CONTENTS

VI. ENDNOTES FROM PRIMARY DOCUMENT*…...………………………………………………………………………………………….35

VII. APPENDICES.….………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………………….……50

CHAPTER OUTLINE AND TIMELINE

Appendix A – Provisional Chapter Outline…………………………………………………………………………………………….………………….50

Appendix B – Prospective Timeline………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……….51

NOTES FROM SECTION I. THESIS, THEMES, AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Appendix C (from p. 2 n. 4; p. 4 n. 12; p. 8 n. 32; p. 85 n. xvii; p. 86 n. xviii) – Field Example #1: July 3rd, 2018 |
Judson Memorial Church….………………………………………..…..………………..……………………………………………………………….…52

Appendix D (from p. 6 n. 18 & 25) – The Emergence of the Debate Over Sanctuary as a Citizenship/ Post-Citizenship
Movement: Political Opportunity Theory and the Cultural-Agency and Emotions School……………………………….…….55

Appendix E (from p. 8 n. 32) – Rethinking the Genealogy of Sanctuary in the U.S. in Five Phases……….…………..….……58

Appendix F (from p. 9 n. 38; p. 15 n. 71 & 78; p. 48 n. i) – Overview of Sanctuary in New York City; Tucson, AZ; and
Montclair, NJ………..…………………………………………………………..………………………………………………………………………………...68

NOTES FROM SECTION II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

Appendix G (from p. 10 n. 47) – Field Example #2: Investigating the Liminality of Sanctuaries Between and Across
Analytic Borderlands………………………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…78

Appendix H (from p. 14 n. 63; p. 15 n. 66; p. 82; p. 90 n. xxviii) – Field Example #3: Interpreting Sanctuary
Mobilizations in Relation to Dual and Imbricated Carceral/Abolition Geographies……….………..…………………………...80

Appendix I (from p. 14 n. 63; p. 80) – Land as Sovereign Territory vs. Living Relationship in the Literature..……….…..81

NOTES FROM SECTION III. METHODOLOGIES

Appendix J (from p. 16 n. 78) – Detailed Overview and Examples of Three Methodological Challenges of Conducting
Research with Sanctuaries as Liberated Zones………………………………………………………………..……………..…………………….82

Appendix K (from p. 16 n. 78; p. 85 n. xxi) – Field Example #4: Accompanying Sanctuary Actors through Prefigurative
Gift Exchange in Epistemically-Liberated Zones……………………………………………………………………..……..……………..…...…92

NOTES FROM APPENDICES*

Appendix L (from p. 85 n. xx; p. 93) – Examples of Questions from Congregations Considering Sanctuary……………….93

Appendix M (from p. 86 n. xxiv) – Sanctuary Actors’ Temporal Reorientations……………...……..……….…………….….………96

VIII. SUPPLEMENTAL SELECTED REFERENCES………………………………….................................available upon request

_______________________________________
* Primary document endnotes (pp. 1-21, notes 1-97) use standard notation. Footnotes within appendices use roman numeral notation.

34
VI. Endnotes from Primary Document
• Field examples are highlighted below (see Appendices C, G, H, J, K, L, M).
• Short interpretive essays to be converted into parts of dissertation chapters are **double-starred that
discuss the emergence of the terms of sociological debate over sanctuary as a citizenship vs. post-
citizenship movement in the 1990s-2000s (Appendix D), reframe the genealogy of sanctuary
movements since the 1960s (Appendix E), and contextualize sanctuary in each research location
(Appendix F).

1
See Santos 2007, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, among others.
2
Bagelman 2019: 157.
3
Pleyers 2010: 193.
4
I encountered the most explicit crystallization of this tension during a sanctuary panel in late-2018. One of the
panelists was Steve Sacco, an NYC Legal Aid attorney working closely with sanctuary seekers and paid by NYC’s “New
York Immigrant Family Unity Project”, a “sanctuary city policy”. This policy assures city residents access to legal
representation regardless of immigration status, although not a right granted by federal law. Sacco asked panel
attendees: “Do we mean the end of citizenship? Do we mean that citizenship manufactures privilege for some and
thus oppression for others, and therefore should be abolished? I would argue yes.” Yet Steve, like many sanctuary
actors, spends most of his time helping people make legal arguments to avoid deportation and win citizenship and
permanent residency. (For another key example of the tension between citizenship/post-citizenship orientations
from fieldnotes, see Appendix C – Field Example #1 and Discussion: July 3rd, 2018 | Judson Memorial Church).
My argument builds on the investigations of many scholars who have noted the distinction between
sanctuary’s dual political orientations: “citizenship”, “liberal”, “reformist”, and the “major politics” of sanctuary on
the one hand, and “post-citizenship”, “non-citizenship”, “no borders”, “abolitionist”, and the “minor politics” of
sanctuary on the other hand. I diverge from the majority of these conceptualizations, however, in a fundamental
respect. Where others view these as discrete orientations of particular sanctuary mobilizations that are
irreconcilable with each other and result in factionalization and conflict between distinct sanctuary groups, in my
analysis, all sanctuary mobilizations must balance an explicit politics of citizenship and rights-claims with a
prefigurative, post-citizenship, postabyssal politics. The question is thus not whether any particular sanctuary
mobilization falls into the former or latter categories but, rather, how actors creatively navigate the tension that is
structurally inherent to a movement that must make claims of the state while simultaneously dismantling it, what
the Canadian sanctuary activist and migration scholar Harsha Walia (2014b: m. 79-83) so crisply captures in her
formulation of “citizenship [a]s survival pending revolution”.
That this tension between citizenship and post-citizenship orientations is pervasive in the vast majority of
contemporary social movements, and certainly not unique to sanctuary mobilizations, is widely established by
Jasper (1998) and other scholars of social movements (cf. Touraine 1981, 1988; Touraine et al. 1983; Melucci 1980,
1985, 1989, 1996; Pleyers 2010). In other movements, however, actors not only can select one or the other of
these polar and seemingly-incommensurable political visions, but doing so typically contributes to the coherence
and success of the movement. Sanctuary actors, in contrast, must consistently navigate the tension between
these two political orientations in order to survive as sanctuary mobilizations, a fact which has recently been
addressed, albeit only peripherally by a small handful of scholars (cf. Bagelman 2019; Walia 2013, 2016; Paik 2020;
Boyce et al. 2019). The fact that this tension is structurally “core” or constitutive of sanctuary can be discerned
from instances where actors are not able to navigate it generatively, instead straying too far toward one of the two
poles. Where the prefigurative, post-citizenship practices of mutual aid are emphasized at the expense of directly
challenging the apartheid regime of citizenship and border imperialism and working to redress their immediate
effects on racialized, poor, and indigenous peoples forced to seek sanctuary, those who are criminalized and
plundered by policy, law, and practice will not encounter so-called “sanctuary” mobilizations to reflect the actual
experience of sanctuary. Bagelman (2016) most provocatively illustrates this phenomenon, where sanctuary
becomes an empty slogan for those who are already in full possession of the rights and privileges of citizenship.

35
 Conversely, when sanctuary actors become too narrowly oriented towards rights-claims from the State for a
specific population category, undocumented immigrants or refugees for example, then nothing distinguishes it
from any other statist immigrant-rights movement. As Boyce and his colleagues (2019: 194, 195) examine in their
study of sanctuary mobilizations in Arizona, whether sanctuary’s politics of citizenship and rights-claims are
conceptualized more conventionally at the national level, or are imagined through an “alternative ethics” at the
municipal or sub-national level, “the effort to fold all political agency, claims and community into a framework of
citizenship… [overlooks the] exclusionary dimensions that are immanent to its logic.” If not complemented by a
post-citizenship or “no borders” orientation, sanctuary mobilizations not only reinforce the legitimacy of the state
to determine who is “deserving” of inclusion, but also increases the dependency of sanctuary actors on the very
state whose borders and logics they attempt to dismantle. As many critics of sanctuary have pointed out,
sanctuary’s citizenship orientation thereby threatens to reconstitute the biopolitical production of bare life and
intensify the urgency and scope of the needs in response to which sanctuary was initially mobilized.
Thus, sanctuary mobilizations entail both of these orientations existing in a constitutive tension with each other,
sometimes navigated with such deftness and agility that the tension provides the torque that animates the
movement, and sometimes torn apart under the divergent force this tension exerts on all sanctuary actors. While
the field note above depicts Ravi and Luis as symbolic of sanctuary’s citizenship and post-citizenship polarities, Juan
Carlos reflects, for the purpose of this example, how sanctuary mobilizations emerge, sustain, and proliferate
through the capacity to generatively navigate this as its core tension. This is, I argue, what Grace Yukich (2013: 141-
170) recognizes in her book about the early years of the New Sanctuary Movement, when she writes about Juan
Carlos as the ideal-typical example of a “crossover activist” who is able to simultaneously navigate multiple
institutional arenas and targets, specifically religious and political. What her analysis overlooks, however, is that this
is a necessary, but insufficient condition for fostering and sustaining sanctuary mobilizations. While her assertion is
certainly true and consistent with my interpretation, my analysis suggests that his capacity to generate “crossover
strategies” becomes salient to the extent that this enables him to generatively navigate the contradictions between
abyssal and postabyssal cartographies and their constitutive contradiction. This contradiction is borne out in practice
through the core tension of sanctuary as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid as “the beating heart that
animates sanctuary” (Bagelman 2019: 157).
On sanctuary as a “citizenship” or “post-citizenship” movement (cf. Jasper 2012; Smith 2012). On sanctuary as a
“citizenship” or “no borders” movement (cf. Boyce et al. 2019; Bauder 2016; Walia 2013, 2014, 2016). On sanctuary
as a “citizenship” or “non-citizenship” movement (cf. Nyers 2006). On the “major” versus “minor” politics of
sanctuary (cf. Squire & Darling 2013; Darling & Squire 2013; Darling 2017; Squire 2011; Squire & Bagelman 2012: 161;
Bagelman 2016). On “liberal” versus “abolitionist” sanctuary (cf. Paik 2017; 2020; Paik et al. 2019: 6; Maira 2019:
153-154; Roy 2019; Walia 2013: 182-184).
5
Paik 2017: 16.
6
Boyce et al. 2019: 195-197.
7
References to invocations of a “higher law” are too numerous to examine here. Especially prominent is Lippert
(2005: 150-163). The literature on the Sanctuary City, Sanctuary Church, and Sanctuary Organization as
approaches to capture sanctuary within particular institutional forms is also voluminous. For a collection that
includes many articles on the “Sanctuary City,” see, for example, Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles: Rescaling
Migration, Citizenship, and Rights (Darling & Bauder 2019). For a collection that includes resources on the
“Sanctuary Church”, see, for example, Sanctuary Movements in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship,
and Social Movements (Lippert & Rehaag 2012). For two prominent lenses on “Sanctuary Organizations”, see, for
example, Sanctuary Cities, Communities, and Organizations: A Nation at a Crossroads (Delgado 2018) and
“Sanctuary Networks” (Villazor & Gulasekharam 2019). And on the distinction between “civil disobedience” and
“civil initiative” as particular innovation of 1980s sanctuary mobilizations, see Bau (1985: 204 n. 83); Corbett (1988:
4-7); Fife (2014), among others.
8
Graeber 2001: 227-228, 237.
9
Graeber argues that sovereign power – whether new or established – must be constantly reaffirmed through
ritualized reenactments of popular consensus that “creat[e] mutual responsibilities… among people who are not

36
[kin… by] creating some invisible force of violence that has the power to enforce [the obligations to which they
commit].” For the analogous arguments made by scholars of sanctuary, see, for example, Czajka (2013: 44-46;
Ridgley: 2010). One prominent example of this argument, Walters (2010: 96) argues that sacred rituals of sanctuary
either call on the divine sovereignty of a “higher law” or on the state, thereby “guarantee[ing] that deportation will
be performed as a site of sovereignty… [by] armed bodies of men smashing down church doors, seizing, arresting,
pacifying, terrifying, removing bodies in full display of the public.”
10
Graeber 2001: 251.
11
In addition to providing the foundation for research questions, case- and site-selection, and the theoretical
framework, these categories will also serve as the basis for data coding and analysis.
12
Tensions between citizenship and post-citizenship include, for example, (a) setting movement objectives (e.g.
liberal/abolitionist), (b) determining strategies/tactics (e.g. “going public”/“private sanctuary”, (c) selecting targets
(e.g. state/non-state), (d) endorsing leadership styles (e.g. “Alinsky-style”/“Gandhi- and Romero-style”), (e)
constructing collective identities (e.g. ‘deservingness’), (f) elaborating narrative and framing devices (e.g.
religious/secular, humanitarian/political), (g) developing moral visions (e.g. “sanctuary for all”), (h) generating and
appealing to emotional motivations (e.g. trust/fear/anger/solidarity), and (i) mobilizing resources through moral
economies (e.g. municipal agencies/non-profit sector/mutual aid). Political opportunity structures include, for
example, (j) increasing political access, (k) elite divisions, (l) party alignments, and (m) influential allies, at multiple
scales.
The tension between sanctuary’s two political orientations as a nonabyssal, citizenship movement and a
postabyssal, post-citizenship movement plays out consistently in sanctuary mobilizations, taking many different
forms under distinct conditions. Sometimes it is perceptible in contestations between constructions of the
collective identity of sanctuary actors as undocumented refugees and asylum seekers, and of sanctuary
mobilizations as fundamentally oriented toward immigrant rights and justice, in struggle with those who aim to
construct a broader collective identity of who constitutes “part of our sanctuary community” as Luis describes,
referring to homeless folks who wondered why only Amanda should be able to find sanctuary at Holyrood (see
Appendix C).
At other times, this tension is manifested through intense disagreements regarding how distinct spaces of the
religious institution will be protected, and from whom. For example, at the San Adalberto Methodist Church in
Chicago, an armed private security guard was permanently stationed at the door of the church, requiring the
presentation of identification by any visitors. On the other end of the spectrum, Luis Barrios insisted on an “open
door policy” whereby the front doors of the church were kept open at least 12-18 hours every day. The question
of the openness of the physical space of the sanctuary space reflects larger disagreements in scholarship and
practice regarding sanctuary mobilizations as assertions of sovereignty, and are thus always complemented by
discussions among sanctuary actors regarding cooperation with local law enforcement. All of these tensions
further reflect the extent to which sanctuary actors experience the spaces declared to be sanctuaries as “liberated
zones”.
In still other instances, this tension can be observed in high-stakes debates regarding sanctuary’s most widely-
noted tactic of “going public”, which entails soliciting community support through broadly-publicized press
conferences, vigils, rallies, appeals to public officials, and other efforts to shape media narratives and
representations of sanctuary seekers as “deserving” of protection. Unless this person is already a vocal and visible
political activist, however, this tactic constitutes immense emotional and legal risk for the sanctuary seeker herself,
including the likelihood of lifelong legal vulnerability and media scrutiny, with the promise of community support,
but without the slightest assurance that it will improve her formal status or the success of her rights-claims.
Finally, these tensions also crystallize around distinct approaches to leadership and organizing strategies and
tactics, specifically around what one prominent sanctuary pastor described to me as “Alinsky-style” versus
“Gandhi- and Romero-style” leadership approaches. This is a distinction that has roots in the sanctuary movement
of the 1980s, specifically, in how sanctuary movement co-founder, Jim Corbett, conceptualized the distinction
between his (Gandhian) approach and the (Alinskyite) approach of Chicago sanctuary activists (see Corbett 1991:
105-108). One scholar who has devoted special attention to Corbett’s Gandhian philosophy is Leo Guardado
(2018: 128-142). Also see **Appendix E – The Emergence of the Debate Over Sanctuary as a Citizenship/Post-

37
Citizenship Movement: Political Opportunity Theory and the Cultural-Agency and Emotions School in the First Wave
of Sanctuary Movement Research.
13
Specific aims of sanctuary mobilizations that appear to be self-evident, but that require a fundamental
reconceptualization when viewed in relation to abyssal/postabyssal distinctions include (a) asserting sovereign
territorial control, (b) restructuring governance and decision-making processes, (c) appealing for political recognition
and social visibility, (d) constructing spaces/arenas for mobilization, (e) developing aspirational capacities in relation
to distinct temporalities, (f) elaborating and reinforcing liberal or abolitionist ideologies and strategies, and even (g)
demanding citizenship and rights.
When viewed with the second sight of the abyssal veil, sovereignty takes on the dual meanings of territorial
control – “a metaphor for the nation,” or as shared responsibility for each other and for the “land – the dirt beneath
our feet” (Kohn & McBride 2011: 99-104; also see Appendices H and I, below). Governance assumes the dual
meanings of the freedom of collective self-determination – governance “from below” (Walia 2014) – or its
constitutive antithesis – “a constant struggle… [between] freedom and governance” (Mancina 2019: 262).
Visibility/recognition is split into assertions of “presence vis-à-vis power” and “presence vis-à-vis each other” (Sassen
2013: 67). Mobilizing spaces and arenas become imbued with nonabyssal meanings as spaces of exception or spaces
of the expelled, and with the post-abyssal meanings of liberated zones or interlocking patterns across the terrain of
the apartheid regime of citizenship. Temporalities of aspirational capacities become either extractivist or
prefigurative (see Chowdhury, in Nail 2010). Liberal/abolitionist ideologies converge as nonabyssal visions in relation
to postabyssal decolonial and indigenous ones. Through a postabyssal lens, even citizenship is transvalued from the
primary objective of sanctuary mobilizations to a discursive repertoire to be deployed toward more radical
aspirations: “citizenship [a]s survival pending revolution” in Walia’s formulation.
14
These questions are grounded in an interpretation of political borders as restricting mobility, access, and
exposure, thereby constituting (e) “epistemologies of ignorance” or “blindness” among those on the dominant side of
the line that are frequently embedded in conventional sociological schemas in the form of extractivist
epistemologies.
On epistemically-liberated zones, see Santos (2018: chs. 6-7, 306 n. 12), and Sections II and III, below. On
“spaces of the expelled” as “conceptually subterranean because we cannot easily make them visible through
[prevailing] categories of meaning,” see Sassen (2014: 211-212). On the anthropology (and sociology) of the future,
see Appadurai 2013. Methodologies that challenge such extractivism include, for example, those developed (f) from
the standpoint of “the outsider-within” and (g) the “epistemologies of the South” that employ (h) “the more ample
version of realism” of the sociologies of absences and emergences to (i) focus on “power relations in… the control over
the agenda of politics” and to (j) detect infrapolitical “hidden transcripts”, (k) “dissident subcultures,” and (l)
“everyday forms of resistance… below the line.”
On “epistemologies of ignorance”, see Sullivan & Tuana (2007) and Mills (2007). On “epistemologies of
blindness”, see Santos (2014: 136-163). On “extractivist epistemologies”, see Smith (2012: 1, 58, 101), Grosfoguel
(2016), Simpson (2017: 73-81, 201-202). On “the outsider-within”, see Collins (2009: 13-15) (and on “insider/outsider
research, also see Smith [2012: 138-142]; on the “insider’s outsidedness”, see Bhabha [2012 (1994): 20]). On “the
more ample version of realism” of the sociologies of absences and emergences, see Santos (2014: 181-182). On
“power relations in… the control over the agenda of politics” as two-dimensional power, see Lukes (2005: 25). And,
on infrapolitical “hidden transcripts”, “dissident subcultures,” and “everyday forms of resistance… below the line,” see
Scott (1990: 198; also see Kelley 1996).
15
Bey 2003.
16
The particularly significant political, legal, and physical risks of sanctuary actors have been widely noted (see
Wiltfang & McAdam [1991]; Coutin [1993b]; Public Rights Private Conscience Project [2018, 2018b, 2018c]). Perhaps
since much of the sociological literature focuses on risks to sanctuary actors with citizenship, it is also necessary to
add that these risks are unimaginably greater for undocumented sanctuary actors (esp. see Golden & McConnell
[1986]).
17
Jasper 1997: 6-7.

38
18
A debate between Smith (1996, 2012), Jasper (2012), and Nepstad (2004; also see Nepstad & Smith 2000; see
**Appendix D) over whether U.S. sanctuary mobilizations in the 1980s reflected the dynamics of citizenship or post-
citizenship movements ultimately resulted in a tenuous consensus that they appeared to be post-citizenship
mobilizations, but that political opportunity structures seemed to be playing a greater role in determining their
emergence, success, and decline than Jasper’s theory predicts of this type of movement.
19
In addition to reconceptualizing the key distinction between social movements in the Global North before and
after the 1960s, Jasper discusses the epistemological implications of this new typology: “By contrasting [post-
citizenship movements] with a literature developed for citizenship movements, [investigators]… should be able to
see dynamics invisible to those with lenses created to focus on citizenship movements.” This initiated significant
debate – a “trouble in paradigms” (Goodwin & Jasper 2004: 75) – regarding the relationship between culture and
social structure in explaining social movements that Walder (2009) laments as having bifurcated the most salient
questions addressed by these two sociological subfields.
20
Nepstad 2004: 21, 136.
21
Walder 2009: 407.
22
In addition to Arendt (1973: ch. 9), this is specifically a reference to Judith Butler’s “Bodies in Alliance and the
Politics of the Street (2015: 80-81), where she (very) briefly discusses sanctuary in relation to the concept “spaces of
appearance”.
23
See Yukich 2013.
24
On the debate between political structures and cultural agency in relation to sanctuary, see Coutin (1993); Jasper
(1997); Nepstad & Smith (2000); Nepstad (2004); Jasper & Smith (2012), as well as the following note (n. 25).
25
Again, see **Appendix D – The Emergence of the Debate Over Sanctuary as a Citizenship/Post-Citizenship
Movement: Political Opportunity Theory and the Cultural-Agency and Emotions School in the First Wave of Sanctuary
Movement Research, on the ways that the debate about sanctuary in the mid-1990s and early 2000s misses the most
fundamental respects in which political opportunity structures at levels other than the nation-state were
instrumental in shaping early sanctuary mobilizations.
26
Morris & Braine 2001: 34.
27
Santos 2014: 71-72. As the “most fundamental problem confronting us in the first decades of the twenty-first
century,” the abyssal line is, of course, an explicit allusion to Du Bois’s 20th century color line (1903, cf. Du Bois
1921).
28
Santos 2014: 126.
29
While I have not found an extensive literature on “liberated zones,” what I have been able to locate largely
emerges from the decolonial movements of the 1960s and 70s in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Primary among
these are Cabral’s (1973) essays and speeches in Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle (1969), Our
People Are Our Mountains (1972), Return to the Source (1973), and Unity and Struggle (1979). After several
critiques of these localized, spatial conceptions of revolutionary politics and movement-building, such as Evans and
Boyte’s (1992) critique of their utopianism and Polletta and Jasper’s (2001) challenge of the spatialized reification
of relational and interactionist processes, there has been something of a resurgence of the idea, particularly in
relation to the Zapatista struggle and the global justice or alter-globalization movement that was heavily
influenced by it. This has, in turn, led to some recent theorizations of types of “liberated” or “autonomous zones”,
such as Barrios’s (1998) “liberating zones”, Bey’s (2003) Temporary Autonomous Zones, Walia’s (2013) “semi-
autonomous zones” and, of course, Santos’s (2018) privileged focus on the concept in his
political/social/epistemological theory. In line with this is the contribution to Santos’s (2007) edited volume,
Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon, of Buhlungu (2007) on liberated zones in South
Africa (also see Sader 2007).

39
30
Santos 2018: 21.
31
Santos 2018: 31.
32
Through the lens of the abyssal line, sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid
compels us to revisit the powerful – but deeply misleading – bifurcation of “abolitionist futures” and “liberal
sanctuary” (Paik 2017) in the emerging literature. While the first wave of sanctuary scholarship (c. 1985-2004)
subsumed these local self-determination struggles under the institutionalized domains of Church against State (see
Bau 1985; Cunningham 1995), a second wave of post-structuralist research (c. 2004-2016) reoriented the debate in
terms of territorial sovereignty versus advanced-liberal governmentality (see Lippert 2005; Ridgley 2010; Mancina
2013, 2016), arguing that those claiming sovereignty were, in fact, governmentalized. Against this earlier research,
recent “abolitionist sanctuary” scholarship recovers the first wave’s interpretation of sanctuary as grounded in post-
liberal and anti-imperialist political and moral visions (i.e. “liberation movements”), and not limited to migration as a
policy-issue or collective-identity (i.e. not ‘equality-based special issue’ or ‘social responsibility’ movements), but
does so by bifurcating sanctuary into liberal and abolitionist ideological factions (for a summary of my re-excavation
of sanctuary’s genealogy from 1967 to the present, **see Appendix E – Rethinking the Genealogy of Sanctuary in the
U.S. in Five Phases).
Abolitionist scholar-activist, Harsha Walia (2013, 2014, 2014b, 2016, 2016b, 2017, 2021, among others), stands
out against this essentialized analysis. Drawing on Angela Davis (See Abolition Democracy [2011]; also see Loyd &
Gilmore’s [2012] use of Gorz’s Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal), Walia (2013: 182-183) challenges “this dualism
pitting reformist against revolutionary strategies [as] often a false one, rooted more in theoretical abstractions than
actual practice.” For Walia, “organizing to meet the immediate needs of undocumented migrants and refugees…
facilitates them becoming more involved in radical movements.” That those ‘seeking’ sanctuary and those ‘offering’
it often experience what one sanctuary pastor described as “radicalization through relationships” (Vogel 2019:
personal communication) is also borne out in my fieldwork.
Rethinking the debate away from abolitionist versus liberal ideologies and instead towards the core tension of
citizenship and post-citizenship retains abolitionist scholars’ insights while avoiding essentialist tendencies. It
acknowledges that all sanctuary mobilizations reflect contingent assemblages of citizenship and post-citizenship
logics, and that efforts of actors like Sacco (for another example of sanctuary actors attempting to navigate this
tension (see Appendix C – Field Example #1 and Discussion: July 3rd, 2018 | Judson Memorial Church) between this
duality must become the focus of empirical investigation. It conceptualizes these orientations as fluid, as actors like
Pastor Vogel and his congregation shift how these logics are balanced over time and in relation to material conditions
– unlike political ideology – not in actors’ immediate control. And it creates conceptual space for investigations
reflective of postabyssal methodologies and oriented to ascertain “how decolonial imperatives can inform
abolitionist and no borders organizing” (Loyd 2019: 104) in relation to pragmatic exigencies of carceral geographies
(Gilmore 2017: 225) and the “apartheid system of citizenship” (Walia 2013). Drawing upon relational schemas of
nascent decolonial sociologies like Santos’s (also see Go [2013] and Bhambra [2007]) and an emerging “anarchist
anthropology” (Graeber 2004: 6) that reconceptualize political orientations of social movements as grounded less in
ideological differences over “theoretical… discourse about revolutionary strategy” than in “ethical discourse[s] about
revolutionary practice,” sanctuary’s core tension is transmuted into a new window through which to reconsider the
relationship between social structure and movements’ political orientations.
33
Boyce et al. 2019.
34
Mancina 2016: 421.
35
Bauder 2015.
36
Sassen 2006.
37
Bagelman 2016.
38
**See Appendix F – Overview of Sanctuary in New York City; Tucson, AZ; and Montclair, NJ, for a further
elaboration of how these local contexts are essential in shaping the ways that sanctuary’s core tension is experienced
by movement actors.

40
39
Arendt 1973: 296-297.
40
Agamben 1998: 90.
41
Agamben 1998: 22; 2005.
42
Sassen 2013: 67.
43
Sassen 2006: 379-380, 386, 319-321.
44
Sassen 2014: 222.
45
Though the transformative potential of spaces of the expelled may be inferred from the dominant perspective
using “analytic borderlands”, Sassen only goes so far as to suggest the ways in which prevailing sociological
categories are insufficient for ascertaining the textured complexities of these disruptions as experienced by actors.
46
Sassen 2014: 211-212.
47
When, for example, a prominent sanctuary activist, Juan Carlos Ruiz, explained movement actors’ experience of
sanctuary practices as “not legal, and… also not illegal,” conventional sociological thought proceeds either by
delineating such practices into two separately-bounded categories or recognizing this as the mystification of a “true
believer”. For Juan Carlos, however, like for Daniel and Justin from New Mexico, or Vania and Saptagiri (see
Appendix G – Field Example #2: Investigating the Liminality of Sanctuaries Between and Across Analytic Borderlands),
to take either of these approaches would misconstrue and subvert their efforts to untangle the complex ways
political, professional, and discursive boundaries materialize – including within and between sanctuaries – as
obstructions to actors’ navigational capacity to aspire (for a discussion of Appadurai’s conception of “the capacity to
aspire [a]s a navigational capacity,” see note 78, and Appendix J, below), and to organize in spaces and with people
whose identities are multiply constituted within, against, and beyond the bounded statist categories (Sitrin &
Holloway 2009). The successful navigation of these boundaries is precarious: efforts to surmount one of them – the
distinction between citizen and non-citizen or community member and institutional representative, for example –
frequently reinforce several others (see McGarry & Jasper 2015). While Sassen’s framework suggests that the
complex entanglement of these material-discursive categories and borders must be understood not only as distinct
phenomena, but also as the same phenomena viewed in relation to distinct political contexts, she stops short of
elaborating the complementary toolkit with which spaces of the expelled might be more robustly analyzed as the
“new spaces for making”.
48
Santos 2014: 165, 123-124; 2016: 19.
49
Santos 2018: 21, 23, 149; 2014: 131.
50
Whereas earlier distinctions between citizenship and post-citizenship mobilizations obviated the paradoxical
nature of movements with hybrid orientations by averring rights-claims as the ultimate objective of the former and
the precondition of the latter, viewing this distinction through the prism of the abyssal line demands an additional
analytic register where rights, citizenship, and sovereignty are denaturalized. It is from this standpoint that liberated
zones become paradigmatic of postabyssal struggles, as precisely those sites from which rights may be claimed as
only one among extensive possibilities for being political. They are where actors choose how to construct political
subjectivities, relationships, and communities, and where they encounter myriad dilemmas regarding the extent to
which to practice the constitutive opposition of sovereign power and bare life, on the one hand, and the new ways to
conceptualize non-sovereign forms of collective self-determination, on the other. These liberated zones – within and
between which actors navigate citizenship and post-citizenship political orientations – are thus where investigators
might glimpse the possibilities and pitfalls of the “new spaces for making” as vast and contingent fields of
postabyssal presences and futures.
51
Santos 2014: 92, 237-238; 2018: 306 n. 12.
52
Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002, 2002b, 2003.

41
53
Scott 1998.
54
See Bourdieu (1977: 191) and Scott (1985: 306-307). Where this epistemic liberation is precluded in Agamben’s
camps, and only inferable in Sassen’s spaces of the expelled, the sociologies of absences and emergences are
specifically designed to elucidate the dynamics of epistemically-liberated zones. The first principle of this
epistemology entails learning about “democracy from the perspective of slaves and slave-like workers… learn[ing]
about citizenship from… noncitizens, refugees, undocumented migrant workers and colonial subjects… [studying]
civil society from the perspective of those abyssally excluded… [and evaluating] human rights from the perspective of
large populations considered subhuman” (Santos 2018: 297). These a priori categories must themselves be
subjected to reconceptualization from the perspectives of those for whom they are most likely to be experienced as
ideological mystifications.
55
Walia 2014b: m. 79-83.
56
For Arendt’s conceptualization of “spaces of appearance”, see The Human Condition (Arendt 1998: 198-212).
57
Butler 2015: 73, 74, 77, 85.
58
Interpreting the Tahrir Square protests as reflective of a globally-emergent “politics of the street” that includes
sanctuary movements, Butler (2015: 81, 88, 89-90) argues that “the simple act of sleeping… in the square, was the
most eloquent political statement – and even must count” as political action, in that “they were breaking down a
conventional distinction between public and private in order to establish new relations of equality… [by]
incorporating into the very social form of resistance the principles they were struggling to realize in broader political
forms.” Because any action – not simply public speaking – can create new political spaces, she challenges Arendt’s
“problematic division of labor” that separates individuals into “two different bodies”: an “active body” that
participates in political life, and the “dimension of bodily life that is given, passive, opaque, and so excluded from…
the political.” Conceding, however, the real effects of these spatial metaphors on the capacities of individuals and
groups to act, Butler insists that “a certain topographical or even architectural regulation of the body happens at the
level of theory” as an important mechanism for the operation of power. These operations of power must be viewed
both critically, recognizing for example that the right to have rights “is codified nowhere… it is not granted elsewhere
or by existing law,” while also attending to the ways in which existing laws, and “the established regime of space”
more generally, may be generatively deployed by actors as “a set of material supports both mobilized and
mobilizing.”
59
Emirbayer 1997: 282-303.
60
Butler 2015: 85.
61
These questions echo the ancient philosophical debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides over an “ultimate
reality… of constant flux and transformation” versus a “reality… at which forms are fixed and perfect” (Graeber 2001:
50). While the first question may be addressed by reading Santos’s epistemologies of the South through Butler’s
politics of the street, which I will take up in the dissertation, the second question requires an initial elaboration of the
relationship between two modalities of space and time. For the present purposes, this means that citizenship and
post-citizenship movement repertoires must not be conflated with abyssal and postabyssal standpoints, nor with the
internal logic of any “established regime of space”. To do so would reinscribe the existing boundaries of political,
sociological, and geographic categories onto individual’s bodies, collectivities, practices, and spaces/times, and
impose these deductive lenses onto the struggles for world-making of actors facing open futures – bleak as they may
sometimes appear.
62
Lefebvre 1996 [1968]: 131-132.
63
See Appendix H – Field Example #3: Interpreting Sanctuary Mobilizations in Relation to Dual and Imbricated
Carceral/Abolition Geographies. Also see Appendix I – Land as Sovereign Territory vs. Living Relationship in the
Literature.
64
Gilmore 2017: 227-229, 231.

42
65
Gilmore 2017: 227.
66
To research and “think this way is to think deductively (there are forms) and inductively (interlocking patterns
reveal generalities which might or might not be structural)… and [to] explain the formalities and improvisations of
place-making” (Gilmore 2017: 229). Again, see Appendix H – Field Example #3: Interpreting Sanctuary Mobilizations
in Relation to Dual and Imbricated Carceral/Abolition Geographies.
67
See, especially, those of Coutin (1993), Mancina (2012, 2016, 2019), Yukich (2010, 2013), and Bagelman (2016,
2019).
68
Burawoy 1998, 2000, 2008.
69
Bagelman 2016: 109-110.
70
“In practice, approaching sanctuary through a global-intimate lens means being attentive to how movements are
being organized (not just the spectacular major moment)… [and] draws our attention to the slow work and (often
gendered) emotional labour that goes into building and sustaining places of safety for people with precarious
status… not always seen or heard” (Bagelman 2019: 257).
71
See Section I.C and **Appendix F.
72
Emerson et al. 2011.
73
For ANT, these four notebooks include: log, categorizable, writing trials, and experimentally-risky accounts
(Latour 2005: 134-135).
74
Bagelman 2016, 2019.
75
Also referred to as “dominant” and “subjugated” knowledges (Foucault 1976: 81-83, Squire & Darling 2013) and
“official” and “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990).
76
Bagelman 2016: 108-114.
77
McClelland & Fine 2008: 233.
78
As discussed in the theoretical overview, the nature of epistemically-liberated zones – as sites where actors are
oriented toward carceral geographies as well as toward the imbricated abolition geographies of world-making –
poses three methodological challenges (elaborated in detail in Appendix J – Detailed Overview and Examples of
Three Methodological Challenges of Conducting Research with Sanctuaries as Liberated Zones). The first involves
interpreting sanctuary’s dual logics in relation to two epistemologically incommensurable geographies: boundary-
making carceralism and world-making abolitionism. The second stems from the contingent unpredictability of these
prefigurative, experimental contexts where actors display thoroughgoing critical-reflexivity and resistance to
prevailing political and sociological categories. The third challenge emerges from the conflicting temporal
orientations of epistemically-liberated zones: pedagogical prefiguration, on the one hand, and carceralism’s temporal
extraction through “asynchronous, fragmented, and elongated experiences” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013: 158), on the
other. To the extent previous sanctuary research has been conceptually and empirically limited, it is largely a result
of a failure to adequately account for these theoretical and methodological challenges.
Designed to reflect Burawoy’s “methodological duality, the coexistence and interdependence of two models of
science - positive and reflexive,” I address the first challenge through (a) case-selection, (b) site-selection, (c) cross-
paradigmatic interviews (Moran-Ellis 2006: 50), and (d) focus group design. My three cases are all subject to carceral
geography – albeit in different forms (see **Appendix F) – but differentially positioned in relation to it. By
comparing actors’ situated experiences of this carceral landscape, and through site-selection that includes liberated
zones in addition to carceral sites like immigration courts, detention centers, and federally-funded non-profit and
legal-aid organizations helping undocumented people navigate these institutions, this study will allow for an
interpretation of the tensions and incongruities between these geographies, as well as the moments where
mobilizing in relation to one enhances actors’ capacities to aspire and navigate the other. Previous observations

43
suggest that actors in the selected mobilizations have some basis of existing connections with each other, and have
expressed hopes of deepening these relationships. By attending to efforts to construct and sustain relationships not
only within each of these cases, but also between them – deploying their experiences of “borders as cartographies
of… struggles” (Walia 2013: 77) – this study’s case- and site- selection methods will enable inquiry into the “world-
making” efforts to form “interlocking patterns of abolition geographies,” and the contingencies and hazards of such
attempts. Sequential and iterative sampling, multi-phase interviews, and focus groups with participants both within
particular sites, and across distinct sites will reinforce this study’s capacity to surmount this challenge.
To address the second challenge, I apply a modified version of actor-network-theory, beginning with Latour’s
(2005: 12, 24-25) first exhortation: “follow the actors”, and “be prepared to cast off agency, structure, psyche, time,
and space [and] every other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common
sense they may appear.” To do this, I use (a) inconvenience sampling, (b) modified sociological intervention focus
groups, (c) critical-participatory phase-three interviews, (d) a designated experimentally-risky accounts field
notebook, (e) diatopical hermeneutics (Santos 2014: 91-92, 219-229; 2018: 250-251), and (f) existing relationships
with community elders and institutional governance bodies in each research location (see Smith 2012: 140-141, 186,
Ch. 10). Inconvenience sampling ensures consideration of “perspectives or observations outside the sample whose
existence is likely to have implications for the argument,” and incorporates these perspectives not as outliers, but as
integral to the snowball and stratified sampling for focus groups and the second and third phases of interviews.
Further, in order to systematically and reflexively account for the effects of engaged research in the prefigurative
gift-exchanges of ethnography-as-accompaniment, critical-participatory design of phase-three interviews and
sociological intervention focus groups that invite actors into the process of reflecting on the study design and
implementation (see Appendix K – Field Example #4: Accompanying Sanctuary Actors through Prefigurative Gift
Exchange in Epistemically-Liberated Zones), as well as a specially-designated notebook as a variation of Latour’s
(2005: 135) “second experiment, added to the fieldwork itself… [are essential tools] to check how an account plays
its role of assembling the social… [and to document] the trails left in [the] wake” of such “risky accounts”.
I will also assume Santos’s (2014, 2018) diatopically-hermeneutic reflexivity, “keeping one foot in existing
institutions with a view to changing them, and the other in new institutions of their own creation,” thereby
navigating a complex research positionality with a dual reflexivity in relation to dual geographies. Finally, beginning
my inquiry with between five and ten community elders (listed below) in each location with whom I have developed
existing relationships through previous research in each location will increase the likelihood of access to sensitive
information, especially regarding divergent experiences and tensions underlying what may otherwise be publicly
presented as the monolithic uniformity of official transcripts. The central concern that initiating research through
existing institutional relationships can alienate divergent movement actors who may come to identify the researcher
with the orientations of established leadership will be mitigated through the four strategies presented in the two
previous paragraphs.
To address the third challenge, I apply “the capacity to aspire [a]s a navigational capacity” elaborated by
Appadurai’s anthropology/sociology of the future through (a) site-selection, (b) the collection of archival materials in
each research site, and (c) the application of critical epistemologies to the design of focus groups and the second and
third phases of interviews. Through document analysis, I will be able to recognize how sanctuary work has evolved
over time, and how individual and collective actors’ “horizons of aspirations” have shifted. By integrating the logics
of inconvenience, snowball, and stratified sampling not only to interview and focus group recruitment, but also to
site selection itself, I will also be able to identify how actors’ temporal orientations shift in relation to distinct action
contexts/arenas. And by integrating the critical-realism of internal conversational interviews and the critical-
participatory epistemologies of the South through pluralistic triangulation in multi-phase interviews and focus
groups, I will be able to interpret how elements of citizenship and post-citizenship logics – and abyssal and
postabyssal orientations – affect the temporal orientations of actors.

Initial Interviewees and Institutional Affiliations:

A. New York City, New York
1. Luis Barrios – Senior Pastor, Holyrood/Santa Cruz Episcopal Church
2. Juan Carlos Ruiz – Senior Pastor, Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
3. Ravi Ragbir – Executive Director, New Sanctuary Coalition
4. Tara Geer – Founder, Action Potluck
5. Fabián Arias – Senior Pastor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church

44
 6. Sunita Viswanath – Co-founder and Executive Board Member, Sadhana and Hindus for Human Rights
7. Donna Schaper – Senior Minister, Judson Memorial Church
8. Angela Fernández – Former Director of the Northern Manhattan Immigrant Rights Coalition and the NY State
Division of Human Rights
9. Elora Mukherjee – Director, Columbia University Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic
10. Schuyler Vogel – Senior Minister, Fourth Universalist Society
11. Michael Livingston – Senior Minister, Riverside Church
12. Michael Orzechowski – Director of Housing and Campus Services, Union Theological Seminary
B. Montclair, New Jersey
1. Eric Scherzer – Former Sanctuary Co-Coordinator, Bnai Keshet; and Liaison, Montclair Sanctuary Alliance
2. Peter Wert – Member, First Congregational Church; and First Congregational Church Representative to
Montclair Sanctuary Alliance
3. Reverend Ann Ralosky – Senior Pastor, First Congregational Church of Montclair
4. Rabbi Elliott Tepperman – Bnai Keshet Reconstructionist Synagogue
5. Reverend Anya Sammler-Michael – Senior Co-Minister, Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair
6. Catherine Mulroe – Refugee Assistance Project Coordinator, St. Teresa of Calcutta Parish and Catholic
Charities
7. Alan Keller – Member, North Jersey Sanctuary Alliance Network of Homes; Founder, Bellevue Program for
Survivors of Torture; Director, NYU Center for Health and Human Rights
8. Michelle Fine – Member, Bnai Keshet Reconstructionist Synagogue
C. Tucson, Arizona
1. Randy Mayer – Founder/Leader, Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritan; and Senior Pastor, Good Shepherd United
Church of Christ.
2. John Fife – Former Pastor, Southside Presbyterian Church
3. Alison Harrington – Pastor, Southside Presbyterian Church
4. Katherine Franke - James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Columbia University; and Founder/Faculty Director, Law,
Rights, and Religion Project
5. Ellen Yaroshefsky – Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics, Hofstra University Law School; and Director,
Monroe H. Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics
6. Noel Anderson – Grassroots Coordinator, Church World Service; and Lead Organizer, UCC Collaborative on
Immigration
7. Leo Guardado – Former Member and Sanctuary Volunteer, Southside Presbyterian Church
8. Stephanie Quintana – Former Member and Sanctuary Volunteer, Southside Presbyterian Church
79
Especially during months 1-2.
80
Especially during months 2-3.
81
Especially during months 3-4.
82
Phase-one interview questions will be organized into the following categories:
(i) Timeline and map of local sanctuary mobilizations – History and current context of sanctuary
mobilizations in this location, highlighting (a) specific individual, organizational, and government players;
(b) long- and short-term movement objectives, campaigns/initiatives, recruitment/mobilizing strategies
(of people as well as material resources [i.e. money, in-kind donations, etc.]); (c) moments of transition,
internal movement conflict, and movement growth; (d) perceived achievements and defeats, including
impact on the trajectory of organizing; and (e) other events of symbolic importance for the movement.
(ii) Situating sanctuary mobilizations in context – Relevant policy context and changes, including at national,
local, and transnational levels; specific attention will be devoted to political opportunity structures (e.g.
access, elite divisions, party alignments, elite allies), as well as shifting movement composition (e.g. did
new recruits bring alternative orientations) that may have affected the emergence of tensions, dilemmas,
movement orientations. This set of questions will also probe for particular changes in political
opportunities that actors perceive as having resulted from sanctuary mobilizations themselves (either as
successes or as backlash).

45
 (iii) Respondent’s direct experience of movement tensions and liberated zones – Current as well as past
experiences, and individual as well as organizational involvement of respondent in sanctuary
mobilizations. Special emphasis will be devoted to challenges, tensions, debates, factions, and aspirations
encountered by the respondent, their allies, and other groups of which they are part. These questions
will probe for respondent’s insider-knowledge of 1-3 moments and sites where sanctuary’s core tension is
likely to be most visible, and where sanctuary reflects the characteristics of liberated zones. These
questions will be designed to gauge the potential of conducting phase two interviews with this
respondent in relevant situations.
(iv) Suggested contacts and sites – More informal request for research guidance, including specific individuals
to contact/interview, organizations to connect with, sites for participant-observation, and available
archives/materials (institutional and individual) of which respondent is aware. These questions will be
specifically oriented to support inconvenience, snowball, and stratified sampling methods, respectively.
Phase-two interview questions will be organized into the following categories:
(i) Description of situation – Taking a narrative approach, particular emphasis will be devoted to
understanding respondents’ definition of the situation (cite Goffman), as well as their awareness of their
political, social, and cultural position in relation to other actors in the situation. These questions will
probe actors’ reflections on the situation in relation to the sub-themes of particular significance to the
abyssal line: (a) sovereignty, (b) governance, (c) visibility, (d) mobilizing spaces, (e) temporal orientations,
(f) political ideologies, and (g) citizenship rights (enumerated in section I.A.ii.a - I.A.ii.g).
(ii) Experience of movement tensions and complementarities – Using a dual approach that incorporates
narrative and internal conversational elements, these questions will probe respondents’ discussions of the
sub-themes from point (i) to gauge the degree to which they experience tensions (a) between distinct
actors, (b) between types of actors, and (c) within the internal deliberations of respondents themselves.
Tensions between citizenship and post-citizenship goals and repertoires experienced as strategic and
ethical dilemmas will be highlighted, as well as how actors in these situations attempt to navigate and
resolve these dilemmas.
(iii) Toolkits for abyssal/postabyssal translation in liberated zones – These questions will ascertain how
actors who are situated on distinct sides of the abyssal line develop strategic, cognitive, and affective
repertoires in an effort to construct shared meanings across these disparate social and political positions.
Because this kind of translation is a feature of liberated zones, questions will probe for ways tensions
from point (ii) differentially affect actors’ capacities to develop translation repertoires in the context of
the specific characteristics of liberated zones, including (a) significant risks undertaken, (b)
prefigurative/pedagogical orientation, (c) non-citizenship goals and repertoires pursued by those without
citizenship, and (d) engagement between groups situated on distinct sides of the abyssal line.
(v) Suggested contacts and sites – More informal in nature, these questions will include requests for
available archives/materials (institutional and individual) of which respondent is aware, as well as for
additional sites and situations that may be pertinent to the themes that emerge throughout the
interview. These questions will probe for potential interest in participating in focus groups and phase-
three interviews, as well as for support in inconvenience, snowball, and stratified sampling procedures.
Phase-three interview questions will be organized into the following categories:
(i) Evolution over time – In order to trace respondent’s engagement with shifting discourses and practices
over time, and in the context of distinct situations, these questions will build on question (iii) from phase-
one and question (ii) from phase-two regarding respondent’s interpretation of tensions and
complementarities between sanctuary’s hybrid repertoire. These questions will probe for new reflections
regarding previous situations as well as for new situations that are observed or emerge in the course of
investigation, with special attention given to the sub-themes discussed earlier. Using critical-participatory
triangulation, specific materials from previous interviews, focus groups, observations, and document
analysis will be presented back to respondents, along with open-ended questions that probe the
evolution of their internal conversations and deliberations over several months.
(ii) Translating across the abyssal line (North/South translation [Santos 2018: 34, 219-230]) – Using critical-
participatory triangulation, these questions will be informed by themes and challenges that emerge from
focus groups conducted with actors within particular liberated zones. Special emphasis will be placed on

46
 highlighting moments from focus group conversations in which distinct meanings, discourses, and
repertoires emerge between actors, and will probe the individual respondent for further interpretation
and reflection regarding the themes, experiences, and questions discussed. For all respondents, and
especially those not in focus groups, these questions will be further supplemented with materials from
previous interviews as well as from archival and observational data to elicit respondents’ experiences of
North-South translation.
(iii) Translating between liberated zones (South/South translation [Santos 2018: 34, 230-243]) – These
questions will be structured like those of the previous set of questions, but will pertain to respondents’
experiences mobilizing in distinct contexts, i.e. navigating between, rather than within, distinct liberated
zones. This set of questions will probe respondents’ experiences and attitudes towards tensions and the
potential for complementarities and alliance-building with other movements, organizations, groups, and
liberated zones, including those that may not be explicitly oriented to sanctuary work, or to migration
more generally, and specifically their efforts to share tools and resources between individuals and groups.
(iv) Interrogating diatopical reflexivity – These questions will gauge the impact of the research methods on
the context of action, and will invite actors into the process of determining how data is coded and
analyzed, and how findings are presented to contribute most effectively to movement goals.
83
Duneier 2011: 9.
84
Josselson 2004, 2011; Chase 2005.
85
Archer 2003: 161-162.
86
Moran-Ellis et al. 2006; Frost 2009; Torre et al. 2012; Santos 2018: 247-268.
87
Fernandes 2017.
88
Katsiaficas et al. 2011: 124-125.
89
Such texts include, for example, publications, email communications, recordings, photographs, and archival
materials.
90
Torre et al. 2012: 8-11.
91
Moran-Ellis 2006: 50.
92
Santos 2018: 34, 219-230.
93
Santos 2018: 34, 230-243.
94
The design of focus groups, document analysis, and hermeneutic analysis will proceed as follows. Focus-groups
with multiple participants will be conducted at the end of months two, three, and four. These focus groups will
reflect a modified version of sociological intervention: the group will be “as diversified as possible and… [formed] of
individuals who simply belong to the population that feels most committed… [and who demonstrate] awareness of a
disharmony between the movement and its forms of action and organization” (Touraine 1981: 151, 153; 1983). At
the end of months two and three, respectively, focus groups will be conducted with roughly five participants in two
sanctuary congregations, coalitions, or alliances that have been observed to reflect the characteristics of liberated
zones. Conducted in the latter-half of research in each site, and after the initial inconvenience sampling to reflect a
cross-section of organizational affiliations, identity groups (e.g. documented/undocumented), and political
orientations, focus groups will reflect the broadest possible range of emergent tensions, debates, and factions, and
avoid privileging any one of them. At the end of month four, individuals from the previous two focus groups will be
selected to participate in a third focus group. This will facilitate the gathering of data that not only reflects a
representative cross-section of perspectives in isolation, but also the possibilities and obstacles for translating across
these standpoints and meanings of actors in distinct settings. When possible, additional focus-groups will be
conducted between sanctuary actors across geographic locations. The questions asked during focus groups will be

47
drawn from questions (i)-(iii) of phase-one interviews and questions (ii)-(iv) of phase-three interviews, and will be
tailored to the specific experiences of participants.
Both textual and multimedia archival materials will be collected using current and historical archival collections
in each congregation, coalition, and alliance, as well as in specifically-designated sanctuary archives. Textual
materials include policy documents, periodicals, speech transcripts, interview transcripts, first-person written
accounts (e.g. journals, letters, emails), education and training manuals, and campaign publicity materials (e.g. fliers,
posters, pamphlets). Multimedia materials include photographs, video and audio recordings, and other artifacts that
can be photographed or copied for review. The three types of archival sources that will be consulted are (a)
historical, (b) organizational, and (c) individual. This categorization, though non-exhaustive, is helpful in delineating
the three major archival sources: universities, organizations (i.e. religious congregations, sanctuary coalitions,
advocacy organizations), and individual actors who have collected materials over long-standing movement
participation. University archives include Graduate Theological Union, “The Public Sanctuary Movement: An
Historical Basis of Hope, Oral Histories,” and “The Gustav Shultz Collection,” (Berkeley, CA); University of Arizona,
“The Sanctuary Trial,” and “Miriam Davidson Papers,” (Tucson, AZ); Union Theological Seminary, private archives,
(New York City); Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Carol Cummings and Frank Cummings Papers,” and “Young
Friends of North America: Committee on Conscription Records,” (Pennsylvania). Organizational and individual
archives will be sought at each site of ethnographic observation, and from each interview respondent and focus-
group participant. Consistent with genealogical-ethnographic method, and in alignment with the three phases of
interviews and participant observation, archival materials will be consulted in four iterative.
The first phase of archival research has already been conducted, and includes materials collected through the
three years of exploratory research previously discussed, as well as materials available from digital databases,
organizational and municipal government websites, and primary/secondary print publications.i The focus of
inquiry, research questions, and sub-themes discussed above have all been developed based on extensive content
analysis of these documents. The second phase of archival research will take place during the first month of
research in each location, concurrent to the first phase of interviews, the third phase will take place during months
two through four, and the fourth phase will take place after site-based fieldwork has been completed.
During the first month in each location, I will begin collecting available archives at relevant universities,
organizations, congregations, and government agencies, as suggested by initial interview respondents. I will also
request materials from interview respondents both in preparation for interviews, as well as those that emerge as
potentially relevant during interviews. During this phase, documents will be provisionally reviewed to amend and
focus the sub-themes of greatest relevance in each location, to tailor interview questions to local context, to assist
in mapping the local landscape and timeline of sanctuary, to assess current and previous policy changes, and to
assist in identifying additional liberated zones and other research sites for observation and interviewee
recruitment.
The third phase of archival research will take place during months two through four, with particular attention
devoted to discerning sanctuary’s minor politics, subjugated knowledges, and hidden transcripts as they may be
subtly present in materials that had been reviewed prior to observations and interviews. A more thorough review
of materials collected in phases one and two will be conducted, and an initial coding schema will be developed to
guide the organization of data, the elaboration of the second and third phases of interviews and focus groups, and
the identification of a final round of archival sources to fill potential gaps that emerge through systematic coding.
After all interviews, participant observation, and focus groups have been completed, transcribed, coded, and
analyzed, the final phase of archival research will be conducted. This phase will be comprised of more closely
reviewing materials for continuities and incongruities between historical experiences and current findings, with the
goal of identifying additional questions and insights for further studies.ii
Ethnographic, interview, focus group, and documentary data will be coded, memoed, and analyzed using
Emerson (Emerson et al. 2011) in the three phases corresponding with interviews and document analysis, and as

i
See references in **Appendix F – Overview of Sanctuary in New York City; Tucson, AZ; and Montclair, NJ. Also see
Supplemental Selected References.
ii
See Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography on one approach that will inform textual analysis. Also, the sub-
themes from the introduction of this proposal will be used to elaborate memos and coding procedure.

48
modified in relation to Latour’s (2005: 127) “textual accounts as the social scientist’s laboratory,” and Santos’s
diatopical hermeneutics. For Santos, the ecologies of knowledges (the primary epistemological tool of the
sociology of absences) can only be employed using translational contact zones and diatopical hermeneutics (the
primary epistemological tools of the sociology of emergences). Ecologies of knowledges as an epistemological
orientation is developed to challenge hegemonic monocultures that naturalize the universalizing epistemologies of
the North by empirically excavating and highlighting “alternatives that never occurred because they were
prevented from emerging,” as well as those “alternatives that did occur, but the types of scale, perspective,
resolution, time compression, and signature used by science did not recognize them at all or took them for
residues” (Santos 2014: 153).
By paying particular attention to the tensions between sanctuary’s citizenship and post-citizenship orientations –
especially from the standpoint of liberated zones where carceral and abolition geographies converge in analytic
borderlands – data that are assembled into textual accounts will be constructed as “translational contact zones”.
These are “in-between spaces” or “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994; Soja 1996), “social fields in which different cultural
life worlds meet, mediate, negotiate, and clash” (Santos 2014: 218). Because all translational contact zones are
constituted by inequalities between the concepts, worldviews, languages, and actors who come together, Santos
proposes a diatopical hermeneutics as the primary epistemological tool for “reducing such inequality” by (a)
“identify[ing] isomorphic concerns among [distinct cultures],” (b) making visible the “incompleteness” of each
cultural schema, and (c) “rais[ing] the consciousness of the reciprocal incompleteness to its possible maximum by
engaging in the dialogue… with one foot in one culture and the other in another” (Santos 2014: 218). Dancing with
“one foot” in sociology, carceral geography, and a nonabyssal standpoint, and another in the lived experience of
movement actors, abolition geographies, and postabyssal liberated zones, the third phase of interviews and focus
groups will aim to extend insights from diatopical hermeneutic analysis of the first phases by fostering additional
“textual accounts” with the direct participation of movement actors, thereby extending Latour’s social scientific
laboratories beyond the texts themselves.
95
Walia 2013: 77.
96
This refers to Santos’s (2010: 226-227) conception of the necessary “reinvent[ion of] social emancipation” from
the standpoint of the Global South – a “South understood as a metaphor of the human suffering caused by
capitalism,” colonialism, and patriarchy.
97
Weis & Fine 2012: 196.

49
VII. Appendices
I. Appendices

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix A | Provisional Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
1. Introduction

II. Theory, Methodology, Sanctuary in the Literature

2. Theory
a. Social movement studies and political sociology
b. The decline of the nation-state, the catastrophes of capital, and the crises of citizenship
c. Decolonial, abolitionist, and indigenous perspectives on bordering practices and liberated zones
3. Methodology/Epistemology
a. Overview of methods
i. Case-selection v. Focus group design
ii. Site-selection vi. Archival resources
iii. Fieldnote methods vii. Coding, memoing, and hermeneutic analysis
iv. Respondent sampling
b. Overview of cases
i. New York City
ii. Montclair, New Jersey
iii. Tucson, Arizona
c. Epistemologies of ignorance and epistemically-liberated zones
i. Epistemologies of the South iv. Sociologies of the future
ii. Actor-network-theory v. Sociology of autogéstion
iii. Subaltern global sociology
4. Sanctuary Literature
a. First Wave (late 1980s – early 2000s): Sanctuary as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement in
the literature
b. Second Wave (mid-2000s – mid-2010s): Poststructuralism, governmentality, and sovereignty
c. Third Wave (mid-2010s – present): Liberal and abolitionist sanctuary
d. Rethinking the genealogy of sanctuary mobilizations in the U.S. since 1967 in Five Phases

III. Data Analysis

5. Navigating sanctuaries’ core tension: citizenship and post-citizenship logics
a. Sanctuaries’ citizenship repertoire
b. Sanctuaries’ post-citizenship repertoire
c. Tensions and complementarities between citizenship and post-citizenship practices
6. Interpretations of sanctuary’s logics from nonabyssal and postabyssal standpoints
a. Interpreting citizenship and post-citizenship logics from nonabyssal standpoints
b. Interpreting citizenship and post-citizenship logics from postabyssal standpoints
c. Tools of translation between nonabyssal and postabyssal standpoints
7. Mapping sanctuaries as liberated zones in relation to carceral and abolition geographies
a. Experiences of sanctuaries as liberated zones in relation to distinct local contexts: particularities
and morphologies of carceral and abolition geographies
b. Experiences of sanctuaries as liberated zones in relation to national, subnational, and
transnational political opportunity structures
c. What variations in experiences of liberated zones reveal about carceral and abolition
geographies across disparate contexts: opportunities and constraints

IV. Conclusions
8. Conclusions and Implications

50
34
______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix B | Prospective Timeline

Month Research and Writing Plan

1 January, 2022 – a. Participant observation in NYC
May, 2022 b. Plan participant observation in Montclair
c. Complete and submit draft of Chapter 2
d. Begin drafting Chapters 3-4

2 June, 2022 – a. Participant observation in Montclair

October, 2022 b. Plan participant observation in Tucson
c. Complete and submit drafts of Chapters 3-4
d. Outline Chapter 5

3 November, 2022 a. Participant Observation in Tucson

– b. Complete and submit draft of Chapter 5
March, 2023 c. Draft Chapter 6
d. Outline Chapter 7

4 April, 2023 a. Revise Chapters 2-4

b. Complete and submit draft of Chapter 6
c. Begin draft of Chapter 7

5 May, 2023 a. Complete and submit draft of Chapter 7

b. Outline Chapters 1 and 8

6 June, 2023 a. Complete and submit drafts of Chapters 1 and 8

b. Revise Chapters 2-6

7 July, 2023 a. Revise Chapters 1 and 7-8

8 September, a. Defend
2023

51
35
______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix C (from p. 2 note 4 [and p. 4 note 12; p. 8 note 32; p. 85 note xvii; p. 86 note xviii]) | Field Example #1 and
Discussion: July 3rd, 2018 | Judson Memorial Church

By July 3rd, 2018, Amanda Morales Guerra and her three children had made the painstaking
decision to leave the physical sanctuary of the Holyrood Episcopal Church/Iglesia Santa Cruz in
Washington Heights, where they had lived for almost a year. In order to debrief the process,
determine next steps, and in an effort to contain potential fallout and targeting to which they
and the congregation may be exposed upon their departure, Ravi Ragbir called for a meeting of
the main organizers at Judson Memorial Church. Ragbir, the Director of the New Sanctuary
Coalition (NSC) and himself an undocumented immigrant from Trinidad, had asked me and
Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz, the co-founder of the New Sanctuary Movement in 2007, Lutheran
minister, and a lead NSC organizer, to assemble the organizers who had taken on roles of
leadership and coordination during Amanda’s time in sanctuary. This included, most
significantly, the Reverend Dr. Luis Barrios who is the pastor of Holyrood; Geoff Trenchard,
Amanda’s immigration attorney; Tara Geer, the founder of Action Potluck, the Washington
Heights community group that had been most active in mobilizing support for Amanda and her
family; and Chloe Breyer, the Director of the Interfaith Center, who had been especially active
in recruiting other local religious leaders throughout the process.
The day before the meeting, Juan Carlos called me into his office to discuss a game plan.
Ravi is going to attack us, saying that Amanda’s sanctuary campaign was a failure, he told me.
He’s going to say that if he was in control of the process, she would have succeeded. We need
to be ready to show him all the ways we were successful, Juan Carlos said, referring to Luis,
Tara, Chloe, and myself as “we”. “Does Ravi actually think that we failed,” I inquired, “or is he
just using this to try to assert more power over the process?” Mmm, yes, Juan Carlos
responded, gesturing with his eyes toward Ravi’s empty chair on the other side of the small
office. That is the question. “Should we invite Chloe to the meeting?” I suggested. “I think Ravi
will be more careful if she’s there, since he knows she has access to many of the faith leaders
and congregations who trust her more than him.” Excellent, I agree, Juan Carlos affirmed. I’ll
send her a message now.
On the Tuesday of the meeting, all the coordinators who had been working to support
Amanda arrived at Judson before 1pm, when the meeting was scheduled, but the office was
empty. Ravi arrived about 20 minutes later with his five most trusted employees who, with
barely a sound, set up another table adjoining the first one, and pulled up five additional chairs.
Who’s going to start the meeting? Ravi asked in a declarative tone. After waiting a beat, Father
Luis Barrios responded. I can do that. My understanding is that we are meeting to officially
share information about where we are and how we can move forward. We have been dealing
with a situation with Ronnie, Amanda’s husband for the past few months. He was saying that
he was going to take the kids for the summer back in Long Island, so Amanda has been feeling
very anxious about staying at the church without them. We met with her and a lawyer a few
weeks ago, and shared the options with her and Ronnie. But she decided that she could not stay
at the church without the children. Ravi began to interrupt, and Luis interjected: so that’s
where we are.

52
 Ravi began as Luis finished. Right, but what about the legal status? My mission is still to get
Amanda safely home, so we should be focused on her case. Geoff Trenchard, Amanda’s lawyer,
summarized the bleak options. The case was never a guarantee, but with Sessions’s recent A-B-
decision [restricting asylum claims on the basis of threats of violence by non-state actors like
gangs and intimate partners], the BIA [Board of Immigration Appeals] is almost certain to reject
the legal arguments we submitted. Apparently unconvinced that the legal options had been
exhausted, Ravi intervened in an increasingly frustrated tone. I thought you were going to file
for an Administrative Stay. Did you do that? Geoff confirmed that he had submitted this
request, but that they were no longer being granted in New York State as part of the Federal
Government’s retaliation for New York’s confrontational stance toward Trump’s Justice
Department.
Looking directly at Juan Carlos and Luis, and with an increasingly urgent disposition, Ravi
shifted the focus to Amanda’s current vulnerability. People could become extremely angry and
target her by calling ICE to tell them she left. Have you created a rapid response network and
prepared the Habeas papers and Privacy Waivers? Juan Carlos deferentially explained that he
had been in touch with rapid response teams near her family’s home in Long Island with a
response time of under ten minutes, and that her Habeas papers had been drafted in
consultation with the law professor from Columbia University Law School who we had sought
out to support Geoff. The Privacy Waivers would not change, Luis explained matter-of-factly,
since Amanda had already given him access to advocate on her behalf, including access to her
legal information. Exasperated, Ravi shifted the focus again. So then tell me, what was your
original plan when she went into sanctuary?
Luis began describing how he and the church community at Holyrood had taken
responsibility for social, emotional, and spiritual support, as well as support for the children,
and support finding health, educational, financial, and other resources that were necessary
after the family was uprooted from their home. Luis continued that Geoff was responsible for
the legal support and, to avoid polarizing the group and alienating anyone at the table, he
added, Also, New Sanctuary was consistently there to offer other kinds of support. Ravi, in quick
succession, hurled one question after another, part of the agenda he had warned Juan Carlos
he had prepared, but that had not been shared with any of us. And what about the advocacy
plan? Why aren’t politicians involved? Have you put any pressure on them? What was your
plan to tell them what to do? Why hasn’t there been any campaigns?
As Juan Carlos, Luis, Chloe, Tara, and I responded to each of these questions, the tone of the
meeting began to shift. We described the Sanctuary Symposium that had been organized at
the synagogue down the street from Holyrood by more than two dozen city, state, and federal
elected officials, as well as faith leaders, advocates, and activists from the community, with
more than two hundred people in attendance. We described the local precincts that had
agreed to alert us when ICE agents were spotted in the neighborhood. We explained the
dozens of neighbors who were part of Action Potluck and over a dozen other groups and
congregations who had been mobilized to bring breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Amanda’s
family every day based on a rotating menu that was developed in collaboration with Amanda,
her kids, and the food volunteers. We described the hundreds more volunteers who were
doing “sanctuary watch” at the church over 12 hours a day, doing the family’s laundry, taking
the kids to school and meeting with their teachers, offering Western and traditional health

53
care, setting up and being present at press conferences, weekly vigils, rallies, and rapid
response teams, and serving as translators who were consistently on-call. We described the
clothes and toy drives that had been set up with such extensive community response that many
of the items were donated to dozens of other local families in need. We explained how
institutional partnerships had been set up between Holyrood and other congregations, the local
schools, political advocacy groups, and local neighbors that had materialized into a dramatic
shift in the culture of the church, and the broader community, with many of the long-standing
racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions in the neighborhood having been overcome
through efforts to mobilize together. We have created an incredibly important model, Chloe
asserted. The community has really mobilized to support the family, and we have formed a new
image that has been secured into people’s consciousness. We have created a really unique
opportunity that we can take advantage of in this moment.
As we systematically articulated the picture of how the community had been transformed
through the courage of Amanda and her family to seek sanctuary at Holyrood, Ravi gradually
leaned back in his chair, and the pace of his questions slowed as he began to listen intently, a
palpable sense of calm and tenacious purpose filling the room. How would we use the
opportunity of this moment?, he echoed, a mood of curiosity now complementing the
adversarial one of urgent exhortation. We should plan a community event, Luis exclaimed. God
told me this is a good idea, he said, his characteristically broad smile inviting consensus. Not a
Holyrood activity, or a New Sanctuary activity; not a meeting, or a time to discuss business, but
a time to gather together and celebrate… There are people who don’t see what we have
accomplished, and we need to help them see what exactly it is that is happening here, with this
community that we call ‘sanctuary’, with Amanda, and with the family. We need to show how it
has been possible, through all of people’s differences - whether they believe in God or not,
whether they speak Spanish or not - how we have built unity in diversity, and how we are going
to continue this work into the future. And we still have to figure out how to help more people
reconnect, like how to build on what we’re doing with our street brothers and sisters
downstairs, because they’re part of our sanctuary as well… People need to feel connected, and
start to feel like we can take responsibility for each other.
Through my more than three years of involvement with sanctuary work as an organizer and
participant-observer, I believe that the anecdote above can be explained as a prime example of
what I call the core tension of sanctuary mobilizations’ hybrid1 political orientation. In this
instance, Ravi represents one side of the tension, characterized most simply as sanctuary
actors’ pursuit of rights-claims, even claims to formal citizenship, in the face of the most
pervasively inhuman conditions of carceral capitalism, crimmigration, and border imperialism.
On the other side of the core tension, as illustrated in the example above, Luis reflects
sanctuary actors’ prefigurative orientation to cultivate political communities, practices, and
subjectivities that are not structurally bound to citizenship distinctions, or their attendant
cultural and linguistic differences. When Juan Carlos called me into his office the day before
the meeting to strategize a response to Ravi’s attacks and to formulate an independent agenda
to help Ravi recognize the complexities and successes of our work at Holyrood, Juan Carlos was,
as I would come to internalize through years of working closely with him, enacting a
foundational practice to generatively navigate sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship/post-
citizenship movement hybrid. I begin the inquiry for my dissertation with the proposition that

54
this tension is at the “core” of sanctuary movements in the sense that wherever these
mobilizations exist, actors will encounter it in some form. Further, whether sanctuary actors
recognize this tension, how they experience it, and the extent to which they are able to
navigate it generatively will determine the degree to which these movements emerge,
proliferate, and are sustained over time.
Sanctuary mobilizations entail both of these orientations existing in a constitutive tension
with each other, sometimes navigated with such deftness and agility that the tension provides
the torque that animates the movement, and sometimes torn apart under the divergent force
this tension exerts on all sanctuary actors. While the field note above depicts Ravi and Luis as
symbolic of sanctuary’s citizenship and post-citizenship polarities, Juan Carlos reflects, for the
purpose of this example, how sanctuary mobilizations emerge, sustain, and proliferate through
the capacity to generatively navigate this as its core tension. This is, I argue, what Grace Yukich
(2013: 141-170) recognizes in her book about the early years of the New Sanctuary Movement,
when she writes about Juan Carlos as the ideal-typical example of a “crossover activist” who is
able to simultaneously navigate multiple institutional arenas and targets, specifically religious
and political. What her analysis overlooks, however, is that this is a necessary, but insufficient
condition for fostering and sustaining sanctuary mobilizations. While her assertion is certainly
true and consistent with my interpretation, my analysis suggests that his capacity to generate
“crossover strategies” becomes salient to the extent that this enables him to generatively
navigate the contradictions between abyssal and postabyssal cartographies and their
constitutive contradiction. This contradiction is borne out in practice through the core tension
of sanctuary as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid as “the beating heart that
animates sanctuary” (Bagelman 2019: 157).

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix D (from p. 6 notes 18 & 25) | The Emergence of the Debate Over Sanctuary as a
Citizenship/Post-Citizenship Movement: Political Opportunity Theory and the Cultural-Agency
and Emotions School in the First Wave of Sanctuary Movement Research

This question, as it relates to larger debates among social movement scholars between
political opportunity theory and the “cultural-agency” and emotions approach, has been taken
up in several stages. Perhaps most relevant here is the wave of sanctuary research between
the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, when scholars largely took the goals of sanctuary
movements to be self-evident: determination to transform U.S. foreign policy in Central
America, and especially to end financial, political, and military support for proxy armies, while
providing direct support for Central American asylum-seekers to the U.S. whose asylum claims
were systematically rejected as part of a U.S. federal government effort to legitimize the right-
wing dictatorships in the countries from which these refugees were fleeing. Debates during this
period in the social movement studies literature focused on how U.S. citizens were able to
mobilize tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of sanctuary actors, largely through religious
congregations, to participate in high-risk movement activities (Wiltfang & McAdam 1991)
without any discernible immediate rewards or long-term benefits.
The two sides of this debate may be characterized, on the one hand, by political process
theory, represented most strongly by the work of Christian Smith (1996) and, on the other

55
hand, by a cultural agency and emotions approach, reflected most strongly in the work of
Sharon Nepstad (2004) and Jim Jasper (2012). Arguing that “the case of the Central America
peace movement merely adds to the number of diverse movements and campaigns whose
births, lives, and passings appear best explained by openings and closings in the structure of
political opportunities,” Smith (1996: 378) attributes sanctuary mobilizations to President
Reagan’s obsessive preoccupation with Central America, the political vulnerabilities generated
by the Vietnam syndrome, division and elite defection in the U.S. government, and repeated
White House policy blunders,” all factors that Jasper (2012: 208-209) demonstrates to be more
aptly explained as “strategic choices”, “cultural or biographical” factors, and the socially-skilled
construction of “grievance” by pro-peace activists.
Nepstad (2004: 21, 25-26), careful to aver that the “cultural-agency approach” is
“complementary” to Smith’s Political Process model “since each sheds a different light on the
movement by drawing our attention to distinct aspects and dynamics,” draws extensively on
what she refers to as Jasper’s (1997) “model of social movements that places humans at the
center of our analysis, recognizing that people are to be credited for transforming cultural and
structural potential into protest.” Only from this people-centered cultural perspective, she
insists, is it possible to “understand their deepest convictions and most cherished beliefs… the
cognitive, affective, and moral effects of these personal encounters” that explain “why
sanctuary workers reacted to the plight of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees with a
willingness to take them in, placing their own well-being in jeopardy… Without this emphasis
on emotions, values, and moral commitments, we will not fully comprehend why people act on
the information they receive and why they are willing to risk their lives for a cause” (Nepstad
2004: 136).
Seeking to synthesize Nepstad and Jasper’s approach to analyzing cultural agency and
emotions with Smith’s emphasis on “the structure of political opportunities”, Nepstad and
Smith (in Goodwin et al. 2001: 158, 173) collaborated on the article, “The Social Structure of
Moral Outrage in Recruitment to the U.S. Central America Peace Movement,” published in
Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, an influential volume co-edited by
Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta. In this article, Nepstad and Smith argue that “structural factors
were central in determining who had access to credible sources of information that formed the
basis of this moral outrage… [yet] one’s values and identity shape the way the information is
perceived and the degree of importance placed upon responding to the situation… People of
faith did possess social ties that provided them access to credible, alternative information
about Central America. While much attention has been devoted to the role of social networks
in movement recruitment, most scholars tend to view them merely as a given without analyzing
the elements that make these structures so influential in terms of the values or emotions they
transmit… These ties were not only information sources; they were infused with compassion
for the poor and oppressed, and love for one’s fellow Christians.”
Through this phase of scholarship, a somewhat precarious consensus emerged that the
sociological categories, methods, and frameworks that had evolved to study the “citizenship
movements” (Jasper 1997, 2012) of the 19th and early-20th centuries concealed as much as
they illuminated about sanctuary movements, and that a new set of sociological tools must be
designed to study “postcitizenship movements”, of which sanctuary was a key example. For
Jasper (2012: 211), citizenship movements “consist of a preexisting (often legally defined) group

56
that is pursuing political, economic, or human rights in order to advance the group toward full
citizenship, full incorporation in society,” while postcitizenship movements are made up of
participants “who already possess those rights; they are full citizens but pursue other forms of
social change (sometimes for beneficiaries other than their own group).” Sanctuary actors, he
argues, like “most groups of protestors, especially in the advanced industrial countries, are not
sitting outside the window with a well-formed list of grievances in hand, just waiting for that
window to open in order to squeeze through.” To the extent that participants in post-
citizenship movements may be distinguished as “requir[ing] a shock for them to realize that
their basic moral sensibilities are being violated, that they even have a grievance to mobilize
around” (Jasper 2012: 216), the two sides of this debate find common ground in this distinction
between citizenship and post-citizenship movements as “helpful for specifying the usefulness of
the political-process model” (Smith 2012: 220).
Recognizing that sanctuary mobilizations are situated in a complicated and inconsistent way
with respect to the analytic frameworks and conceptual tools of political opportunity theory
was a major contribution not only to the analysis of sanctuary and the Central America Peace
Movement, but to contemporary social movements more generally. But while Jasper’s
distinction between citizenship and post-citizenship movements is an invaluable insight, it had
the unintended consequence of obscuring the involvement in these mobilizations by hundreds
of thousands of individuals, groups, and organizations in Central America, both those who
immigrated to the U.S. as well as those who remained in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
and Honduras. This was certainly an ethical and epistemological oversight of what Boaventura
(2014: 44) describes as “realities that are ‘surprising’ because they are new or have been
ignored or made invisible, that is, deemed nonexistent by the Eurocentric critical
tradition.” But it was also an analytical problem, epitomized by Jasper’s (2012: 209, 210) own
claim that:
“surprisingly absent from Smith’s list of political opportunities are factors having to do with political
structure: electoral systems, laws and constitutions, and federalism in the United States, for
example… They are missing because they were not very important to the rise and fall of Smith’s
movement... There was no pool of potential protestors who shared the same goals and grievances that
merely needed an opportunity to be expressed… These were typical middle-class American citizens, with
the ability to vote, lobby legislators, bring lawsuits, contribute money to favorite organizations, travel
abroad, and so on.”
When Central American citizens, rebels, and asylum-seekers are considered, of course, the
narrow view of sanctuary as a “postcitizenship movement” is problematized, demanding
attention to new political structures that had been gradually opening not only within the U.S.
polity, but between the Global North and South.
The most obvious example of this was the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 that went
into effect merely 110 days before July 4th, 1980, the date that Pastor John Fife (2014: 257)
attributes to marking the beginning of the 1980s sanctuary movement. Most cursorily, this Act
changed the “definition of refugee under the seventh preference category to the United
Nations definition… [it corrected] the discretionary withholding of deportation section [that]
was inconsistent with the mandatory nonrefoulement principle of the [1951 UNHCR Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees]... [and it established a] statutory mechanism in the United
States immigration statute for refugees already physically present in the United States to seek
asylum in the United States” (Bau 1994: 56).

57
 Even the most preliminary review of primary source documents from the 1980s sanctuary
movement demonstrates that this was, in fact, the central legal justification on the part of
movement actors (cf. Nickel 1985: 96-100; Wipfler 1985: 111-112; MacEoin 1985: 118-119;
Coffin 1985: 177; Corbett 1986: 19-20; 1991: 133-134; Fife 2014: 262, 265-266; cite Coutin and
Cunningham’s articles on the trial, and maybe Villazor and Lasch’s articles as
well). Nonetheless, Nepstad refers to the Refugee Act of 1980 only once, and neither Smith nor
Jasper mention it at all. Thus, while Smith attempts to apply political opportunity structures to
the analysis of sanctuary as a “citizenship movement”, he obscures the transnational elements
of the movement that would perhaps be best (or exclusively) interpreted through this
framework. Indeed, while the first phase of sanctuary movement research makes major
headway in discerning the post-citizenship elements of the movement, the scant attention to
the experiences either of those in Central America, or those seeking asylum in the U.S., limits
the credibility of this research in comprehensively interpreting the meanings and explanations
for the emergence, successes, and dénouement of sanctuary in the 1980s.

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix E (from p. 8 note 32) | Rethinking the Genealogy of Sanctuary in the U.S. in Five Phases

Phase 1 | 1967-1972: Vietnam War Resisters, Sanctuary Congregations, and Berkeley City
Council Declares Sanctuary

Until now, scholars of sanctuary investigating Berkeley during the period between 1967 and
1971 have framed their research as an inquiry into the origin of the contemporary sanctuary
city discourse that began to proliferate during the late 1980s through the mid-2000s (see phase
3, below). These genealogies of “the sanctuary city” (Ridgley 2010, 2011) have, in significant
and problematic ways, foregrounded elements and interpretations of the Berkeley City
Council’s sanctuary declaration in 1971 that are anachronistic to the meaning of this
declaration at the time and have contributed to reifying a conception of sanctuary that is at
odds with the meaning of sanctuary mobilizations on the part of actors themselves.
Specifically, as seen in Figure 1 (below), the Berkeley declaration included six points, all but one
of which emphasized the relationship between municipal authorities and the congregations and
community groups engaged in sanctuary work.

Figure 1 - City of Berkeley: Sanctuary for the Soldiers on the USS Coral Sea, Nov. 9th, 1971 (City of Berkeley 1971)

58
 The fact that the resolution affirmed a different relationship between the City and local
groups doing sanctuary - rather than foregrounding the relationship with the Federal
Government or national organizations - was of great significance to sanctuary actors at the
time. Nonetheless, only point five, the one that reorients the struggle over sanctuary to a
contest between levels of established (national and municipal) government institutions, has
become the focus for scholars of Berkeley’s sanctuary mobilization during this period. As
Ridgley (2011: 204) writes, “Most important for the legacy of municipal Sanctuary in the United
States was the seemingly inconsequential 5th point of the resolution… It was this provision, the
refusal to involve municipal staff (including local police) in the enforcement of federal law,
which later became a model for municipal Sanctuary policies passed to protect the rights of
refugees in the 1980s.” While it is useful to explore how this “seemingly inconsequential 5th
point” takes on a life of its own during the following decades, a genealogy of sanctuary’s “minor
politics” requires revisiting this period with greater attention to the dynamics that were of
greater consequence to actors themselves.
Gus Schultz (1985: 79), for example, the Pastor of the University Lutheran Chapel of
Berkeley at the time, emphasizes this in a somewhat exasperated speech given to sanctuary
workers from around the country in 1985, reflecting on the process by which his congregation
began transitioning from the first to the second phase of sanctuary mobilizations.

“The Berkeley resolution of 1971, which incidentally was introduced by a Republican councilman, was the
thing that led us in the Bay Area to begin looking at the sanctuary issue in relation to Central American
refugees, and we did it at a Bible study group that met every Tuesday morning. We started talking about
sanctuary and how it fit into what we were reading in the Scriptures. We discussed it, and we felt that
this was something we ought to be considering with Central American refugees. Later, Marilyn Chilcote
from Saint John’s Presbyterian Church came to me and said that her group had been talking about this
issue and that she had received a letter from John Fife in Tucson, Arizona, saying that his congregation
was doing the same thing. We realized that people all over were doing sanctuary, and there was no
official office, no national coordinator. Sanctuary is a grassroots thing, and it takes place on the local
level. Part of the reason I stress this is to tell you that the consultation among groups of sanctuary
activists is not something that was created by a national group, by a national office, by a national
coordinator, but something that has grown out of this process.”

While movements to create and sustain sanctuary cities, when investigated as immigrant
justice movements, highlight specific policies of non-cooperation between municipal and
federal authorities, documents and interviews of contemporaneous actors indicate that this
focus overlooks the meaning of these declarations for actors themselves. When sanctuary
mobilizations are viewed through a more expansive lens than that of the struggle between
municipal and federal authorities in an effort to promote migrant rights, the lens of sanctuary’s
core tension between citizenship/post-citizenship orientations allows this period to be revisited
as part of a trajectory that integrates, rather than bifurcates, mobilizations whose aims are to
promote subnational and municipal sanctuary policies and those oriented toward the
prefigurative work of direct support.

59
Phase 2 | 1981-1989: Human Rights, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-War Emerge as Sanctuary
Mobilizations’ Three Orientations in Tucson, Chicago, and Berkeley

Prevailing research on sanctuary mobilizations in the United States during the period
between 1981 and 1989 has focused as much on the controversies between the Tucson and
Chicago branches of the movement as on struggles between movement actors and government
officials (Bau 1985, 1994; Davidson 1988; Smith 1996). This has led to an overwhelming
emphasis on the points of contention between Tucson and Chicago, especially whether
sanctuary mobilizations are “political” or “religious/humanitarian”, whether sanctuary is an act
of illegal “civil disobedience” or legal “civil initiative”, and whether sanctuary was oriented
toward “refugee rights” or “structural change” in patterns of U.S. foreign military intervention.
While these questions are critical in interpreting the history and meaning of sanctuary, the
focus on these tensions have obscured two other foundational dynamics and questions, both of
which will be central to my genealogical investigation. First, there were not two, but three
political orientations to sanctuary mobilizations during this period, as Susan Bibler Coutin’s
(1993) pathbreaking early research demonstrates. Other than the Tucson and Chicago
branches, the work of sanctuary that had begun in Berkeley in the late-1960s experienced a
resurgence in the early 1980s, and spread to other congregations throughout the West Coast.
Coutin characterizes the three branches of sanctuary in her seminal ethnography, The Culture
of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement.

“I encountered widespread disagreement about whether sanctuary was a refugee rights movement, an
antiwar movement, or a movement to challenge the institutional structures of oppression. Although
advocates of each of these perspectives were to be found in both Tucson and the East Bay, in general,
Tucson sanctuary workers saw the movement’s goal as saving refugees’ lives, East Bay [Berkeley]
volunteers compared sanctuary to the anti-Vietnam War protests, and those whom I met at national
meetings [from Chicago] argued that to be successful, sanctuary had to challenge institutionalized
imperialism. The refugee rights perspective focused on direct services, the structural change position
confronted the root causes of oppression in Central America, and the antiwar contingent tried to do both.
Another way of differentiating these three positions is to say that the proponents of refugee rights
claimed to have primarily humanitarian motives, those who challenged structures generally characterized
themselves as political, and the antiwar activists said that their work pursued both political and
humanitarian ends” (Coutin 1993: 176).

This is conceptually crucial, since Berkeley’s sanctuary mobilizations managed to collaborate

closely with sanctuary groups in other parts of the country, integrating ostensibly distinct
political orientations and practices while avoiding the tensions in which other branches became
embroiled. This indicates the possibility - or even likelihood - that the tensions between
Chicago and Tucson were not reflections of two incommensurable political orientations, visions,
or practices, but rather two distinct strategic approaches that were primarily responses to local
contexts, available resources, and types of repression they encountered.
Indeed, this is a point that Coutin (Perla & Coutin 2012: 81) makes in an essay almost two
decades later. Specifically highlighting the tensions between Tucson and Chicago regarding
“the visibility, invisibility, and politicization of Central Americans,” she points out that “such
framings were themselves, at times unconsciously, strategic, in that because the US
government accused sanctuary workers of serving political rather than humanitarian and

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religious goals, the revelation that members of FMLN groups were involved in or behind the
movement in some capacity, or behind the Central American organizations with which
sanctuary workers collaborated, would have undermined sanctuary’s legitimacy.” It is in this
light that Berkeley’s capacity to work with both branches, while either avoiding or
constructively navigating these tensions, signifies the need to explore the possibility that both
Tucson and Chicago shared a political orientation, but perceived distinct strategic opportunities
and threats that shaped their immediate practices and experiences. By interrogating how the
political visions and strategic practices emerged and evolved in each of the three cases, a
genealogy of sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid
promises to shed new light on this significant movement in contemporary U.S. history and
social movement literature.
Second, the emphasis on the tensions between Tucson and Chicago has also led minimal
scholarly attention to be directed to the tensions within each of these branches, and indeed,
within all sanctuary mobilizations. By highlighting the most prominent voices of each of these
factions - Jim Corbett and John Fife in Tucson, Renny Golden and Michael McConnell in Chicago
- the narratives of sanctuary in each of these regions have been homogenized to a great extent.
By shifting the narrative of the “national” sanctuary movement from one of divergent political
orientations to one of distinct tactical calculations, necessary attention might be redirected on
the tensions that each of these local branches of sanctuary mobilizations experienced, and how
efforts to navigate these local tensions created challenges that rendered the appearance of
national distinctions as perhaps more obdurate than they may, in fact, have been. In my
preliminary historical research, each branch seems to have attempted to navigate the tension
between sanctuary’s citizenship and post-citizenship orientations in distinct ways, each
reflecting disparate local conditions to a comparable, or greater, degree than they reflected
disparate political orientations that might be characterized as “political” or
“religious/humanitarian”.

Phase 3 | 1989-2006: Sanctuary Shifts to Subnational Immigration and Law Enforcement Policy
Discourse in Response to the Criminalization of Migration, Widespread Repression, and Global
Defeat of State Socialism as a Coherent Political Vision

The academic literature on sanctuary mobilizations during the period between 1989 and
2006 marks a notable shift from research on the movements before 1989. There is broad
consensus on the most self-evident reasons for this: grassroots sanctuary mobilizations in
congregations and community groups declined as a result of peace agreements in El Salvador
and Guatemala, increased scrutiny and constraints upon U.S. military aid, several provisional
immigration policies that postponed deportations of asylum seekers from several countries, the
collapse of the Soviet Union and a political vision of State Socialism, and the general exhaustion
of sanctuary workers, many of whom had engaged ceaselessly under some of the most trying
conditions in the U.S. and abroad (cite Smith 1996, and others). If anything, however, this
period marks a proliferation - rather than a decline - in scholarly interest in sanctuary
movements. This attention, however, shifts from congregational and community-based
sanctuary as direct support for asylum seekers (or war resisters), and instead toward a set of

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municipal policy provisions that would come to be identified with a burgeoning “sanctuary city”
discourse.
There is general agreement on only three elements of the definition of the sanctuary city.
First, that it is contested - even “vague” - and that “despite or maybe precisely because of the
vagueness of the concept, the definition of sanctuary city has become highly significant, a
question of definitional power” (Kuge 2019: 50), especially in that the indeterminacy fosters the
capacity for different definitions to be constructed on the basis of local conditions and needs.
Second, there is universal agreement among scholars that “sanctuary city policies and practices
are reactions to exclusionary national policies and practices” (Bauder 2019: 25). Research on
sanctuary mobilizations in the United States, in particular, has coalesced around a third point of
consensus that extends, potentially problematically, this second one.
In the United States, there is greater consensus on the specific provisions that are
characteristic of sanctuary city policies than there is when Canada, Europe, and other regions
are included as points of comparison. These eight provisions, according to the Immigrant Legal
Resource Center’s late-2016 report, “Searching for Sanctuary” (Graber & Marquez 2016: 18, 5),
include:

1. Declaration of sanctuary 5. Acceptance of various forms of identification

2. Prohibitions on inquiries into immigration status 6. No 287(g)
and/or place of birth 7. No ICE detention contract
3. General prohibitions on use of resources to assist 8. Limits on ICE in local jails (also see Lasch et al.
immigration enforcement 2018: 1707)
4. Limits on immigration based detentions, including
ICE holds [and ICE alerts]

This has led to a general agreement that sanctuary city policies, because they expanded
during this period in relation to protections for asylum seekers and other undocumented
immigrants between 1985 (especially 1989 [Wells 2004: 1322-1323]), are both empirically and
conceptually coextensive with movements for migrant rights and justice. Historically, this is
because the discourse of sanctuary cities has been employed to respond to four waves of
increasing criminalization of immigrants and other residents who support or employ them,
commonly referred to as “crimmigration” (Lasch et al. 2018: 1712-1736; Varsanyi, Ridgley,
Brotherton [2018] and two other Crimmigration articles). While these four waves have all
been constituted by shifts in federal policies, they have also led to the adaptation and adoption
of “sanctuary city” policies at the local level in many towns, cities, states, and regions across the
U.S. (Lasch et al. 2018: 1736-1752) In broad strokes, these four waves of crimmigration include:

1. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 (Wells 2004: 1308), including the Criminal Alien
Program (CAP) predecessors of 1988 .
2. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) (which added Section 287(g) to
the Immigration and Nationality Act), and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA or Welfare Reform Act) of 1996 (Ridgley 2008: 59-65).
3. The Patriot Act of 2001 followed by the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ICE Administrative Warrants in 2003 (Gardner 2014: 5;
Lasch et al. 2018: 1728).
4. The Secure Communities Program of 2008, amended slightly by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) of
2014 (Chen 2016), and then reversed back to Secure Communities in 2016.

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 Through all these trees, it can become difficult to see the forest, a caution that sanctuary
actors and researchers as disparately positioned as Gus Schultz (1985), Jennifer Ridgley (2010),
and Harsha Walia (2016) have emphasized. The earlier-cited pleas of Schultz and Walia that
“sanctuary is a grassroots thing… something that has grown out of this process,” and that “the
process is as important as the goal… the process of becoming a sanctuary city is very important
in determining… what it’s going to mean and what the tangible impact is for people,” are
confirmed by Ridgley’s (2010: 142) comparison of sanctuary city policies in San Francisco and
New York City. “Because there was little widespread ‘buy in’ to restrictions on participation,
particularly among police, the anti-sanctuary provisions of the 1996 immigration and welfare
reforms were able to shape local approaches to non cooperation in New York… never
translating into a significant shift in everyday practices.” While more recent experiences and
evidence of grassroots mobilizations in NYC over the past decade indicate that these dynamics
may have shifted in New York, the underlying issue remains: characterizing “sanctuary cities” as
essentially a delimited policy program risks obscuring the elements of the process that are
determinative of the sanctuary city’s efficacy and sustainability.
In her comparison of sanctuary cities “between policy, practice, and politics” in the U.S.,
U.K., Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, Kuge (2019: 57, 59) describes the explanatory
significance of processes of grassroots sanctuary practices in determining the efficacy,
extensiveness, and sustainability of sanctuary city legislation. “Grassroots [sanctuary]
movements and their political struggle for immigrant rights often precede municipal
involvement… creat[e] new political spaces and advanc[e] new values and rationalities beyond
those generally associated with liberal democratic citizenship… and citizenship practices… The
movement is able to point out possible future policies, and create discourses, forums, and
spaces of deviant and progressive practices.” Making the obverse and complimentary point
from the position of “sanctuary-power” as an emergent logic of governance (governmentality),
Mancina’s (2016: 424, 425) exceptional work on San Francisco demonstrates that “‘policy’ is not
the sole prerogative of those who legislate that policy, but rather the axis around which a wide
variety of actors engage in political battle… Sanctuary-power is a form of governmentality
wherein immigrants and their advocates, as well as immigrant-supportive government officials,
demand that the government work upon itself to improve itself.” Viewed in this light, the two
premises of the vast majority of research on sanctuary mobilizations during this period must be
subjected to greater scrutiny.
First, while sanctuary city policies and practices may appear to emerge as “reactions to
exclusionary national policies and practices,” closer empirical examination reveals that the
extent to which sanctuary mobilizations transform dynamics between municipal and federal
governance is, in fact, epiphenomenal to their more explicit political orientations and strategic
practices. Instead, as Mancina emphasizes, his analysis (among others) calls into question the
widespread consensus that sanctuary city policies reshape relations of sovereignty between
municipal and federal authorities. The more salient focus of “sanctuary-power” is in shifting
the dynamics between municipal authorities and the field of grassroots and governmental
social and political actors, thus requiring a general revision of the historical and ethnographic
work on sanctuary mobilizations during the period between 1989 and 2006, as well as in the
preceding and subsequent phases. This reinterpretation would be consistent with the terms of

63
reframing that I have proposed for the periods between 1967-1972 and 1981-1989, and would
also shed new light on the core tension of sanctuary as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement
hybrid. If the political orientation of sanctuary mobilizations emerges in navigating the
construction of post-citizenship political subjectivities, communities, practices, and institutions
while claiming inclusion and citizenship rights within the existing polity, then the prevailing
narrative of sanctuary’s constitutive tension in the 1980s between Tucson’s “humanitarian”
approach of direct support and Chicago’s “political” approach of anti-imperialist structural
change would likely be myopic. Instead, both of these branches of the 1980s U.S. sanctuary
movement may be viewed as navigating the core tension of citizenship and post-citizenship
orientations so as to foster a grassroots morphology of post-citizenship political subjectivities
and communities, on the one hand, and institutionalized mechanisms of formal political and
legal representation and rights-claims for non-citizens, on the other. In this light, the period
between 1989 and 2006 may be viewed not as a break with earlier phases of the movement,
but rather as part of a continuous effort among sanctuary mobilizations - especially reflecting
the approach of the “Chicago branch” - to institutionalize the mechanisms by which non-
citizens might claim political voice, representation, and legitimate authority. This, in turn, may
be interpreted as consistent with efforts ascribed to the Tucson branch to establish a
transnational, decentralized, grassroots network or morphology of sanctuary groups as the
mechanism for protecting human rights in the face of state malfeasance (cf. Fife 2014: page;
Corbett: cite).
Second, if it is true that the process by which sanctuary city policies are adopted are more
determinative of the efficacy and sustainability of their impact on vulnerable communities than
the specific policies themselves, then analysts must delineate the salient characteristics of
these processes in their discussions of sanctuary cities to a far greater extent than they have
previously done. While Mancina’s examination of San Francisco presents what might be used
as a roadmap for this kind of analysis, he does not offer a discussion of the implications of his
approach for analyses of other so-called “sanctuary cities”, instead emphasizing the
implications of his analysis for sanctuary power as “a new type of governmentality”. However,
by attending to both shifts in orientation - from sanctuary-power as a contestation between
municipal and federal authorities to one between municipal authorities and grassroots actors,
and from the sanctuary city as a policy program to a set of processes and dynamics with
municipal policy as one locus of struggle - the ground may be laid both for integrating analyses
of “sanctuary city” mobilizations and “grassroots sanctuary” mobilizations, and for rethinking
the earlier tensions between distinct branches of sanctuary mobilizations in the United States.
Both of these have proven to be areas of disagreement that run through much of the scholarly
literature on sanctuary mobilizations in the U.S., as well as globally.

Phase 4 | 2006-2016: Where? How? For Whom? From What? Grassroots Sanctuary
Reemerges and Confusions Surface

Scholars of sanctuary mobilizations in the preceding period (1989-2006), with few

exceptions, came to the consensus that the political orientation of sanctuary movements was
limited to subnational efforts to challenge the sovereignty of the nation-state in making and

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enforcing immigration law, an interpretation that obscured the contemporary origins of
sanctuary as part of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, as well as sanctuary’s
decisively more complex political orientation during the 1980s. In an effort to problematize this
ostensible consensus, Perla and Coutin (2012: 89) observe, “In some ways, in California and
Arizona at least, the US-Central American sanctuary movement of the 1980s was not about
immigration at all, but rather sought to address social injustice in Central American nations, US
intervention in Central America, and the effects of political violence on individuals and
communities.” Sanctuary actors in 2006-2007, as well as scholars who had been involved in
earlier sanctuary mobilizations, were acutely aware of the extent to which the discourse of
sanctuary was being steadily appropriated in service of a different set of political aims.
Walter Coleman (2017: 65-66), the Pastor of Chicago’s San Adalberto Methodist Church
where Elvira Arellano took sanctuary in 2006 for the first time since the 1980s, explains that the
deployment of sanctuary in service of immigrant justice was a reflexive departure from
sanctuary’s earlier political orientations. “The situation of our families was different from those
who sought refuge in the ‘80s… Indeed, our purpose was different than those brave pastors
and religious leaders, who were part of a non-violent movement of civil disobedience against
U.S. policy in Central America. The purpose of Familia Latina Unida, from the beginning, had
been to put a human face on the immigration issue, to redefine it as an issue of family unity and
opposition to family separation. We sought to empower undocumented immigrants to speak
for themselves, and to enable their families to give a clear, powerful, public witness. Sanctuary,
for Elvira, would be an act of civil disobedience; the church would simply be her willing
accomplice.” While the fact that the political orientation of sanctuary had not previously been
“the immigration issue” may have been clear to those who explicitly sought to repurpose it in
this way, as well as to scholars like Coutin who had been closest to earlier sanctuary
mobilizations, this became a source of general confusion for a more recent generation of
investigators and activists.
Further complicating matters, a group of prominent pastors from around the country
recognized the momentum and public support that had been generated by Arellano, and
initiated the New Sanctuary Movement in 2007, shortly after Elvira voluntarily left sanctuary in
Chicago. In contrast to the most prominent voices of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s,
who had strategically and reflexively used religious networks and resources in order to offer the
direct support without which Central American asylum seekers could not survive, leaders in the
New Sanctuary Movement instead recognized their work as “less about physical sanctuary than
about providing a new means of telling the story of the human costs of current US deportation
policy… [and] became reconfigured as a public and performative practice, meant to offer a
potential counter-discourse to dominant rhetoric on immigration and to constitute an activist
community of faith” (Caminero-Santangelo 2012: 92). Thus, what had, in the 1980s, been
recognized somewhat more explicitly as differences in strategic decisions responding to local
contexts, became sources of confusion that threatened to reify these local differences as
contradictory political orientations, movement goals, tactical propensities, and even historical
analyses.
Literature on sanctuary mobilizations between 2006 and 2016, especially in the U.S., was
riddled with these confusions. Grace Yukich (2012: 106, 116), for example, writes of the
confusion with respect to strategic and tactical adaptations in her article, “‘I Didn’t Know If This

65
Was Sanctuary.’” “Despite leaders’ attempts to redesign sanctuary in a clear and unified way, a
good deal of confusion remains among NSM [New Sanctuary Movement] activists, potential
recruits, and the general public regarding what constitutes sanctuary in the NSM. While lack of
growth can partly be attributed to the hostile political climate, the NSM’s inability to fully
diffuse new understandings of sanctuary is also creating problems with recruiting new activists
and with cultivating commitment among those who join.” During these years, the tactics,
strategies, and political orientations of sanctuary mobilizations were also proliferating widely in
Canada, the U.K, and across the European continent. Because the availability of legal
protections for the practice of religion are specific to U.S.-based movement actors, sanctuary
outside the U.S. was more frequently practiced by secular institutions, and often by those who
limited their own practices (as well as imposed limitations on asylum seekers) to align with the
constraints of national law (cf. Cunningham 2012 on the case of Canada; cf. Millner 2012 on the
case of France). Thus, throughout this period, confusion proliferated regarding the tactics,
strategies, spaces, and targets of sanctuary.
Like the emerging consensus in the U.S., and in contrast to sanctuary in the 1980s, the
discourse of sanctuary outside the U.S. was explicitly limited to “the immigration issue” during
most of this period (for one notable exception, see Innes 2009, 2012). Upon first glance, this
would appear to be a welcomed point of clarity and coherence amidst a field of confusion.
However, it actually had the effect of further obscuring the political orientation of sanctuary
mobilizations. “This transnational, political, and organizational focus presents a clear difference
between the 1980s US-Central American sanctuary movement, which was part of a broader
Central America peace and solidarity movement, and current sanctuary practices in Canada, the
US, and elsewhere, in which local communities seek immigration remedies for individuals who
are at immediate risk of deportation” (Perla & Coutin 2012: 73). As consensus grew regarding
sanctuary’s political orientation in relation to migrant justice, an inexorable paradox emerged.
In order to define sanctuary as a movement defined in relation to migrant justice and migrant
rights, sanctuary actors had to choose between conceptually untenable positions. On the one
hand, sanctuary actors could advocate a “citizenship” stance, which would entail becoming
governmentalized agents of a liberal state and making determinations regarding the
“deservingness” and “undeservingness” of particular migrants (cf. Lippert 2005; Yukich 2013).
Thus, sanctuary as a mechanism for holding the state accountable would become inverted into
the advanced liberal logic of the governmentalization of resistance, thereby propounding an
incoherent practice of resistance against the state in order to strengthen and reinforce the logic
of the same state. On the other hand, sanctuary actors could advocate a “no borders”
perspective (Boyce et al.) which would be politically incoherent and strategically untenable as
long as it were to be adopted only in relation to a politics of migration. For this “no borders”
orientation to be politically coherent and strategically viable it would need to be accompanied
by an analysis, critique, and political program for transforming the causes of migration (and
inequality, uneven development, and empire more generally), thus making migration an issue
that is only peripherally related to sanctuary’s political orientation. As this period drew to a
close, recognition of these challenges became more widespread, with sanctuary movements in
Canada and Europe increasingly being subjected to critiques of biopolitics and governmentality,
while sanctuary in the U.S. was charged with having forsaken its abolitionist and anti-imperialist

66
roots and increasingly “yoked to postcolonial whiteness” (Roy 2019: 775) and liberal reformism
(Paik 2017, 2020).
From the standpoint of a renewed genealogy, the confusions identified in the literature are
more of a boon than an obstacle. To the extent that this period may benefit from genealogical
treatment through the lens of sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship and post-citizenship
movement hybrid, it is largely in identifying patterns in these confusions, as actors seek to work
out a coherent political orientation, historical analysis, and viable strategic repertoires. In order
to do this, however, the aims of sanctuary actors as primarily the extension of citizenship rights
and the political orientation of sanctuary actors as primarily migrant-justice advocates must
first be deconstructed. These are efforts that have largely already been undertaken by scholar-
activists in the emerging decolonizing abolitionist sanctuary and - to a somewhat lesser extent -
politics of presence schools of thought (see Theoretical Controversies section, above).

Phase 5 | 2016-Present: Liberal vs. Decolonizing Abolitionist Orientations Crystallize the Core
Tension of Sanctuary Mobilizations’ as Citizenship/Post-Citizenship Movement Hybrid

Since the U.S. Presidential election of 2016, and the particularly vitriolic and proliferating
attacks on immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, the poor, and all manner of
vulnerabilities, sanctuary has entered a new phase, illustrated by the exponential multiplication
of sanctuary congregations, jurisdictions (at different levels and scales), individual participants,
as well as scholarly and popular literature and documentation. As scholarship on sanctuary
during this period is nascent, since I have conducted a thorough review of this literature in the
theoretical section of the proposal, and because this most recent period will be examined more
extensively in the ethnographic section of the dissertation (using what Bagelman refers to as
“genealogical ethnography”), I will only characterize it in the most general terms here. To the
extent that scholars are debating the orientations of sanctuary mobilizations since 2016,
distinct schools of thought have identified two political orientations of sanctuary that are
differentially described as “liberal vs. abolitionist” (Paik 2017, 2020; Paik et al. 2019; Martínez &
Schreiber 2018; Boyce et al. 2019; Maira 2019; Roy 2019), “major vs. minor” (Bagelman 2016,
2019; Darling 2017), and “municipal/top-down vs. grassroots/from below” (Walia 2013, 2014,
2016, 2017; Bagelman 2019b).
While the bifurcations made in each of these cases reflects the schools of thought of
scholars writing in distinct fields and conceptual traditions, they are, to a great extent,
overlapping. What they share is a consensus that there are two distinct political orientations of
sanctuary mobilizations and - the last of the three characterizations as the only partial
exception - that they are incommensurable with each other. These interpretations of sanctuary
claim that there is an irreconcilable paradox embedded into sanctuary’s “liberal”, “major”, and
“municipal” orientations, respectively. Perhaps most emblematic of these critiques, Paik (Paik
2017: 16) writes, “The core paradox of liberal sanctuary 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”. Scholars who aver variations of this critique all argue that
sanctuary’s politics of citizenship and rights-claims reinforce the legitimacy of the nation-state
and the “apartheid system of citizenship” (Walia 2013: page). They each propose that there

67
are, in contrast, histories and practices of sanctuary that resolve these internal contradictions,
labeling these approaches “abolitionist sanctuary”, “the minor politics of sanctuary”, and
“decolonizing sanctuary”, respectively. What they share in common is a call for sanctuary to
relinquish the parochial fantasies of western cosmopolitan statism and to recover elements of
its abolitionist, anti-imperialist, transnational, and indigenous genealogies, renewing these
approaches for a new generation. These scholars are situated on the border between
academia and activism, drawing on proliferating examples of sanctuary mobilizations that do
not limit their historical analysis or political program to migration, religious humanitarianism, or
political sovereignty as defined by the contemporary post-Westphalian period. Instead, they
cite the examples referred to above, *******Cite Ritchie et al. (in Chicago), Sanctuary Health
(in Vancouver), Paik, and Paik’s edited volume to show that sanctuary in this period is moving
beyond migration******, to suggest the emergence of a post-citizenship politics of sanctuary
throughout the past decade, and which has gained particularly formidable traction and
momentum since 2016.
In part because these scholars are responding as much to sanctuary scholarship as they are
to sanctuary actors themselves, they are compelled to assert these abolitionist, minor,
decolonizing orientations to sanctuary as being - at least in part - in opposition to prevailing
interpretations of sanctuary. But, as I will attempt to excavate and demonstrate through this
genealogical investigation, this post-citizenship political orientation of sanctuary has existed at
least since sanctuary’s reemergence in the United States in 1967, and has been embedded in
different ways in all local sanctuary mobilizations, each attempting to navigate the tensions
between openings for this post-citizenship politics and the apartheid regime of citizenship that
is both dominant and hegemonic, as well as obsolete. By locating the pivot around which each
of these distinctions in sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement
hybrid, I aim to demonstrate that there are not, in fact, two distinct political orientations to
sanctuary mobilizations. Instead, there is a core tension that actors seek to navigate in
different ways, responding to local needs, available resources, and strategic imperatives against
contrasting backdrops of disparate degrees and types of repression. While none of these three
ways of articulating the contested political orientations of sanctuary have yet taken root to the
point where they have ossified in opposition to each other, my extensive field work and
organizing experience suggests that this is a distinct possibility. Part of the rationale for
undertaking this genealogy as I have outlined it in this section is to foster a new
conceptualization of these orientations so as to prevent what I see as a politically unnecessary,
historically inaccurate, and strategically self-defeating analysis.

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix F (from p. 9 note 38 [and p. 15 notes 71 & 78; p. 48 note i]) | Overview of Sanctuary in New York
City; Tucson, AZ; and Montclair, NJ

Overview of Sanctuary in New York City

Of the three cases of sanctuary mobilizations that I have selected, New York City is the only
one with extensive “sanctuary city” policies. As Villazor and Gulasekaram (2018: 555 n. 38)
note, “New York City has been known as a ‘sanctuary city’ since it adopted a policy in 1989 of
prohibiting police officers from disclosing information about a person’s immigration status to

68
federal officials… unless the person gave consent or criminal activity was involved.” Though
these policies were broadened in 2003, 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2014 (Lasch et al. 2018: digital
appendix, https://libguides.law.du.edu/c.php?g=705342&p=5008843), lawmakers did not use
the term “sanctuary city”, or any similar concept, in the official designations or titles of these
policies (Soto, personal communication). Nonetheless, even the New York State Attorney
General’s (Schneiderman 2017: 1) “Guidance Concerning Local Authority Participation in
Immigration Enforcement and Model Sanctuary Provisions” refers to “hundreds of
municipalities - including New York City… [that] have enacted sanctuary laws and policies.” The
fact that these policies have a long history in NYC indicates an embeddedness of the “sanctuary
city” policy discourse as a contested field of struggle between legislators, community groups,
and other stakeholders. Among NYC’s sanctuary policies are those passed in 2003 (NYC
Mayor’s Office 2003: 2-3) guaranteeing “Any service provided by a City agency shall be made
available to all aliens [sic] who are otherwise eligible… [and] for which aliens are not denied
eligibility by law,” and that “A City officer or employee… shall not inquire about a person’s
immigration status unless… required by law.” In this sense, NYC may be contrasted with both
Tucson and Montclair, neither of which have histories or contemporary policies of a similar
nature or scope, and neither of which have the financial capacities to guarantee the types of
services like an independent public university system or public hospital system offered to
residents of NYC.
New York City also has a history of grassroots mobilization to support people deciding to
take physical sanctuary dating back to 1968. “On October 31, 1968, Private William Steven
Brakefield, 19, took sanctuary in the ballroom of the Finley Student Center at City College of
New York… The sanctuary was organized by the New York Resistance, with support from the
campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the City College Commune, and the
executive committee of the student government” (Bau 1985: 166). This tradition was
revitalized in NYC on September 11th, 1984iii, by Pastor William Sloane Coffin and the members
of the Riverside Church congregation who voted to offer sanctuary to a Guatemalan family who
“had been sheltered for three months by the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America…
[when they were] forced to flee after their community-organizing activities ran them afoul of
the Guatemalan government” (Christian Century 1984: 951). While NYC’s participation in the
1980s sanctuary movement was far more limited than other regions around the country, it
became one of the centers of the New Sanctuary Movement in 2007. By this point, as noted
above, sanctuary had taken on a different meaning, so the congregations and community
groups who were part of grassroots mobilizations were not, for the most part, offering
“physical sanctuary”. Nonetheless, by early 2018, when I assembled the list of NYC houses of
worship who had worked with the New Sanctuary Coalition to become a sanctuary
congregation, there were 82 members on the list. This is in addition to the countless
“sanctuary campuses and school districts… sanctuary workplaces… rapid response networks…
social networks and technology sanctuaries” that Villazor and Gulasekharam (2019: 1242-1251)

iii
The New York Times article was published on October 2nd, 1984, and describes the family as having “moved into
Riverside three weeks ago, taking up residence in a refurbished meeting room” (Briggs 1984: A1, 29). It is possible
that the exact date they took sanctuary was slightly before or after September 11th.

69
term “sanctuary networks”iv, and Cordes (2019: 147-149) refers to as “sanctuary
[neighbor]hoods”.
Because of the great capacity and ostensible support among government officials for
sanctuary city policies, as well as the expansive network of groups and organizations engaged in
grassroots sanctuary mobilizing, NYC is a context where sanctuary actors are more likely to face
a dilemma regarding the balance between strategies that pressure municipal officials to both
prevent cooperation with federal authorities and provide for the basic needs of undocumented
people, on the one hand, and non-governance oriented strategies to find and develop local
solutions of direct support and mutual aid to address those needs, on the other hand. This
dilemma plays out across a wide variety of domains, including (a) determinations of the extent
to which sanctuary should be open and public - when a sanctuary seeker “goes public” - as well
as (b) the extent to which sanctuary actors choose to rely on local agencies and organizations to
meet basic needs, many of which have ties to local government. “Going public” entails
publicizing an instance where an individual or family takes sanctuary through extensive press
releases and interviews with the media, which becomes the source of support from public
officials and local residents and institutions, but can also attract negative attention among
those who target sanctuary actors for reprisals in various ways.
More specifically, who goes public, when, and the process this decision is made, evolved as
critical questions and points of division during the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, because
“going public” is an essential - sometimes the only - tool for recruitment and mobilization,
including among city officials, but it also makes the experience more stressful for the individuals
and families taking sanctuary. Thus, whether and how to go public frequently becomes a
source of division and conflict between sanctuary seekers and the community groups involved
in mobilization, as well as between sanctuary actors with distinct political orientations in any
given case. While I was supporting the coordination of physical sanctuary with Patricia Morales
and her children at Riverside Church from 2017-2018, this became an especially acute and
ongoing source of conflict. Similarly, while meeting specific sanctuary seekers’ basic needs
through established organizations can, initially, be a more reliable source of resources in early
stages of sanctuary mobilizing, especially around cases of physical sanctuary, delegating these
responsibilities to neighbors with the necessary skills, resources, and experiences often serves
as the most important method of fostering recruitment and commitment, and it allows for
greater autonomy from relations of dependence on local political and economic power-brokers
that can become increased sources of tension as sanctuary cases draw out. When I worked
closely on coordination efforts of physical sanctuary with Aura Hernández and her family at
Fourth Universalist Church, the conflicts that emerged more closely resembled this second
type.

iv
Villazor and Gulasekaram (2019: 1225) explicitly contrast sanctuary city policies that grant undocumented
residents access to services, which they call “rights-building”, and sanctuary networks, which they describe as
“those policies, which express opposition, or otherwise undermine, the enforcement regime and policy vision
instantiated by the federal executive department.” While this distinction is not exactly the same as the one I am
drawing between sanctuary as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid, it bears a useful conceptual
resemblance and application to juridical federalism in the U.S., upon which I will elaborate in the dissertation.

70
 As these brief examples show, NYC allows us to understand how the core tension of
sanctuary manifests in a large city with a strong sanctuary city discourse and movement base,
where sanctuary actors pursue diverse and sometimes inconsistent goals, including: (1) pushing
for sanctuary city policies, (2) attending to the concrete, immediate needs of sanctuary seekers
(including, but not limited to, legal support around rights/residency claims), and (3) actively
constructing sanctuary as a transformational space that prefigures social and political
recognition regardless of formal access to rights. While these goals are sometimes in tension
with each other, NYC is an ideal site from which to consider how these tensions might also be
navigated generatively and synergistically, and as part of a recruitment and mobilization
strategy.

Overview of Sanctuary in Tucson, Arizona

Most histories of sanctuary mobilizations in the United States identify Tucson as the origin
of the sanctuary movement in 1982 when Quaker and goat herder, Jim Corbett, began
sheltering undocumented asylum seekers from Central America in his home, and reached out
to Pastor John Fife at South Side Presbyterian, as well as a national network of Quaker
Congregations, for support. While the more thorough genealogy that I am conducting
demonstrates that this was not, in fact, the origin of sanctuary mobilizations in the United
States, Tucson, Fife, Southside Presbyterian, and the spirit and writings of Corbett are still
central figures in the contemporary sanctuary movement. Of the three cases of sanctuary
mobilizations that I have selected, Tucson is the only one located in close proximity to the
border that separates the United States and Mexico. Though the other two sites are technically
within the 100 mile border zone, “where Border Patrol… agents can enter private property, set
up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they
suspect to have committed immigration violations” (Misra 2018), Tucson’s location on the
border between the U.S. and Mexico has made it a primary site of sanctuary mobilizations since
1981, as well as a place where sanctuary actors have come into consistent and dramatic conflict
with state authorities.
As described in greater detail in the outline of the genealogical section, above, Tucson was
perhaps the site of greatest public attention during the sanctuary mobilizations of the 1980s.
This was due, at least in part, to levels of surveillance and repression that had not been seen
since COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 70s (Coutin 1993b; Kohn 1986: 74). As documented by
Coutin (1993a, 1993b, 1995, 2000), Cunningham (1995), and Smith (1996), this repression
included harassment of U.S. citizens who traveled to Central America to bear witness to the
violence and displacement being supported by U.S. military financing and proxy mercenaries,
FBI surveillance (both overt investigations, interviews, and tax audits, as well as clandestine
phone taps, mail tampering, break-ins, and group infiltrations), death threats (including
perpetrated by Central American government agents in collaboration with U.S. officials), and
perhaps most famously, the indictments, arrests, and prosecutions of what became known as
“the Sanctuary Eleven” (originally fourteen) sanctuary activists from Tucson (Coutin 1993b: 19;
Smith 1996: 280-324; Davidson 1988: page). While the immediate result of this repression was
a resurgence of recruitment and solidarity among different national factions of sanctuary
mobilizations, it also led to a level of exhaustion that Smith (1996: page) partially attributes to

71
the decline in grassroots sanctuary mobilizations in 1989, even as many individual
congregations and leaders continued their work with asylum seekers in the following years.
Sanctuary mobilizations in Tucson were revitalized under the name No More Deaths (Fife
2014) in 2000, following the increasing criminalization of undocumented people through
federal policies in the mid-late 1980s and 1990s (discussed above), which was directly
responsible for large increases in deaths of sanctuary seekers crossing the Sonora Desert (cite
Jason De Leon). No More Deaths expanded sanctuary practices to include rescue work in the
desert and support for asylum seekers in Mexico preparing to cross the border (Mayer 2019:
personal communication). These evolutions in sanctuary’s organizational and tactical
repertoires have also prompted a new wave of federal government surveillance and repression.
While a detailed examination of this repression is beyond the scope of this proposal, it must be
noted that this continues to represent an essential element of the context of sanctuary in
Tucson up to the present day, and to inform the differences in strategic approaches used by
activists there (and in other border communities), especially relative to sanctuary mobilizations
elsewhere.
Perhaps the most widely cited recent example of this is the case of five volunteers of the
Tucson-based group, No More Deaths, who were charged with varying degrees of federal
violations for leaving food and water in the Sonoran Desert for migrants crossing the border,
and who, in the case of Scott Warren, also provided shelter and transportation for two asylum
seekers. Facing two decades in prison for “two felony counts of harboring and one count of
‘conspiracy to commit harboring’ after he provided food and water to two men he encountered
in the desert… Dr. Warren sought to have the charges dismissed based on RFRA [the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act]” (Platt et al. 2019: 28-29). While news of the charges against the No
More Deaths volunteers spread quickly throughout the communities of sanctuary actors in late-
2017 (at the time, I had been involved in coordinating three families who had taken physical
sanctuary in NYC churches), it became a matter of greater personal significance when the
Columbia University lawyers who were legal advisors in the sanctuary work I was helping
coordinate organized a convening to strategize viable legal defenses for Warren, and others
who, like myself, were engaged in work that was similarly vulnerable to federal prosecution.
On April 20th, 2018, in response to the indictments of Warren and the other volunteers,
and at the request of myself, Juan Carlos Ruiz, and Tara Geer - two other coordinators of
physical sanctuary in NYC - the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at Columbia University
Law School organized the “Religious Exemptions and the Sanctuary Movement Convening”,
which brought together civil rights, religious freedom, and immigration attorneys with other
prominent sanctuary leaders from New York, Tucson, and Washington DC. Roughly two-dozen
people participated in this day-long event, including Allison Harrington, the current Pastor of
Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church where sanctuary was first declared in the U.S. in the
1980s, the National Sanctuary Coordinator of Church World Service, and constitutional lawyers
from the ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and universities across the country. The central theme
of the convening was the viability of the use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of
1993, which had not existed during the original sanctuary trials, as the basis of the legal
defenses of Warren, the other No More Deaths volunteers, and for sanctuary defenses more

72
generallyv. One of these attorneys was Ellen Yaroshefsky, a professor of law and legal ethics at
Hofstra and the sanctuary lawyer who represented “the sanctuary eleven” at the 1985 trials in
Tucson (Davidson 1988: page), who expressed her doubts of the viability of a religious freedom
defense, given that the court had refused to permit such a defense in 1985. Nonetheless,
several of the participants in the convening co-authored an Amicus Curiae brief on RFRA to
submit on Warren’s behalf, and his first trial ended in a hung jury, while the other four
volunteers were convicted of misdemeanors and sentenced to fines and probation.
After Warren’s retrial ended in late November of 2019, Katherine Franke (2019: personal
communication), founder and faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Projectvi,
sent a follow-up message to the participants of the Convening: “In a groundbreaking decision,
Judge Collins found that leaving water for migrants in the desert was an expression of Dr.
Warren’s sincerely held religious beliefs, and that the government’s criminal prosecution for
this activity violated his religious liberty rights secured by the Religious Freedom Restoration
Act (RFRA)... Judge Collins’ decision mirrored the structure provided in this amicus brief.”
Soon after, an Arizona District Court decision by Judge Márquez overturned the convictions of
the other four No More Deaths volunteers, also citing RFRA. "Defendants met their burden of
establishing that their activities were exercises of their sincere religious beliefs, and the
Government failed to demonstrate that application of the regulations against Defendants is the
least restrictive means of accomplishing a compelling interest. Accordingly, the Court finds that
application of the regulations against Defendants violates RFRA (the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act), and the Court will reverse Defendants' convictions” (Márquez 2020: 21).vii
Further, like the response to repression in the 1980s, when “the prospect of a major court
test served to temporarily unify the movement” (Davidson 1988: 97) and led to a resurgence of
volunteer and congregational recruitment, Pastor Randy Mayor (4/27/2019: personal
communication), notes a similar dynamic in April of 2019. Mayor, who co-founded No More
Deaths with John Fife, also known as the co-founder of the 1980s sanctuary movement in
Tucson with Jim Corbett, explained at the time how ICE tactics of targeting asylum seekers and
No More Deaths volunteers in an effort to manufacture a “crisis” was backfiring. “At the
monastery [sheltering 400 asylum seekers], they need 150 volunteers to run the facility every
single day. At all of the 15 or so churches they need a team of 20 or 30 people to keep the
shelters going. Those people were not engaged in this issue at all six months ago. Now there’s
a couple thousand people that are very engaged, and very touched and changed by the
relationships that they have built. So, we don’t use the language of crisis. It’s not a crisis. It’s a
huge opportunity to become part of the solidarity movement. The United States is going to
change in the positive because of this manufactured ‘crisis’. The government is trying to do

v
Cite five Public Rights/Private Conscience Project documents, including Sanctuary Law background, RFRA
background and 2 applications, and Scott Warren Amicus brief, in addition to the Scott Warren motion to
dismiss.
vi
The name of this research center has since changed to The Law, Rights, and Religion Project.
vii
The full text of Judge Márquez’s ruling is available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6763128-
2020-02-03-Hoffman-DE22-Order-Reversing.html

73
this, but as people of faith, we’re going to take this and make it into this huge opportunity for
transformation of this country.”viii
Despite Tucson’s history of widespread grassroots sanctuary mobilization, in a ballot
initiative known as Proposition 205 that was conducted in November of 2019, “voters
overwhelmingly rejected an initiative to turn Tucson into a sanctuary city” (Fortin & Rueb
2019). Specifically aimed to challenge Arizona’s infamous 2010 immigration law S.B. 1070,
Proposition 205 (City of Tucson 2018: 1) would have declared it to be “the policy of the city that
the city be a sanctuary and safe refuge for all persons,” and that “the city is committed to
protecting and defending all people, and upholding the self evident truths that all people are
created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and sanctuary.” But, like
past efforts to pass sanctuary legislation in Tucson, the initiative was roundly rejected, in part
because residents and city officials feared that it would lead to cuts in federal funding, as the
Trump administration had threatened and was in the process of litigating in Chicago,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York. Thus, the fact that Tucson has a rich history of
grassroots sanctuary mobilizations that are strongly influenced by border-dynamics, and even
extending across the border to collaborate with Mexican congregations and community groups,
in the virtual absence of any city or state support, presents a stark point of comparison to the
dynamics of sanctuary mobilizations in New York City. Further, through the brief overview of
sanctuary in Tucson presented here, it is possible to recognize the ways in which geographical
factors (ie. proximity to the border), legal factors (ie. change in federal laws regarding religious
freedom), and strategic choices (ie. employment of the RFRA defense, requiring specific framing
of activities as “humanitarian” and “religious”) can only be understood as a multi-causal
dynamic. As a result, to the extent that tensions between sanctuary mobilizations as a
citizenship and post-citizenship movement hybrid are similarly experienced across the two
cases, this comparison promises instructive structural, cultural, and historical insights.

Overview of Sanctuary in Montclair, New Jersey

Of the three cases selected for ethnographic inquiry, Montclair is the site where direct
confrontation and engagement with the federal government is least likely, either by grassroots
actors or municipal agencies and officials. In comparison with New York City and Tucson,
Montclair, as of 2019, is predominantly white, and upper-income, with poverty rates less than a
third of the previous two cases.ix As a small township (ten times smaller than Tucson, and two-

viii
Interestingly, Naomi Paik (2020: 141) views Warren, “like other ordinary people criminalized for their
humanitarian action, [as] refus[ing] to allow the state to define our relationships to each other. Instead… they
show us models of mutual aid central to an abolitionist sanctuary.” This is, I believe, a point of great significance,
as it indicates a decisive convergence of the post-citizenship political orientations as they were points of
contention between Tucson and Chicago in the 1980s. Here, Paik demonstrates that a decolonizing abolitionist
vision of sanctuary integrates the two earlier “factions” into a single orientation. This does not, however,
contravert the tension internal to these mobilizations themselves, which the ethnographic section aims to
excavate.
ix
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork,montclairtownshipessexcountynewjersey,tu
csoncityarizona/PST045219

74
hundred times smaller than NYC), Montclair also has limited autonomous governance capacity,
and is thus subject to greater dependence on the County (Essex) and State (New Jersey). While
far from the U.S.-Mexico border, Montclair is within twenty miles of at least five immigrant
detention facilities, so many of the groups doing sanctuary work include support for currently-
incarcerated and recently-released detainees and their families as an important set of practices.
Since 2017, Montclair has also been the site of grassroots sanctuary mobilizations, the
Montclair Sanctuary Alliance of houses of worship and North Jersey Sanctuary Alliance including
a large network of private homes and families among the most prevalent. While the vast
majority of research on sanctuary mobilizations focuses on larger cities and other jurisdictions
with the capacity to oppose federal government enforcement policies and practices, the fact
that Montclair has experienced burgeoning grassroots sanctuary mobilizations over the past
four years, despite being small, far from the border, and with minimal governance capacity to
challenge State and Federal authority, makes it a promising case for comparison with the larger
sites I have chosen. Because the grassroots nature and recent emergence of sanctuary
mobilizing in Montclair has received little attention from scholars or journalists, I will be relying
more heavily on primary source material and first-person accounts that I developed in the
course of doing sanctuary organizing and exploratory ethnographic research over the past three
years.
The limitations of viewing sanctuary mobilizations through the lens of a contest between
federal and local governments is borne out by efforts of Montclair residents and officials to
pass a Sanctuary City Resolution between late-2016 and early-2017. On November 29th, 2016,
immediately following the U.S. presidential election, the Montclair Township Attorney, Ira
Karasick, introduced a “Resolution Declaring the Township of Montclair a Sanctuary Township”
(R-16-227x) to the Council of the Township of Montclair. This proposal, which was ultimately
tabled, amended, and passed with significant modifications, would have committed Montclair
officials to “not ban people from this Township or from our country for their faith, nor...
tolerate place reporting requirements or additional burdens on any person because of their
faith or denomination,” as well as to “refuse any requests to be an extension of any federal
immigration policy enforcement actions, [to] enter into any agreements to carry out such
enforcement… [or to] participate in any efforts by any government agency to enforce policies
that requires the identification of a resident’s immigration status.” This would have added
significant reinforcements and extensions to New Jersey’s Attorney General Law Enforcement
Directive No. 2007-3 (Milgram 2007: 3)xi, which simply reiterated the State’s existing prohibition
of racial profiling of immigrants (already a federal legal violation), and prohibited inquiring
about immigration status or reporting such status to federal authorities except if “(a) the

x
https://www.ecode360.com/documents/MO0769/public/383346192.pdf
https://www.ecode360.com/documents/MO0769/public/312288991.pdf (see pp. 203-204).
https://www.ecode360.com/documents/MO0769/public/328333607.pdf (see p. 22).
xi
https://libguides.law.du.edu/ld.php?content_id=38817891
Also see the “Resolution of the Montclair Township Council to Protest the Eroding of Civil Liberties Under and
Petition the Federal Government to Repeal the USA Patriot Act (Public Law 107-56)” of 2004:
https://libguides.law.du.edu/ld.php?content_id=38541459

75
County Prosecutor or the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice determines, in writing, that
good cause exists to inquire about or investigate the person’s immigration status; (b) the
person has been arrested for an indictable offense or for driving while intoxicated…; or, (c) as
may be constitutionally or otherwise legally required during the criminal litigation process.”
Thus, in addition to being an important symbolic declaration that “the Township of Montclair
will not turn our back on the men and women from other countries who help make this country
great… [and] the Township Council and the people of Montclair believe that the community
must reaffirm and protect this tradition when these principles are threatened or called into
question, and that, in light of the numerous expressions of prejudice and hate during the
recently concluded presidential election, now is such a time,” the wording of Montclair’s
Sanctuary Resolution, had it passed in its original form, would have added prohibitions against
collecting or sharing any information with ICE; using resources to assist immigration
enforcement; entering into 287(g) agreements to execute ICE holds, alerts, or detainer
requests; contracting with ICE to hold immigrants in the City Jail; and allowing ICE into the jail.
This Resolution, however, was tabled by Mayor Robert Jackson, to be revised and reintroduced
on February 7th, and passed on February 21st, 2017.
In its revised form, the resolution no longer declared Montclair to be a Sanctuary Township,
but instead as “An Open and Welcoming Community” (R-17-024: 1). While many residents
“objected to the removal of the term ‘sanctuary city,’”xii the more serious revisions involved
removing all of the language other than that which affirmed the 2007 Directive of New Jersey’s
Attorney General. In the new resolution, the Council simply informed the Police Department
that they “should continue to follow New Jersey Attorney General Law Enforcement Directive
2007-3 in interactions with federal immigration authorities, refraining from inquiring as to or
investigating a person’s immigration status except in the limited circumstances when they are
required by law to do so and from acting as an extension of federal immigration enforcement
authorities,” and even went a step further to affirm, “As a matter of policy… that this Council is
prevented by State statute from directly instructing or ordering the Manager or Chief of Police
to take any action or to operate the Police Department in a particular manner.”xiii Despite these
changes that effectively undermined any potential symbolic or legal power of the Resolution,
two of the six Council Members voted against the policy on the basis that it would “violate both
the law and the tenets of the Council-Manager Form of Government,” and “jeopardize federal
funding… particularly for the school lunch program.”xiv Several residents who spoke in favor of
the original policy perceived that the revised version “was not strong enough.” Three months
later, some of these same people became leading voices in efforts to organize grassroots
sanctuary mobilizations among their congregations, community groups, and other local
residents.
By June of 2017, faith leaders at three Montclair congregations, Rabbi Elliott Tepperman
and Rabbi Ariann Weitzman of B’nai Keshet, Reverend Ann Ralosky of First Congregational

xii
https://www.ecode360.com/documents/MO0769/public/330715398.pdf (see pp. 29-31).
xiii
https://www.montclairnjusa.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_5276204/File/Government/Township%20Council%20
Meetings/2017-02-21/R_17_024.pdf (see p. 2).
xiv
https://www.ecode360.com/documents/MO0769/public/330715398.pdf (see pp. 29-31).

76
Church, and Reverend Anya Sammler-Michael of Unitarian Universalist Congregation, came
together to discuss the formation of a grassroots network of houses of worship, the Montclair
Sanctuary Alliance, to offer direct support to individuals and families seeking sanctuary (Orel
2017). The initial Alliance had been formed and dedicated by late December of that year, and
by late 2019, the network had grown to include more than ten houses of worship, in addition to
several other organizational partners like Faith in New Jersey, the North Jersey Sanctuary
Alliance, First Friends of New Jersey and New York, Make the Road New Jersey, Wind of the
Spirit, and Catholic Charities (Di Lonno 2018; Roll 2019; Ralosky 2020: personal
communication). The B’nai Keshet Synagogue, where the Montclair Sanctuary Alliance is
housed, describes the Alliance as:
“an interfaith network of congregations, organizations and individuals offering sanctuary to individuals
resisting detention and deportation in order to stay together with their families and communities. We
stand publicly against the injustices affecting immigrants and support reforms to promote fairness… A
growing number of churches and synagogues are offering sanctuary to individuals fearing deportation.
This works because there is a longstanding policy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to avoid
arrests on congregational property. Sanctuary may offer an individual time to seek a deferment or other
resolution that will allow them to maintain their residency. Sometimes the public attention itself seems
to open up new possibilities… Montclair congregations support the Sanctuary Movement in several ways
including advocating changes to federal and local policy. What we are doing in Montclair is actually
creating a space within the Bnai Keshet building to offer physical shelter to an individual or family at risk
of deportation” (B’nai Keshet 2017).
I connected with the Alliance in early 2019, when we received word from a pastor at the
Holding Institute Community Center in Laredo, Texas, who I had been working with through the
New Sanctuary Movement, that there was a recently-arrived Honduran family in desperate
search of sanctuary. The first family who had taken sanctuary at the B’nai Keshet Synagogue
through the Montclair Sanctuary Alliance in December of 2018 had moved out only weeks
earlier (Kondash 2019), leaving open the designated sanctuary apartment, so I helped
coordinate the Honduran family’s journey from Tennessee, where they had originally gone to
pursue a job opportunity with a relative that turned out to involve predatory trafficking. Since
this time, the Alliance has expanded its work to involve four sanctuary apartments, as well as a
large network of homes whose residents have offered to support families in need.
Based on exploratory interviews and focus groups with leaders of the Montclair Sanctuary
Alliance, as well as in a general review of available documents and publications, I anticipate the
discourse of grassroots sanctuary work in Montclair to be characterized far more
unidimensionally along the lines of hospitality, charity, and humanitarian aid than in either New
York City or Tucson. While this discourse is certainly pervasive in all three sites, I have come
across only the most subtle indications that there may be another, emerging narrative of
sanctuary in Montclair that aligns more closely with an abolitionist, decolonial, or anti-
imperialist perspective that my theoretical overview suggests may be inconsistent with a
discourse of hospitality, charity, and humanitarian aid (Fine 2019: personal communication;
Keller 2019: personal communication; Scherzer 2019: personal communication). Possible
explanations for this include Montclair’s demographic composition, its municipal size and
capacity, its distance from the border, and its relatively recent initiation of sanctuary
mobilization.
Nonetheless, the fact that Montclair is located at the center point between five immigrant
detention facilities - twenty minutes from Elizabeth Detention Center, Essex County

77
Correctional Facility, Bergen County Detention Center, Union County Juvenile Detention Center,
and Hudson County Correctional Centerxv - presents the likelihood that the experiences of
sanctuary actors in Montclair may, in fact, lead to the adoption of a more thoroughgoing
critique of detention/deportation and even border imperialism that expands the political
orientation of sanctuary work beyond “lov[ing] and protect[ing] the stranger” (B’nai Keshet
2017) as a relation of “guest” and “host” (B’nai Keshet 2018: Sanctuary Agreement). The
enactment of repressive bordering practices have, in fact, already led to increasingly
widespread resistance on the part of community groups like Abolish ICE NY-NJ Coalition and
North Jersey Democratic Socialists of America, as well as on the part of detainees themselves
(Kiefer 2020, 2021). This replicates some of the established dynamics of experiences of Tucson
activists and congregations starting in the 1980s, through which proximity and exposure to
personal accounts of repression and resistance became a major source of catalyzing movement
participation and radicalization. As the Pastor of NYC’s Fourth Universalist Congregation (Vogel
2019: personal communication) told me after a family had taken sanctuary and lived at his
church for more than a year, “I would say that I was radicalized through relationships.”

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix G (from p. 10 note 47) | Field Example #2: Investigating the Liminality of Sanctuaries
Between and Across Analytic Borderlands

The experience of the four-day event I co-organized in the Spring of 2019, Connecting
Sanctuaries Across North America: Grassroots Approaches, co-sponsored by four universities,
four houses of worship, five local sanctuary coalitions, and the Church World Service, and
involving participants from seven U.S. cities, two Mexican cities, and two Canadian cities,
illustrates how socially, politically, and epistemologically precarious the in-between sites of
analytic borderlands are in practice. The first two days of workshops had been facilitated by
prominent faith leaders from the U.S. and Mexico, the national sanctuary director for Church
World Service, and scholars of sanctuary. All but one of these workshop facilitators were men,
and the light complexion of the majority of them appeared to be of European descent (including
the two Mexican priests).
Upon arriving on the third day, a few minutes after the session had started, three sanctuary
activists from New Mexico interrupted a workshop to express an objection that they had
communicated to me by phone earlier that day. The theme of this particular workshop was
sanctuary health and well-being, and it was designed and facilitated by four undocumented
migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, and India. With the exception of the Cuban woman
who had trained and practiced as a physician before fleeing political persecution, and who had
just been released after spending three months in a Texas detention center, the other three all
had extensive experiences not only as sanctuary seekers, but also as sanctuary activists. The

xv
These examples illustrate that there is pervasive contracting between ICE and New Jersey city and county jails,
indicating the weakness of the 2007-3 Attorney General Law Enforcement Directive that the original Montclair
Sanctuary City Resolution aimed to fortify. Further, Montclair is located in Essex County, suggesting the limitations
of small townships to limit cooperation with ICE, another factor that distinguishes it from the other two cases
selected for ethnographic investigation.

78
objections voiced by two of the New Mexico activists, Daniel and Justin, illustrate the variation
in the types of borders by which sites of sanctuary come to be constituted as “analytic
borderlands”.
“We are looking for ways to create and facilitate spaces of collective liberation to support us, and to
solidify the networks of collusion with our people… Coming out of yesterday’s conversation, I know
that there were some concerns and questions raised by way of how many people are able to relate, of
those who are working directly with the impacted community. So we want to be sure that we are
focusing on tools that community members know, and that allies, accomplices, doctors, or whatever
other capacity, are ensuring to center the community… We want to take a toolkit back to New Mexico
to really answer the demands that we are seeing on the ground, and the people that are really being
impacted directly. I mean, all of us are impacted, but those who are impacted directly and who are
depending on our help…”

“I migrated here from Mexico when I was nine, so I can really identify with these experiences. And
something that has been an extreme concern for the families living in Albuquerque is that there is not
adequate support of people going through the violence of sanctuary, and the stress that our families
are suffering from the violence that has made us invisible and, because of that, easier to target. We
are not just talking about this violent disruption of people going into a place of safety, and of being
confined in that place, but also we have entire populations living under the anguish of that uncertainty,
which is still very violent - no less violent - and which is still very much state-sanctioned and allowed.
So, what are the tools that can ensure we are looking at the mental health for people who are living in
sanctuary, to ensure a family is supported by the community? And what is the demand of those of us
who belong to different institutional bodies - doctors or whatever - in terms of expanding that
protection to our communities?”
The fifty-five participants listened attentively to their concerns without interruption, and
after they finished, the four facilitators began to respond directly, improvising their plan in
accordance with the concerns: “What I’m hearing is that some people would like to share what
they are working on as a way of sharing tools, and also to hear from the wealth of experiences
of all the people who are here. We also can identify various modules: some of us could share
what is happening with the families who are currently living in churches. Maybe others could
focus on the experiences of the community in general, including how to expand the networks of
collaboration. And we could add another theme if anyone else has suggestions? Maybe how
our institutions can support or how to coordinate between different cities?”
A consensus was reached that each of these themes would be discussed as a whole-group,
and that one of the facilitators would write the tools that everyone shared on the whiteboard in
the room. Realizing that some may be uncomfortable sharing these experiences and tools on
camera for legal or other personal reasons, a sanctuary activist from New Haven named Vanesa
spoke up, expressing her concern over the vulnerabilities of undocumented participants. “I
think we should not record this, since some of the information may be sensitive,” she said,
turning toward the two video documentarians who were filming. Nobody objected, but when
the request was made, the filmmakers turned their eyes toward me, giving a clear indication to
other participants that some authority or status had been conferred - however significant or not
- that was unequal to others.
When I had reached out to all of the presenters weeks earlier to invite them directly, I had
made every effort to emphasize that I had no intention of defining the nature of their
participation or the structure of their sessions in any way. Attempting to decenter myself in the

79
process, to make myself somewhat invisible, and thus to create as much space as possible for
other people, knowledges, and experiences to be fully present, I had not given any public
statement to introduce the event, or to demystify what - to my surprise and dismay - became a
kind of hidden curriculum. When the filmmakers turned their heads in my direction, the mood
in the room shifted palpably, and Vanesa demanded that I account for the decision to record,
the process by which this decision was made, and the lack of public discussion and consent for
recording each separate session of the event. Having attempted to facilitate a process by which
the meanings and realities of others were surfaced, and through which I faded into the
background, I had inadvertently backed onto - and seemingly transgressed across - one of the
many borders that analytic borderlands are constructed to “capture as sites for spatial and
temporal disruptions, or ‘events’” (Sassen 2006: 380).
Adding another layer of complexity, as it turned out, the very people who Daniel and Justin
sought to speak on behalf of were those who were facilitating the session they interrupted with
their objection. That evening, I received a call from Vania, one of the facilitators of this session
who was seeking asylum from Cuba and who had just been released from immigration-
detention in Texas. “I need to talk with you about what happened,” she said urgently. “It didn’t
make any sense to me. They said they wanted the people most affected to lead the
conversation but they interrupted us, and we have experienced the need for sanctuary the
most… Do you remember that they said my experiences aren’t important because I’m a
physician? I felt like they did it just as a way to have power and control. I felt really
disrespected.” Saptagiri, another facilitator of the session, would later echo very similar
suspicions.

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix H (from p. 14 note 63 [and p. 15 note 66; p. 82; p. 90 note xxviii]) | Field Example #3: Interpreting
Sanctuary Mobilizations in Relation to Dual and Imbricated Carceral/Abolition Geographies

Canadian sanctuary activists, Syed Khalid Hussan and Harjap Grewal (in Walia 2013: 233-
240), suggest that sanctuary actors’ assertions of sovereignty almost always mean something
different from what is discussed in the academic literature. Hussan parces the distinction most
succinctly as follows: “State sovereignty is about owning land; self-determination is about
defending the land. It is this community sovereignty that Indigenous activists from Six Nations
to Secwepemc harken to when identifying themselves as sovereigntists who are caretakers and
defenders of the land… Decolonization in many ways is an inversion: land does not belong to
us; rather, we belong to it. Understanding this is the key to seeing through the debates around
sovereignty and migration” (see Appendix I). Within these two conceptual schemas of
sovereignty are crystallized what Walia describes as “the two different arcs of sanctuary
organizing” (2021: personal communication).
Grewal responds directly to Hussan with an anecdote from his experience working with
Laibar Singh, a Punjabi refugee who sought sanctuary at a Sikh Gurudwara in Toronto. In
recounting the story of a visit to the sanctuary by a local Indigenous elder who had heard the
news of Singh’s case, Grewal elaborates these two imbricated types of sovereign terrain - what
Gilmore (2017) refers to as boundary-making carceral geographies and world-making abolition
geographies - in relation to which sanctuary actors must consistently navigate:

80
 “Singh could barely understand English, but we translated that he was being welcomed to Indigenous
lands. Laibar said that he could see parallels with his experience as a land-less Dalit and those of
Indigenous people. He told us that visit was one of the most significant for him, as the solidar-ity
extended to him was an expression of shared values. These forms of solidarity between immigrant and
Indigenous communities often exist without an expecta-tion of reciprocity. Some of us regularly bridge
between Indigenous and migrant communities—for example, by having discussions in our immigrant
spaces about coloniza-tion… These moments reflect what can happen when we sit together, unfiltered by
colonialism, which keeps us apart. The responsibility of immigrants and migrant justice movements is to
make visible our support for Indigenous values. Even with shared experiences of racism and vio-lence at
the hands of colonizers, the struggle to defend an Indigenous way of life is not shared by all people of
color. Our struggles for migrant justice cannot be limited to gaining access to nation-states or property.
Migrants’ relationship to the land needs to be rooted in steward-ship of the land rather than colonial and
capitalist ideas of landownership. Even though colonization has entrenched property ownership to such
an extent that it is difficult to exist outside of it, decolonization requires us to overturn this regime.
Though we may not overturn the regime tomorrow, we can decolonize our relations. Wet'suwet'en and
Tsilhqot’in communities have welcomed us on to their territories after asking us what our intentions are
when we arrive. These moments project an anticolonial analysis of migration, in which free movement is
not governed by the state or capital relations but instead is understood as respecting Indigenous
traditions and shared responsibility for the land.”

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix I (from p. 14 note 63 [and p. 80]) | Land as Sovereign Territory vs. Living Relationship in the
Literature

In their book, Political Theories of Decolonization, Kohn and McBride (2011: 99-101, 104)
discuss the significance of the difference between relations of land that are conceptually,
politically, economically, and socially organized around sovereignty as ownership or self-
determination, respectively. Specifically, they point to Amílcar Cabral and Subcomandante
Marcos as two of the major revolutionary theorist-militants who provide a foundation for an
indigenous conception of human-land relations that have profound implications for
understanding the trajectories of contemporary movements. The passage that follows presents
a number of important ideas regarding the relationship between state sovereignty and
indigenous self-determination that I will explore further in the dissertation:
“Land does not seem to find its way into political theory very frequently. Or rather, it makes brief
appearances before being transformed into a metaphor for the nation and no longer appears as land—
the dirt beneath our feet. Most famously, in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, land is
transformed into private property through labor and becomes a commodity that can be bought or sold.
Sovereignty is dependent upon and bounded by territory, but the relationship is actually tautological;
territory is land already transformed into territory by the assertion of sovereignty. Henri Lefebvre’s
production of space supersedes a conception of land per se. And Raymond Williams’s ‘country’ exists as a
cultural construction that is opposed to the city, and, as he emphasizes most emphatically, is not to be
mistaken for the land itself. Every political order depends upon a relationship to inhabitable space; there
must be ground beneath our feet. So it is certainly one of the most fundamental aspects of political order
to define and transform that dirt underneath our feet into city, property, territory, nation, landscape,
farm, or even ‘wilderness,’ to name but a few of the options…
Though in recent years colonization has often been viewed through the lens of racial, sexual, and
nationalist politics, the history of colonization can also be read as the hegemonic application of
conceptions of property, territory and sovereignty. European powers made maps, drew boundaries,
decided which spaces were ‘empty’ and which were already occupied, introduced different forms of

81
 agriculture, and even imposed cultural conceptions of how views and landscapes should be perceived.
Since colonization transformed land through various military, legal, representational, and political means,
it follows that one aspect of decolonization is about challenging these categories and transformations…
It is important to remember that the special relationship between indigenous groups and their land has
not always been a ground of resistance to colonialism; more frequently it has been one of the instruments
of colonialism that provided the means for legal expropriation of territory. Arguing that natives had a
‘different’ relationship to the land was the basis of the concept of aboriginal title, best known as the
device making it possible for governments to take land from indigenous groups. Aboriginal title was a
right that could only be extinguished, not transferred; it asserted that inhabiting the land was not the
same as owning it. Therefore, it was possible for conquering powers to claim exclusive rights to
extinguish aboriginal title. In this way, the ‘special relationship’ between population and territory has
been used to disempower and displace tribes around the globe. One could argue that continuing to base
claims upon this special relationship is particularly risky.
Yet there seem to be some rewards for focusing upon the land as a site of political identity and
meaning. Interestingly, the land provides the basis for an economic critique of colonialism and
globalization outside of class-based Marxian analysis. The land is a link to a history of habitation that
precedes colonization, and is an integral aspect of the structure of self-determination. These two facts
mean that the land can provide a postcolonial foundational claim…
Political theorists can learn by examining movements that have specifically repudiated both the
practices of colonialism and the categories of classical liberalism… Two thinkers, Amílcar Cabral and
Subcomandante Marcos… take the land as a measure of self-determination, emphasizing the proper
relationship between a population and the land it inhabits. These theorists offer a way of thinking about
the land that differs from the framework of rights and property… In the dominant conceptual paradigms
provided by class analysis, revolutions move us away from the land, not toward it. But this is based on the
assumption that all history proceeds according to the path set by European history.”

For three other discussions of the complexities that are revealed about conceptions of
sovereignty when viewed through “the abyssal line” (though without using this particular
term), see the discussion between Hussan and Grewal in Walia (2013: 233-240; see
Appendix H). Also see the discussion on “sovereignty [giving] way to sanctuary” between
Denetdale and Marley (in Martínez & Schreiber: 2018 144-151). Finally, Jim Corbett, the co-
founder of the 1980s sanctuary movement, draws on Arendt in his critique of sovereignty,
and as the foundation of his conception of “civil initiative” (as opposed to “civil
disobedience”), which he credits – at least in part – to his indigenous identity (1991: 194 n.
5; 200).

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix J (from p. 16 note 78) | Detailed Overview and Examples of Three Methodological
Challenges of Conducting Research with Sanctuaries as Liberated Zones

Methodological challenges of researching sanctuaries as (a) liberated zones (b) along

analytic borderlands (c) in contexts of carceral and abolition geographies stem from distinct
spatio-temporalities of sanctuary’s citizenship and post-citizenship orientations. Beyond
sociologies of absences/emergences, I address the most significant of these challenges through
Burawoy’s extended case method, Latour’s actor-network-theory, and Appadurai’s
anthropology/sociology of the future. As key dilemmas and tensions experienced by sanctuary
actors are born in large part by vicissitudes of navigating boundary-making carceralism and
world-making abolitionism as imbricated terrains converging in analytic borderlands as

82
“space[s] of devastation” and “spaces of making” (Sassen 2014: 151, 222), sanctuary analysts
must be sensitized to the dynamics of each, and attuned to actors’ positions relative to both.
The unique provocation for social science lies in the fact that these two terrains are not only
analytically distinct but also epistemologically incommensurable, thus compelling the
investigator of sanctuary to deploy a bifocal analytic, xvi and to thus follow Santos’s (2020: 124)
exhortation of the postabyssal sociologist and the postabyssal artist, to be “an amplifier of the
not-yet… [to turn] ruins into seeds, inven[t] new territories as liberated zones, and old
territories into counter-hegemonic time-spaces.”
Illustrative of this first challenge, when there was a split between the NYC New Sanctuary
Coalition (NSC) and an informal coalition of anarchist and socialist groups who had assembled
to plan the groups’ tactics, it would be easy to ascribe this splintering to distinct political
ideologies or contrasting strategic goals. Taking into account the NSC Director’s experiences
navigating the inner-workings of carceral geographies for over a decade as an undocumented
migrant who had spent years in federal prison and immigration detention, however, in relation
to the anarchist and socialist groups’ more explicit post-citizenship orientation in executing
their “Abolish ICE” campaign, suggests the need for an interpretation capable of assessing these
actors in relation to dual, imbricated geographies. When the anarchist/socialist groups set up
their encampments in front of the ICE processing center, “even if geometrically speaking they
hadn’t moved far at all” (Gilmore 2017), the NSC director recognized the specific timing in
deploying this tactic – in relation to carceral geography – as likely to provide legal justification
for the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue in-person asylum hearings, replacing
them with virtual proceedings instead. He anticipated this would undermine one of the most
effective tactics of sanctuary organizers – mobilizing groups of citizens to accompany
undocumented migrants at court hearings and pressure judges to consider these claims with
more gravity and openness. For the socialist and anarchist groups more aspirationally-oriented
toward the “place-making” of abolitionist geographies through occupations of these militarized
borderlands, they viewed what took place in this ICE facility as a moral travesty that required
immediate and uncompromising resistance.
The discrete actors who emerged through this encounter as adversarial factions agreed on
both border abolition and on tactical diversity. What happened, I suggest, is that they failed to
successfully navigate the tension between these goals and tactics in relation to distinct
geographies – or “arenas” as Jasper (2006) describes – abutting each other in the same physical
space. Drawing on Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld, Burawoy’s (1998: 14)
work is especially instructive in addressing these imbricated social worlds, proposing a
“methodological duality, the coexistence and interdependence of two models of science -
positive and reflexive,” each of which is best suited to interpret the realities of one of these
respective geographies.
“Survey research most closely approximates the positive goals the more the specifics of situations and
localities are destroyed. It works best in a reified world that homogenizes all experience, when… the
system colonizes the lifeworld. Positive science realizes itself when we are powerless to resist wider
systems of economy and polity… Reflexive science, on the other hand… realizes itself with the elimination
of power effects, with the emancipation of the lifeworld. Even as that utopian point may be receding, the

xvi
Fine & Weis, “critical bifocality”.

83
 extended case method measures the distance to be travelled. In highlighting the ethnographic worlds of
the local, it challenges the postulated omnipotence of the global, whether it be international capital,
neoliberal politics, space of flows, or mass culture. [It] valorizes context, challenges reification, and
thereby establishes the limits of positive methods” (Burawoy 1998: 30).
As Burawoy subtly demonstrates, these two worlds are epistemologically incommensurable
because one of them is unitary – “a reified world that homogenizes all experience” – while the
other is plural – “ethnographic worlds of the local”. What, then, are the techniques, methods,
and models of social scientific inquiry that might be employed in the site selection, data
collection, analysis, and presentation of findings, that might account for the ostensibly
incommensurable social worlds of carceral and abolition geographies that sanctuary actors
encounter and navigate? To answer this question, an investigator of prefigurative and
epistemically-liberated zones constructed on complex analytic borderlands must address
specific challenges regarding methods and trajectories of data collection as well as site
selection. Research within and between sanctuaries as epistemically-liberated zones will be
conducted through a version of Burawoy’s “reflexive model,” while sanctuary actors’ relations
to institutional contexts of carceral geographies by which they are rendered rightless will be
investigated through a comparative, “positive model”.xvii
Conducting research within and between sanctuaries as epistemically-liberated zones along
complex analytic borderlands presents another challenge that stems from actors’ explicit
rejection of many prevailing political borders and social/sociological categories. Taking
seriously the central principle of these epistemically-liberated zones – actors work in the
present to prefigure a radical future – and avoiding imposing conceptual schemas derived from

xvii
Insert the example of Angela Fernández who, at the event with Ravi, Amy, and Juan Carlos, explained that
Ravi’s knowledge and experience of the inner-workings of the detention system – and the fact that his position
allowed him to sit at the table – enabled him to challenge false claims made by immigration officials, essentially to
be a whistle blower. Simultaneously, however, this makes it more difficult for him to recognize the complexities of
post-citizenship geographies, which led to the inability to recognize what was happening at Holyrood (see
Appendix C), led him to become alienated from more post-citizenship oriented activists at 4th Universalist and at
Riverside, and led to a major fragmentation between New Sanctuary and an informal coalition of anarchist-
oriented groups who were mobilizing around the Abolish ICE campaign. All of these groups were entirely
sympathetic with his position, and were – under other conditions – fully committed to pursuing the goals and
objectives Ravi espoused. But, because he was unaware of their different political orientations – or perhaps was
aware but did not navigate them generatively – all of these groups ended up cutting ties in more or less decisive
ways with Ravi and New Sanctuary.
For another example from field notes, consider the “sanctuary watch” materials assembled by Jennifer, and Luis’s
response that her “militaristic, aggressive approach is alienating members of the church.”
“It has seemed helpful to organizations I've worked with in the past to have some standardization regarding how
to do things… From reviewing the protocols prepared by Abou and the lessons learned from ICE/Law Enforcement
interaction role playing, I composed a draft for First Responders, Interaction with ICE and Law Enforcement. A
Check-in, and Check-out/Handoff lists have been drafted on paper with input from several people who have been
doing watch, and from content in the Abou's protocol. I need to make a electronic version for
testing/review/feedback.
Others I plan on composing:
Community Rapid Response
Media Interaction
Perimeter Check (have a tool already)”

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elsewhere, my inquiry begins with Latour’s (2005: 12, 24-25) first exhortation: “follow the
actors”, and “be prepared to cast off agency, structure, psyche, time, and space [and] every
other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common
sense they may appear.” Sanctuary actors do not only challenge the overt manifestations of
border technologies – deportation, detention, and raids, for example – but also the subtle
reifications of statist categories like “immigrant” and “Latino/Hispanic”. This was borne out
repeatedly in my research, including when the pastor of a prominent sanctuary congregation
exclaimed the importance of extending “our sanctuary community” to “our street brothers and
sisters” (i.e. homeless people),xviii or when a sanctuary activist from a mixed-race Asian family
voiced the need to reach out to the Chinese community (since “the greatest proportion of
undocumented New Yorkers are East and Southeast Asian”).xix The significant stakes involved
in sanctuary actors’ efforts to challenge these categories were made especially clear when the
governing board of a conservative, Lutheran congregation considering sanctuary debated
whether agreeing to shelter one undocumented family would ethically “obligat[e them] to give
it to anyone who comes off the street.”xx Many of the assumptions that go unscrutinized in the
analytic schemas of sociological analyses of sanctuary – that these mobilizations are
coextensive with the categories of “immigrant/refugee”, for example – are matters of profound
empirical and political importance as actors critically reflect and, at times, directly challenge
these orthodoxies.
Actors exhibit the critical-reflexivity that is constitutive of epistemically-liberated zones in
relation to diffuse discourses to which their collective action is subject, as well as in relation to
the research practices of academics and journalists with tacit (and overt) institutional agendas,
as obverse sides of the same process of demystification and autonomous knowledge
production. For example, Mauricio, a sanctuary activist, cautioned me against taking a “tourist”
stance when I accompanied him to a “Beyond Your Rights” training he conducted in the
Bronx.xxi Redressing the subject-object dualism casting the researcher-as-tourist, this prompted
me to reconsider my role through the lens of the committed gift-exchanges core to the practice
of “accompaniment” in sanctuaries as epistemically-liberated zones, and illustrated the deeper
practices of mutuality required by inquiries in this kind of space. Part of this critical-reflexivity
in relation to the production of knowledge is an abiding sensitivity to what Smith (2012: 1)
describes as methodological extractivism. “It galls us,” Smith writes, “that Western researchers
and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their
brief encounters with some of us… [and] can desire, extract, and claim ownership of our ways
of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce… [then deny us] further
opportunities to be creators of [our] own culture” (2012: 1). Sanctuary actors like Mauricio

xviii
See Appendix C – Field Example #1: July 3rd, 2018 | Judson Memorial Church.
xix
The debatable accuracy of this assertion does not contravene its discursive significance in interpreting sanctuary
actors’ efforts to challenge established political/legal/social categories and collective identities.
xx
See Appendix L – Examples of Questions from Congregations Considering Sanctuary.
xxi
See Appendix K – Field Example #4: Accompanying Sanctuary Actors through Prefigurative Gift Exchange in
Epistemically-Liberated Zones, for extended field notes.

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view “accompaniment” as a way to transform the role of the non-extractivist researcher,
shifting political and intellectual approaches by constituting the ongoing and committed
practice of gift-exchange as integral to research itself. In epistemically-liberated zones,
researchers are expected to participate and accompany actors in the processes of creating new
logics of practice, and rather than simply collecting actors’ “traces”, this accompaniment
requires that the researcher be responsive/responsible to them in ongoing ways. The
laboratories of the non-extractivist, postabyssal sociologist, in this sense, cannot be viewed as
the social scientist’s alone.
Combining high-stakes social experience and experimentation, actors of epistemically-
liberated zones are always already constructing social scientific laboratories, requiring a
reimagination of the sociologist beyond what ANT proposes. “When they are genuine and
imply risks and costs, such liberated zones are particularly prefigurative and promote self-
education. At a time when the ideology of neoliberalism proclaims that capitalism, colonialism,
and patriarchy are the natural way of life, liberated zones disprove it” (Santos 2018: 31-32).
Research with actors “de-ideologizing” and re-educating themselves and each other (Martín-
Baró 1996: 30-31) requires relinquishing tourist-research, and instead engaging as mutually-
responsible co-pilots navigating incommensurable terrains, forging new logics of practice. In
contrast to ANT’s approach to following the actors by collecting “the traces left behind by their
activity” (Latour 2005: 29), ethnography-as-accompaniment raises a question Latour does not
sufficiently address: how to decide which actors to follow, when, and how these decisions
embed the researchers’ assumptions and categories of thought into the ultimate shape of the
data and interpretation.
This accompaniment involves engaging in sustained gift-exchange as well as a commitment
to building mutual trust across the researcher/subject divide, as Brotherton and Barrios
(2004)xxii forcefully advocate. “This kind of ethnographic research, based on a trusting and
open relationship… is the best and perhaps only approach… where reaching a holistic
understanding of a stigmatized group is the task.” When investigators engage in the inherent
risks and experiments that are necessary to build trust and to offer gifts that are “to be of use”
(Fine 2016: 358) to those s/he accompanies in constantly-changing and perilous circumstances,
they not only increase their access to sensitive “data”, they also supplement ANT’s (Latour
2005: 127) “textual accounts [as] the social scientist’s laboratory,” converting non-textual sites
into “laboratories” as well.
A final challenge involves sanctuaries’ conflicting temporalities: pedagogical prefiguration of
epistemically-liberated zones, and carceralism’s temporal extraction through “asynchronous,
fragmented, and elongated experiences” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013: 158). Extending
Lippert’sxxiii “capricious… conspicuously absent… [and] commodi[fied]” temporalities of
sanctuary, Bagelman (2016: 7) finds that officials in immigration courts tactically deploy time to
make life in sanctuary unbearable, dragging sanctuary seekers into “a suspended state” where
the legal “process of deferral… implies a temporality of waiting.”xxiv While scholars of sanctuary

xxii
See Brotherton & Barrios (2004: 340). Also see Brotherton (2019: 10-15).
xxiii
See Lippert (2005: 142, 143-164).
xxiv
See Appendix M – Sanctuary Actors’ Temporal Reorientations.

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note the extractive temporalities of carceral geographies, overlooked are those who – sick of
waiting – transmogrify this experience of being “trapped in time” (Bagelman 2016: 5, 11 n. 24)
into “a temporal analogue to untamed spaces… established to function as wilderness,” that
sanctuary movement founder, Jim Corbett (1991: 82, 86), calls “sabbatical communion.” This
empirical lacuna is the result, I argue, of the failure to adequately address the theoretical and
methodological challenge posed by these dual temporalities.
Especially illustrative is a comparison between Amanda Morales Guerra, Aura Hernández
(both of whom took sanctuary in New York), and Jeanette Vizguerra, a former sanctuary seeker
from Denver. On one hand, Amanda’s experience of feeling “trapped in time” is depicted in an
email sent by one of her closest confidantes, Shawna Mulcahy, to Senator Gillibrand:
“I can tell you that based on both my personal and professional observations, Amanda and the children
are suffering immeasurably... This family desperately needs to go home, and I am not sure how much
more time in the church Amanda can withstand. Amanda is an inspiration and source of strength to many
others in similar situations, and I worry that she is being overwhelmed by the seeming futility of the
extended period of time that she has spent in sanctuary.”
Contrast this with Jeanette, who emphasizes the distinction: "Taking sanctuary doesn’t make
you a prisoner, it means having a safe space" (Rodriguez 2021). With this in mind, Jeanette
came from Denver during Aura’s first days in physical sanctuary to offer her counsel:
“I’ve been an activist for more than twenty years… so when I took sanctuary, I knew what I wanted, and I
told the people at the church what I needed them to do. If they don’t want to do it, no problem, I’ll find
somewhere else… I was in sanctuary for three months, but sometimes it goes for years. If you’re not an
activist, if you don’t know why you’re there all that time, only waiting for someone else to solve the
problem, I promise, people will use you for their own benefit.”
The sanctuary experiences of Aura and Amanda diverged in fundamental respects, perhaps
in part because of Jeanette’s advice and, according to Aura, also as a consequence of her efforts
to take control of her experience and avoid the traumas she witnessed Amanda enduring.
These contrasting temporal experiences reflect the dual geographies of the first challenge and
the contingencies and critical-reflexivity of the second as they manifest in an interpretive
register that previous analysts have overlooked because we cannot easily make them visible
through prevailing sociological categories. However successful struggles of actors like Jeanette,
Amanda, and Aura are to reorient their preciously “limited attention space”xxv – around which
emotional energy surges and solidarities crystallize – they reflect a tension between temporal
orientations that shape the logics, trajectories, and experiences of all sanctuary actors.
Abbott (2007: 75-76, 82, 86-90) contrasts these methodological orientations as the
“momentaneity” of lyrical sociology’s focus on “something that is, a state of being,” as against
narrative sociology’s exclusive preoccupation with “causes,” “outcomes,” and “sequence[s] of
events or variables explain[ing] the phenomenon of interest.” As a citizenship movement, the
objectives of sanctuary actors are self-evident, and thus the “successive temporality” of the
narrative sociologist is aligned with this citizenship orientation. When scholars like Bagelman
and Lippert assess the experience of actors like Amanda who feel the existential futility of being
“trapped in time”, they are accounting for their experiences in relation to the carceral
geography that is designed, as Gilmore notes, precisely to extract time from the territories of
the self. It is at these moments when actors find themselves trapped by carceralism’s

xxv
See Collins (2005; 2018, in Zeeuw et al.).

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temporality, however, that Jeanette’s guidance becomes so significant, because these are the
moments that present actors with a core dilemma of sanctuary, and determine the extent to
which they become experienced and enacted as liberated zones. When the nonresponsiveness
of immigration officials becomes unbearable, overwhelming, and seemingly futile, actors must –
if they have not already – decide whether to “wait for someone else to solve the problem,” or
to expand their goals, desires, and aspirations in relation to non-carceral geographies. To
account for sanctuary as a post-citizenship movement in relation to these emergent abolition
geographies as a kind of temporal wilderness – and thus to understand the core tension of its
hybridity – analysts must be able to smoothly pivot between narrative and lyrical modes of
inquiry and analysis.xxvi

xxvi
After this passage, reference additional field notes regarding how this challenge plays out in practice, using
Shawna’s quote as an example of navigating carceral geographies:
“Hi Emma,
I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to meet with our group last week to discuss Amanda Morales’
situation, as well as to note our concerns regarding the draconian immigration policies being implemented by the
current administration.
My professional background is in social work and education, and I am also a mother of two young children. I have
been volunteering with various efforts to support Amanda, including providing meals to the family, acting as a
parental surrogate for Amanda at the public school that her 8 and 10-year-old daughters attend, and by walking
Amanda’s 3-year-old son to and from his neighborhood preschool.
I can tell you that based on both my personal and professional observations, Amanda and the children are
suffering immeasurably. As I noted in the meeting, this family desperately needs to go home, and I am not sure
how much more time in the church Amanda can withstand. Amanda is an inspiration and source of strength to
many others in similar situations, and I worry that she is being overwhelmed by the seeming futility of the
extended period of time that she has spent in sanctuary. And so, I am pleading with you and your team to help us
obtain a commitment from Thomas Decker not to detain or deport Amanda while her case is pending with the
Board of Immigration Appeals. It would be a profound injustice and moral failing for Amanda to be detained
and/or deported before the resolution of her legal case, and I hope that with the assistance of you, your team, and
the Senator, we might be able to at least guarantee due process for Amanda.
Please let me know if you have any questions, and again, thank you so much for your support and any assistance
that you can provide.
Most Sincerely,
Shawna Mulcahy”

Also use Ravi’s quote about “not being able to think ahead more than a couple weeks,” and contrast that with
Tara’s email to volunteers:

“Hello Sanctuary Neighborhood Volunteers,

Welcome to our new volunteers!

The rest of you-- the work you are doing is amazing! Around the clock, you are researching, calling, planning,
showing up, improvising, learning, not giving up. It is truly extraordinary to feel the massive pull of all of this
determination to stand up for our shared humanity.

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We are all working as kind of emergency triage for our families right now. And the immediate bleeding needs to be
addressed first.

But these families will also need support that can last. We need to build that into our work. Volunteers are known
to disappear when the story drops out of the headlines and the problems seem more complex. (Not us, of course
:).) We want to help with immediate glaring needs like lawyers, but also help put in place a long-term solid
structure of support on the ground where they are.

We are calling upon our friends, our families, our professional networks, the networks of allied faith communities
and long-term immigration activists. These are incredible resources which could be built upon. It would be amazing
if we could end up not just with with contacts, but with relationships. We are building the foundation for a
network of allies that is extremely useful right now, and may be be critical going forward.

Those of us who have been working for the past year with the families living in Sanctuary in the churches in NYC,
have learned that some structures work better than others. What doesn't work is hoping for the best, or putting
faith in big not-for-profits, or operating from a big email list handling out tasks. What does seem to work is bringing
in and weaving together the immediate neighborhood and giving everyone clearly defined roles that share the
weight enough that no one gets burned out. Below are the roles we came to at Holyrood/Iglesia Santa Cruz, largely
thanks to Matt Block's intensive efforts listening to volunteers and shaping and refining the roles over the year. We
want to offer this structure as we reach out to allies on the ground, and when the immediate bleeding in stopped,
do what we can to support allies putting it in place.

First steps in long-term plan:

1. When your families have a lawyer and other immediate needs met, the first step is finding a person
willing to be the on-the-ground communication coordinator. They become the lynchpin. We can support
them as they get people into the other roles. This person (1st on the list in bold below) needs to be:

• as physically close to family as possible

• checks in 3x week to start, 1x later
• needs face to face contact
• can coordinate other support
• We ask, “Are you in a position to be this person? Is is feasible?”
• If no— "Do you have contacts that are closer?"
• "How can we support you putting a long-term workable structure in place?"

There are 7 other roles. Here is a complete list of the Sanctuary Neighborhood Group Roles with
descriptions of each role from Matt
Block: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FbnyiZ5fd0d1tIdwQjNHaMmW74JRx3DFpwa8y_njECs/edit
?usp=sharing

1. Communication Coordinator
2. Companion/Interpreter
3. Health Coordinator
4. Legal/Advocacy Coordinator
5. Housing Coordinator
6. Food/Livelihood Coordinator
7. Transportation/Travel Coordinator
8. Childcare/Schooling Coordinator

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 It is in an effort to methodologically account for actors’ struggles to reorient preciously
“limited attention space”xxvii around which emotional energy surges and solidarities crystallize,
and to transmute their “presence trapped in the present” (Bagelman 2016: 11 n. 24) – instead
living the present into a future to which they aspire by circuiting liberated zones across
abolition geographies – I supplement ANT as a “travel guide” (Latour 2005: 52) with an
anthropology of the future that facilitates “the capacity to aspire [a]s… a navigational capacity”
(Appadurai 2013: 126, 188). Converting “how human beings engage their own futures”
(Appadurai 2013: 183) into a collective and spatialized question, the sociology of the future
renders prefigurative construction of epistemically-liberated zones and abolition geographies
ethnographically accessible by framing these pedagogical “capacities to aspire” as “navigational
capacities”. Otherwise discernible only through inadequate informant-interviews, this
sociology emphasizes how groups become “conscious of the links between the more and less
immediate objects of aspiration,” (2013: 187-188) and maps actors’ efforts to bridge between
communities, decolonize their relations,xxviii and create a “social reality that does not yet exist”
(Graeber 2001: 251).
By reorienting analysts’ attention to moments when actors encounter borders that appear
impassable, and to their experiments that dismantle, circumnavigate, or reinforce them, it
interprets aspirational capacities as part of a “system of ideas (remember relationality…) which
locates them in a larger map of local ideas and beliefs,” thus complementing ANT’s Deleuzian
deconstructionism by focusing on relationships between spatio-temporal borders and border-
crossings. Enabling analysts to recognize actors’ processes of mapping the contours of social
structures “through their confrontations and negotiations” while navigating them, and their
“experiments and… archiving of alternative futures” to form “horizon[s] of aspirations” (183,
189), the sociology of the future interprets what is risked, what is at stake, and what is achieved

2. We are building relationships, not just asking for services or contacts. I know this may seem obvious, but
please keep notes about the specific people you end up working with, try to be very clear from the outset
about who does what, thank them for their work, and apologize for miscommunications. Ask, "What can
we do from NYC to support you?" Because there are lots of volunteers, and various groups, and everyone
is working in frightening, rushed, chaotic circumstances tensions and miscommunications are happening.
Let's be in this for the long haul, and try to work those out. There is no way we can prevent ourselves
from making mistakes, we can own them and work to fix them.

Also be aware that handing off families to service organizations may not be so effective in the long run.
In Washington Heights, the moms lugging food up to the church every other week changed when they
became friends with the family in sanctuary and with each other. We thought we did the work to
change Amanda's circumstances, but it was ours that probably changed the most. Because of her, we
became a network, we know how to work together, how to divide work, how to sustain the work-- we
trust each other. These seem like important lessons to have learned, and not to off-source to
organizations. Reach out to friends of friends “outside of non-profits, ask who they can bring in. We may
need organizations in the immediate, but lets' also try to seed each neighborhood with the structures for
long-term neighborhood sanctuaries.

xxvii
See Collins (2005; 2018, in Zeeuw et al.).
xxviii
Again, see Appendix H – Field Example #3: Interpreting Sanctuary Mobilizations in Relation to Dual and
Imbricated Carceral/Abolition Geographies.

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when actors bridge liberated zones into interlocking patterns of abolition geographies. Perhaps
counterintuitively, by accounting for actors’ capacities to aspire towards more complex futures
than mere citizenship – or its border-abolitionist negation – the lyrical sociologist of the future
can reveal insights about the experience of sanctuary actors as they navigate the tensions of “a
present… open to all sorts of [future] realizations, not just the one that obtain[s] in actuality”
(Abbott 2007: 86).
Returning to Burawoy’s discussion of positive and reflexive models of social science,
sanctuary actors are in a unique position to navigate the imbricated dynamics of two different
geographies, or “worlds”. Like the Canadian sanctuary activists who discuss two different types
of sovereignty that reflect two different relationships between people and land (in example #3,
above), Gilmore elaborates these worlds as “carceral geographies” and “abolition geographies”,
respectively. The interlocking patterns of abolition geographies are constructed across the
terrain of carceralism, and by deploying some of the realities of carceral morphologies as tools
of “world-making” itself.
“People didn’t make what they made from nothing—destitute though the millions were as a result of the
great effort to strike, free themselves, and establish a new social order. They brought things with them—
sensibilities, dependencies, talents, indeed a complement of consciousness and capacity Cedric Robinson
termed an “ontological totality”—to make where they were into places they wished to be. And yet they
left abundant evidence showing how freedom is not simply the absence of enslavement as a legal and
property form. Rather, the undoing of bondage—abolition—is quite literally to change places: to destroy
the geography of slavery by mixing their labor with the external world to change the world and thereby
themselves—as it were, habitation as nature—even if geometrically speaking they hadn’t moved far at
all” (Gilmore 2017: page).
Thus, the dynamics of sanctuaries must be analyzed in relation to each other, as well as to the
carceral geographies that occupy the same physical space and channel sanctuary actors’ efforts
of “world-making” into particular opportunities to link more and less immediate objects of
aspiration. If sanctuaries are situated not only upon the sovereign borderlands between nation-
states, but also upon an analytic borderland where boundary-making carceralism and world-
making abolitionism overlap, a more expansive ethnographic imagination of sanctuary is
necessary to interpret each of these distinct dynamics.
This brings us back to the need for comparative analysis that takes the form of Burawoy’s
reflexive model of social science within and between sanctuaries as epistemically-liberated
zones, while taking the form of a positive model of social science when it examines the
relations between individuals who are constructed as rightful or rightless in relation to a
carceral state. By flexibly employing these two models in different situations, and to answer
distinct questions in relation to the experiences of sanctuary movement actors, an analyst will
be able to explore the intricate dynamics of sanctuary’s core tension as a citizenship/post-
citizenship movement hybrid. Historical evidence, contemporary accounts, and my own
ethnographic observations suggest that proximity to the U.S./Mexico border; municipal
“sanctuary city” legislation that bounds a new population category of “resident regardless of
citizenship status” (cite Mancina 2016); and the size, level of racial/ethnic integration, and
administrative capacity of the town or city within which sanctuary mobilizations take place all
play a major role in shaping the really existing and really possible pathways available to
sanctuary actors as they navigate these analytic borderlands.

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Appendix K (from p. 16 note 78 [and p. 85 note xxi]) | Field Example #4: Accompanying Sanctuary Actors
through Prefigurative Gift Exchange in Epistemically-Liberated Zones

I was first confronted with the methodological implications of what Santos (2018: 306 n. 12)
refers to as “liberated zone[s]... on the epistemological level” while accompanying a formerly-
undocumented sanctuary activist named Mauricio who was presenting at a workshop for
undocumented people in the South Bronx called “Beyond Your Rights”. This was the first time
he had conducted a workshop, and he asked me to travel to the Bronx school and stand with
him in front of the audience for moral support. As part of the workshop, Mauricio shared the
stories of the deaths of his parents and his brother as a result of their failed attempts to seek
political asylum from Colombia in the United States. It was a captivating and heartbreaking
story, and was visibly painful for him to recount. As he narrated his account over the course of
the hour, I stood next to him silently, one pace back, wanting to support in any way I could, but
also careful not to distract from his words. We did not know each other very well, and as we
returned to Brooklyn on the subway, I asked him how he had arrived at the decision to share
these experiences so openly with strangers. “Each of us has a gift that we bring to sanctuary,
and I share this story as my gift to others.” Turning the question back to me, he asked, “What
gift will you share?”
His question caught me off-guard, and I did not respond immediately. As I scoured his
expression for some clue that might suggest the kind of response he was anticipating, he
probed for more information, asking about my areas of study, and about research I had
conducted in the past. When I responded by describing a large network of neighborhood
groups and experiments in decentralized, participatory-democratic governance that I had
researched in Kerala, Mauricio suggested I might contribute lessons from these experiences by
facilitating sanctuary neighborhood assemblies. I expressed an ambivalent openness to this
possibility, not sure exactly what this would look like in practice, or whether it would be
consistent with either the epistemological or ethical principles of the kind of sociological inquiry
I aimed to practice. “I will definitely consider sharing some experiences, but I wouldn’t want to
do it unless folks express interest in learning about them. The last thing I want to do is to
impose a model that was developed in rural India and assume it’s relevant for sanctuary
organizing in New York.” Mauricio intervened again, this time pressing me with more overt
skepticism: “Are you here to do sanctuary work, or are you just a tourist?” This was only the
first of what I would experience as an ongoing series of tests by all of those most vulnerable to
the political, legal, and socio-cultural exigencies of sanctuary’s uniquely precarious and
powerful dynamics.
Over the following months, I reflected consistently about the different gifts that I might
offer to the sanctuary groups with whom I worked. When Amanda first moved into sanctuary
with her three children, I learned that the church where they lived did not have a kitchen they
could use, that no plan had been made to ensure they had access to food, and that as a result
they were routinely eating only one meal a day. I worked with leaders of the church as well as
local activist collectives to form a group of twenty-five families in the neighborhood, and to
create a rotating schedule for three meals to be delivered every day. When I learned from the
pastor that Amanda urgently needed to find a school for her children, I sought out close friends

92
and colleagues who work in bilingual education to contact local school leaders and assemble a
list of welcoming options. When I learned that another woman taking sanctuary three miles
south of Washington Heights, at Riverside Church, had significant health concerns, I reached
out to colleagues, local families, and community leaders to form a network of doctors, nurses,
psychologists, social workers, and other health care workers who were eager to contribute.
When congregations were deciding how to practice sanctuary, they would send me lists of
questions about every aspect of the sanctuary experience, from legal strategy to the political
effects on neighborhood residents, and from the relationship between sanctuary congregations
and “sanctuary city” to the costs and benefits of granting sanctuary to anyone who asks for it
versus employing some set of criteria to distinguish those who would be accepted or not (see
Appendix L).
As more families took sanctuary, more congregations began contemplating the possibility of
offering sanctuary, and more neighbors sought to learn how they could contribute their own
gifts to the process, I found myself being asked - sometimes dozens of times daily - to
synthesize and share the “data” I was collecting. And when the needs became more diverse
and complex than congregations and neighbors could respond to improvisationally, I also began
sharing accounts of the structures, roles, and processes of the decentralized neighborhood
groups I had researched in Kerala, a version of what Mauricio had originally suggested, as one
example that might simplify and resolve certain obstacles. Reports of these needs expanded,
whether on the part of specific families in sanctuary or others in the community, and they
began filling one after another of the “tiny notebooks” Latour (2005: 133-135) had so
vociferously commended us to use in accounting for processes of “reassembling the social”.xxix
These pocket-sized notebooks gradually took on a radically different kind of meaning, and
became perhaps the most integral part of my participation in sanctuary as a prefigurative total
gift exchange.

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix L (from p. 85 note xx [and p. 93]) | Examples of Questions from Congregations Considering
Sanctuary from Field Notes

Questions from Congregation 1

● How do we handle the issue of the families health? What do we do if the kids get sick? If the
mother gets sick?
● What happens if they get injured/hurt on our grounds? Or some sort of accident happens?
● Will our insurance cover them?
● We have a building policy that a custodian must be in the building when the building is in use.
How do we handle the building when the building is closed? Problems with the boiler, heating,

xxix
Refer to the example of Mauricio, and how one of my ethnographic notebooks became, in effect, a gift-
exchange notebook – connecting those who had needs with those who wanted to participate:

In response to challenge 2 (and maybe 3), below, find a place where Latour’s types of notebooks become a
strategy with which to navigate the practice of ethnography-as-accompaniment (especially in relation to the gift
exchange), and emphatically site the field note with Mauricio.

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 leaks, all sorts of building issues? We must have some sort of supervision. We need to keep
the building secured.
● Is the building cared for overnight?
● How is the laundry issue handled?
● What about an escrow fund to cover unexpected costs? (that will happen) How do we fund it?
● Do they speak English?
● Can we tell them up front that we can only take care of them for a specific period of time?
● Will we be stuck with them for a full school semester?

Questions from Congregation 2

Financial Issues:
For a family: what income & health benefits does hosted family have? What would they need?

For Congregation & Partners:

What are projected costs/in-kind donations needed for
1) Setting Up/furnishing “apt” for family, including cooling now (& heat if this extends to winter),
cooking/fridge, bathing linens, fun stuff for baby/kids
2) Having the building open 24-7 (given systems are now shutdown most nights & all day Tues/Thurs):
Electricity, air conditioning (consider room unit for “apt”), by late fall heating, additional custodial
staff?

3) Making building secure (in general & from deportation):

Additional Custodial staff? Security volunteers, Security cameras?

Volunteer Needs:
What is the range of volunteers needed for which roles to sustain a person/family?
How do partner congregations and individual neighborhood volunteers get organized & participate?
How does host congregation accommodate range of volunteer visitors and still maintain safety for
family?

Legal issues:
1) For Family: status of parent’s case?; has/needs attorney? What is nature of ICE self-restraint in
entering Congregational Building? What role has NYPD played in relation to family & congregation,
including vigils & rallies. Do they protect host congregations from anti-immigrant haters?
2) For Congregation & Partners: Is congregation legally vulnerable and in what ways? Specifically, is
clergy legally vulnerable and in what ways? Officers/Board members? [need to check Board
liability insurance]. What have been the actual experiences of other congregations, clergy, officers?
Do attorneys in congregation need to recuse themselves from decision or from participation in
supporting family?
3) Regulatory Questions: are there regulatory issues with someone living in house of worship—(could
NYC Building Dept inspection & Certificate of Occupancy be a problem?) [need to review Cert of
Occupancy]… What is interplay of “Sanctuary City” and these issues?

Benefits as well as risks:

1) Does family feel they have been helped? How?

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 2) Does congregation know of people who have changed their minds about immigrants & immigrant
rights through this process?
3) Do immigrant rights advocates feel the campaign to change ICE policy has been helped?
4) What do elected officials think? What role can elected officials play around security, Legal
vulnerability and resources?
5) How has hosting family helped the congregation?
Added (or lost) members? Have its own members become more active?
Has congregation received financial & volunteer support from other congregations, organizations and
individuals, or has it struggled around financial & human resources? Become a better known
congregation in neighborhood, among immigrant communities and with public?
Any other positive outcomes?

Short-term vs open-ended hosting:

1) Are the needs, risks & benefits different for hosting a family short-term vs open-ended?
2) If an open-ended host has to stop at a certain point, can the family be moved to another long-term
host? What are the challenges involved with that?

Questions from Congregation 3

Sitting across the table from relatively conservative Lutheran Church board members in
South Brooklyn about two weeks ago, I listened as middle-aged, white, business people tried to
reconcile their religious values with sanctuary practices. “If we provide sanctuary for Mike and
June [pseudonyms] and the kids, what does that mean when other people come demanding
sanctuary too? Are we obligated to give it to anyone who comes off the street?” “Obligated in
what respect?” I asked. “Morally, legally, or in some other way?” “Well, of course we’re
obligated morally, I guess… But what if a homeless person comes into mass one Sunday and
sees Mike and June here, and he refuses to leave until we give him sanctuary?” The board
member’s forehead tensed and he opened his mouth as if to continue, but no words came out.
The Head Pastor interjected, “I would argue that we’re obligated to take in anyone seeking
sanctuary. That’s our mission as a church and that’s our role as people of faith.” Most people
around the table nodded, though one man, sitting next to me, looked visibly distraught. He
reached loudly into a plastic bag with the red P.C. Richard and Son logo that he had set in front
of him on the table, and pulled out a typed letter to Thomas Decker, the Regional ICE Director,
folded in half, with handwritten notes scribbled at the top. He rustled the letter – a request to
Decker asking that he consider Mike’s and June’s stays of deportation – around with one hand,
unfolded it, quickly folded it again, and thrust it back into the bag as he checked the time on the
gold-banded watch he wore on the other hand which he had, until then, kept still, clutching the
brown metal rim that bordered the underside of the collapsible table.
“The reality is that we don’t have a choice…” said another middle-aged woman with tightly
cropped and dyed blonde hair, a slim-fitting, black power-suit with white trim, and small,
braided, half-sphere gold earrings. She hesitated for a breath and then proceeded: “…if we call
ourselves Christians.” Speaking from the other side of the table, she was firm and resigned, but
not eager, as though she was trying to convince herself more than anyone else. “You do have a
choice, though. By doing this, you are setting a model and an example for others to follow,”
Pastor Juan Carlos, founder and lead organizer of the New Sanctuary Coalition, replied. I had

95
been able to attend the meeting at his invitation. Juan Carlos lifted his hand in a subtle gesture
of witness before putting it down gently on Mike’s arm. Mike’s eyes filled with a thin layer of
moisture, and he reclined, though barely perceptibly, in his chair. “I just want to thank you all
for the love and support that you have shown me and June and our children” he said, as the
seven board members voted unanimously to recommend that the congregation offer physical
sanctuary to him and June, who came to the United States from China almost two and a half
decades ago, as well as their children, all three of whom are U.S. citizens.

______________________________________________________________________________
Appendix M (from p. 86 note xxiv) | Sanctuary Actors’ Temporal Reorientations

This has been born out in my ethnographic fieldwork when, for example, after a meeting
between sanctuary organizers and Senator Gillibrand’s office shortly before Amanda left
Holyrood, the neighbor responsible for mediating between Amanda and her children’s new
school sent a message to the Senator. “I can tell you,” Shawna writes, “that based on both my
personal and professional observations, Amanda and the children are suffering immeasurably...
This family desperately needs to go home, and I am not sure how much more time in the
church Amanda can withstand. Amanda is an inspiration and source of strength to many others
in similar situations, and I worry that she is being overwhelmed by the seeming futility of the
extended period of time that she has spent in sanctuary.” As long as the goals, targets, tactics,
and practices of sanctuary actors are oriented exclusively toward state actors, sanctuary comes
to feel like a kind of futilely self-imposed incarceration, where time stands still. As Canadian
sanctuary activist Fariah Chowdhury (in Nail et al. 2010: 10) captures most clearly, it is only by
reorienting the “limited attention space” to other local and non-state actors that sanctuary may
be experienced as movement and transformation in spite of a capricious and non-responsive
state.

“If we expect that politicians and governments can change and pass desirable policies when we push
them to, we not only reinforce the idea of a benevolent nation-state as a supreme entity in control, but
we also disempower ordinary people, who should be the true decision making body… In a
Sanctuary/Solidarity City, ideas don’t have to get passed at the ‘top’ in order for them to manifest
themselves in our day-to-day lives. Sanctuary City is about building ways of living that allow us to
horizontally make decisions with collective communities, on the ground, every day, with or without the
approval of a colonial state that we believe is an illegitimate occupying force.”

Interpreting the habitual disagreements and strategic dilemmas through the lens of sanctuary’s
core tension as a citizenship/post-citizenship movement hybrid is thus a foundational
conceptual and strategic move that grassroots sanctuary actors must make to reorient their
limited attention space, such that they may balance goals, targets, tactics, and practices that
are both pragmatic and sustainable over long periods of time.

96