and sanctuary organizations, with a focus on
three sub-questions. First, how do sanctuary actors construct collective identities,
organizational forms, targets, tactics, and leadership styles where citizenship/legal status is
their central objective? Second, how do actors differently construct mobilizing repertoires
where formal legal status and the strategies to attain it are instead perceived as a means by
which to achieve other objectives (including border-abolition)? Third, under what conditions
do these two orientations come into tension, and how do sanctuary actors navigate between
them? While I begin by postulating citizenship and post-citizenship orientations as a useful way
to understand the tensions sanctuary actors experience, the questions that guide this first
phase of research create ample opportunities for extending, modifying, or replacing these
categories with others that may emerge as better-suited to account for surprises in the data.
Framing the proposition and the initial phase of research in relation to citizenship and post-
citizenship orientations immediately addresses the growing sanctuary literature that
distinguishes between “liberal” and “abolitionist” sanctuary movements. These authors
describe “liberal sanctuary” not only as a citizenship movement; they also critique the ways
that sanctuary actors actually reinforce the legitimacy of the legal distinction between
“citizens” and “aliens” by demanding legal rights for a slightly larger group of specific individuals
they decide are most “deserving” of sanctuary. As Paik puts it, “The core paradox… lies here:
being a law-abiding, ‘good’ immigrant will not save you as long as the state can determine what
it means to be a law-abiding, ‘good’ immigrant.” According to these scholars, those who
practice abolitionist sanctuary, on the other hand, struggle to expand the rights of residency,
regardless of the “deservingness” of any particular sanctuary seeker. They argue that although
specific sanctuary actors may not recognize themselves as “liberals” or “abolitionists”, all
sanctuary mobilizations fall into one of these two camps.
On its face, distinguishing between liberal and abolitionist sanctuary ideologies or
citizenship and post-citizenship orientations may seem semantic, or unimportant. But, unlike
liberal vs. abolitionist interpretations, citizenship and post-citizenship is more useful because it
allows for recognizing the flexibility and fluidity required by groups made up, in part, of people
whose very existence is criminalized. For example, looking at sanctuary practices like
congregational Board meetings where members decide whether or not to offer sanctuary to a
particular family, citizenship and post-citizenship allows for looking beyond the parallels
between the decision of “deservingness” by immigration officials or local neighbors, instead
recognizing the multiple strategic dilemmas actors encounter in this situation around access to
resources, legal risks, recruitment capacities, and others. More generally, actors whose long-
term goals involve border-abolition and dismantling the citizenship regime, may still pursue
rights and citizenship at any given moment, not because of false consciousness or inadvertent
cooptation, but as a strategic response to the dilemmas of volunteer recruitment and retention,
resource mobilization, political education, or simply responding to the immediate needs of
diverse participants.
Further, the citizenship/post-citizenship distinction aligns with the one characteristic
common to all sanctuary mobilizations. Whether as movements to protect asylum seekers
from being deported or to protect conscripted Vietnam War soldiers from being sent to battle,
sanctuary always involves the participation of those with formal political rights and those
without full citizenship. So, in the most preliminary sense, sanctuary exists on the border
where those with citizenship enact it as a post-citizenship movement (in a quite literal sense),
and those without citizenship enact it, at least in part, as a citizenship movement.
But this points to the two major drawbacks of characterizing sanctuary’s core tension in this
way. The first drawback is that it risks conflating the descriptive potential of “citizenship” and
“post-citizenship” objectives and mobilizing repertoires, on the one hand, with the explanatory
power of the ascriptive identities – “citizen” and “noncitizen” – on the other. To put it more
simply, defining post-citizenship movements as mobilized by those who have already attained
citizenship rights, makes it conceptually impossible to account for the undocumented people –
or others without rights – who practice versions of sanctuary that empirically align more closely
with a post-citizenship or border-abolitionist orientation. As a result, the concept of post-
citizenship movements as those strictly undertaken by citizens inscribes a conceptual blind-spot
with respect to “post-citizenship” practices enacted by undocumented people. By locating the
focal point of the typology around citizenship, it risks naturalizing a certain epistemology of
blindness in relation to the voices and experiences of those with most precarious status.

Part Three: The Epistemologies of the South

I have found Santos’s epistemologies of the South to be especially useful in addressing both
of these limitations (1) first, by paying more balanced attention to the experiences of both
those who ostensibly “seek” sanctuary and those who presumably “offer” it, and (2) second, by
recognizing, at an epistemological level, how to avoid interpreting sanctuaries through statist
categories, as a kind of methodological nationalism. Santos’s conception of “nonabyssal” and
“postabyssal” struggles can be initially mapped onto the citizenship/post-citizenship typology.
Like citizenship movements, “nonabyssal struggles” aim for inclusion “on this side of the
[abyssal] line,” while “postabyssal struggles” are prefigurative efforts beyond abyssal logics.
Whereas Jim’s post-citizenship movements involve people who already have rights and are
“already integrated” into the polity, however, the ultimate aim of postabyssal struggles is not
inclusion in the existing regime – despite being undertaken in large part by actors suffering
from “abyssal exclusions” from such rights. Thus, while the post-citizenship or border-
abolitionist practices of undocumented people are conceptually invisible in the
citizenship/post-citizenship typology, they have plenty of room for maneuver using the
categories of nonabyssal and postabyssal struggles. In order to maximize this conceptual and
empirical space, the second phase of research in each location adds several additional sub-
questions drawn from Santos’s approach. First, in what ways do legal status and other social-
structural identities shape actors’ citizenship/post-citizenship objectives and mobilizing
practices?
At first, this seems consistent with the approach to phase one, a pretty slight shift in the
language used to describe sanctuary actors. But it actually requires a more fundamental
epistemological and methodological break that takes place around what Santos calls “the
abyssal line” or “abyssal colonialism”. While this concept is extraordinarily vast in its
implications, three aspects are especially relevant. At the most basic level, the epistemologies
of the South are always most interested in identifying the voices and experiences that appear to
be absent, and investigating the causes of these absent people and knowledges. These causes
can be legal exclusions, or exclusions by militarized national borders, or even socio-economic
exclusions, but they can also be caused by epistemological blind-spots like post-citizenship
mobilizations of undocumented people. Second, by recognizing genocide and epistemicide as
mutually-constitutive, and conceptualizing the abyssal line as embedded in statist categories
like citizenship and post-citizenship, the epistemologies of the South open space for the
emergence of forms of knowledge and experience that are invisible to these categories. Third,
by separately analyzing the types of exclusion (as abyssal or nonabyssal) from the types of
struggle (as nonabyssal or postabyssal), there is less of a risk of conflating the ascriptive
identities of actors with their political orientations. In other words, not only can undocumented
people engage in postabyssal struggles, but those with rights can as well.
By focusing on the experiences that are “produced as absent”, privileging the knowledge
that may be invisible to the citizenship/post-citizenship typology, and untangling the complex
relationship between ascriptive legal identities and movement orientations, the epistemologies
of the South create space for unraveling the strategic dilemmas faced by the most vulnerable
actors, rather than assuming too tight a link between status and movement orientation. The
second and third months of research will elicit these dilemmas and tensions again through
participant-observation, roughly ten interviews, and document collection, coding, and analysis,
and I will also conduct the first focus group during this phase. Using Santos’s concept of
liberated zones, which creates the space for interpreting movement actors who reflexively
challenge prevailing political and sociological categories in their own terms, this phase will focus
more explicitly on groups and spaces that seem to reflect the characteristics of such liberated
zones. As is true in my use of “citizenship movements”, the liberated zone is not a concept I
theoretically impose on actors, but one that emerges from my observations, including in the
sanctuary mobilizations based at Luis’s church.
For Santos, liberated zones are paradigmatic of postabyssal struggles because they’re
spaces where actors explicitly work to prefigure a radically different kind of future society in the
present moment. Santos argues that both nonabyssal and postabyssal struggles may employ
the mechanisms of the liberal state like legal advocacy, claims for human rights and citizenship,
and procedural democracy, but that postabyssal struggles invoke these mechanisms “only as a
form of deception,” as he says. While actors in liberated zones may have certain objectives that
appear to align with citizenship movements, this may actually be a reflection of “citizenship [as]
survival pending revolution,” as a prominent sanctuary activist puts it. Actors in liberated zones
also face the often great “risks and costs” of engaging in political action that is, at best, legally-
precarious, while reflexively challenging the various forms of domination and institutional
authority that criminalizes this action. In order to incorporate liberated zones into my research,
two additional sub-questions guide the second phase of inquiry: first, how are citizenship and
post-citizenship logics experienced in liberated zones differently from other contexts? And
second, when sanctuaries are constructed as liberated zones, how do actors translate between
citizenship and post-citizenship orientations? In order to investigate these questions, I follow
Santos in provisionally defining liberated zones as sites where actors are subject to the law, but
actively and reflexively challenge it as a means to cultivate alternative forms of political,
economic, social, and cultural identities, practices, relations, and institutions. I emphasize the
importance of this concept so strongly because it provides the conceptual, empirical, and
methodological space where those without citizenship can still engage in post-citizenship
movements, and those who do not suffer abyssal exclusions can still engage in postabyssal
struggles.
Since one of the major features of liberated zones is that actors confront risks and costs
involved in reflexively challenging prevailing legal and socio-cultural borders, these are spaces
where hidden transcripts and subjugated knowledges are most likely to be visible. In order to
elicit this “minor politics of sanctuary”, I extend the narrative interview approach during this
phase with roughly ten situational-actor interviews that can trace the tensions and
complementarities between actors with distinct political orientations, as well as elicit the
“internal conversations” of these actors as they attempt to make sense of such tensions in
particular situations. I also introduce focus groups during this phase in order to bring
dimensions of sanctuary’s “major” and “minor” politics into direct dialogue, along the lines of
Touraine’s sociological intervention.

Part Four: Methodological Approach

I design the three stages of research, and the three phases of inquiry in each location, using
genealogical-ethnography, a particular version of the extended case method that Bagelman
develops to respond to the methodological dilemmas sanctuary research involves.
Genealogical-ethnography uses what she calls a “methodological feedback loop” to trace
sanctuary’s “major” and “minor politics” as they come into tension with each other in actors’
lived experiences. To account for the “minor”, “hidden”, and “subjugated” knowledges of
sanctuaries as postabyssal struggles, this loop begins with archival materials to interpret
sanctuary’s dominant discourses, followed by ethnographic observations and interviews to
identify instances where these discourses are reinforced and subverted. Returning to archival
materials, these subjugated discourses are once again sought in the absences of the voices and
experiences of particular groups, and the loop is then completed by ethnographically eliciting
what Michelle calls these “absence[s] we know to be present.”
I amend the metaphor of the “feedback loop” slightly by applying the loop in three phases
at different analytic registers, instead conceptualizing my methodology as a kind of spiral. In
line with the extended case method, this allows me to begin with the citizenship/post-
citizenship typology as a formulation that has, thus far, proven so useful in interpreting the
experiences of sanctuary actors, while weaving substantive analytic openness to surprise and
contingency into my concepts, categories, and methods. By iteratively emphasizing the
relationship between sanctuary’s official and hidden transcripts at different registers,
genealogical-ethnography is particularly well-suited to identify people and knowledges that
have been produced as absent, to bring them into dialogue with dominant practices, to reveal
the places and moments where actors experience tensions between these orientations, and to
document the kinds of tools they employ and invent to navigate these differences.
The selection of three research locations, as well as the third research phase in each
location, are designed to address the most salient drawback of the liberated zone as a concept.
Because of its spatialized connotation, liberated zones draw the investigator’s attention to what
takes place “within” these spaces, and thus risks analytically bounding the sites of inquiry more
rigidly than actors experience them. In other words, sanctuary actors frequently attempt to
find opportunities to organize not only within liberated zones, but also between them,
sometimes across long distances that traverse political borders and institutional settings. This
limitation emerged most clearly when I co-organized a four-day event that brought together
sanctuary organizers from Mexico, Canada, and several U.S. cities, and realized not only that
there are both important similarities and differences in the tensions as experienced by actors in
different places, but also that these tensions raise qualitatively distinct questions and
considerations when they emerge between actors in different locations or between actors in
closer and more routine contact. Conducting research in three locations offers the opportunity
to distinguish between the characteristics of sanctuary orientations that are commonly
experienced irrespective of local context, from experiences that are contingent upon local
arrangements – including proximity to the border, sanctuary city policies, and municipal
structures – while also creating the opportunity to interpret the experiences of actors as they
attempt to connect and collaborate across disparate locations.
To investigate these dynamics, the third research phase is guided by three sub-questions:
first, to what extent do local geographies – especially of carceral institutions and arenas – shape
actors’ citizenship and post-citizenship practices? Second, what tensions, dilemmas, and
complementarities do actors experience when navigating these local geographies while working
to develop post-citizenship institutions, relationships, practices, and projects? And finally, to
what extent do local, national, and transnational political opportunities and threats affect
actors’ experience of navigating within and between liberated zones? During this phase, I shift
the approach to participant-observation to one that more closely approximates Latour’s Actor-
Network-Theory, explicitly following actors beyond what may initially appear to be bounded
sites of mobilization, to trace connections between their practices and institutional contexts
(maybe refer to Dorothy Smith here), as well as connections between their practices and those
of sanctuary groups in other places. Additionally, roughly five final interviews and two focus
groups will be conducted during this phase with actors whose orientations are “as diversified as
possible”, who are most committed, and who demonstrate interest in identifying and
responding to what Touraine calls “disharmonies” between groups with distinct objectives and
repertoires. Using iterative inconvenience, snowball, and stratified sampling procedures
throughout research to recruit these respondents, the final interviews and focus groups will be
conducted using participatory-dialogical approach that elicits actors’ involvement to interpret
data that has already been collected, and to shape the presentation of findings in ways that are
directly beneficial to the sanctuary groups with whom they work.

Part Five: Contributions

With this study, I aim to complement existing sociological literature on sanctuary with the
perspectives and experiences of actors engaged in these struggles, and to contribute insights in
social movement studies, political sociology, and social theory regarding the relationship
between municipal, regional, national, and transnational policies/practices and the experiences
of sanctuaries in disparate contexts. I also aim to contribute to the emerging research program
of the epistemologies of the South by complementing the prevailing emphasis on movements
in the geographic South by extending and developing research tools that can be used to
interpret the complexities, tensions, and complementarities of sanctuaries as paradigmatic,
postabyssal struggles of the South that emerge in the Global North. This study will extend and
revise the abolitionist sanctuary literature by parsing sanctuary actors’ political ideologies and
movement practices into the strategic dilemmas actors actually experience. And most of all, I
am committed to conducting research that will be of use to actors themselves – especially
those most vulnerable of being made absent – by supporting learning between sanctuary
groups, sites, geographic locations, and historical time periods through the sharing of materials
and tools, as well as through direct connection and dialogue.