Are churches sanctuaries?

Some Catholics are pushing back on the prospect of immigration arrests at church. Here's some history

As the Trump administration aims at a deportation push across the U.S., the federal Department of Homeland Security rolled back this month guidelines that had previously aimed to prevent the apprehension of immigrants in several federally-defined “sensitive areas” — including churches.

Justin Henry/Flickr. CC BY SA 2.0

The rollback has been controversial, with some Catholics — including the U.S. bishops’ conference — opposing the move.

Amid the controversy, some have brought up the notion that churches are sanctuaries for people fleeing arrest, and should be respected as such.

So what does it mean for a church to be a sanctuary? The Pillar explains.

First, what exactly did the Trump administration announce?

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamin Huffman issued a directive that it would roll back 2011 guidelines on immigration enforcement actions in or near “sensitive locations,” which included “churches, synagogues, mosques or other institutions of worship” — along with rolling back a 2021 expansion of those restrictions by the Biden administration.

While the previous approach had restricted enforcement at or near such locations unless there were immediate circumstances requiring otherwise, the Trump directive seemed to allow for enforcement actions — arrests — even without immediately compelling public safety reasons.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” Huffman said.

How did the U.S. bishops respond?

The USCCB responded Jan. 23 with a joint statement, in which they were joined with the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA.

The statement pushed back on the administration’s “sensitive locations” rollback.

“We recognize the need for just immigration enforcement and affirm the government’s obligation to carry it out in a targeted, proportional, and humane way. However, non-emergency immigration enforcement in schools, places of worship, social service agencies, healthcare facilities, or other sensitive settings where people receive essential services would be contrary to the common good,” the statement said.

“With the mere rescission of the protected areas guidance, we are already witnessing reticence among immigrants to engage in daily life, including sending children to school and attending religious services. All people have a right to fulfill their duty to God without fear. Turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer,” the bishops’ conference added.

Many people have mentioned that churches should be sanctuaries from the threat of arrest. What does that mean?

Some forms of sanctuary were customary in ancient Israel, according to Sacred Scripture, and in ancient Greece and Rome, where the rectors of some pagan temples allowed people being pursued by vigilantes or soldiers to take refuge on their grounds — debtors, criminals, and runaway slaves were commonly found at some temples, with some unwilling to leave over long periods of time.

In Rome, that practice was decidedly more regulated than it was in Greece, and sanctuary seekers would need to leave their place of refuge when their trials began.

Christians are known to have offered sanctuary to wanted men in their churches in early centuries, with the practice becoming especially common after the early fourth centuries decrees and edicts that made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.

For some bishops, the Church’s authority to confer a kind of sanctuary came from the preeminent sovereignty of the Church, the belief that the communion of the Church was not subject to earthly rulers. Others seemed to emphasize that arrests — and the prospect of violence — inside of sacred spaces would desecrate the holiness of the Church itself.

In 392, according to scholars, Roman Emperor Theodosius recognized in law the customary practice of Christian sanctuary, which by 450 had been codified to extend to church grounds more broadly, only to Christians, and only to certain kinds of suspected criminals, excluding suspected rapists and murderers, along with suspected adulterers and public debtors.

In the medieval period across Europe, both custom and various royal decrees recognized the Church’s practice of granting sanctuary to suspected criminals — as recounted in Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

But eventually, over concern that the sanctuary customs were being abused, they in some places began to be rolled back. And during the Protestant Reformation, anti-Catholic and anti-clerical laws in some countries also impacted sanctuary customs.

In England, sanctuary laws developed into relative complexity during much of the medieval period, but Henry VIII mostly put them to an end, and the parliament of King James I formally abolished remaining sanctuary laws in 1624.

Indeed, by the early 1700s, sanctuary was hardly recognized as an ecclesiastical right anywhere in Europe. Unsurprisingly, the concept had no legal force, and almost no customary mention, in the early decades of American history.

Even as the Underground Railroad flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, with people fleeing slavery being welcomed frequently to hide in churches as they fled northward, there was little mention of the legal concept of sanctuary among clerics or their attorneys. Instead, churches hiding such people seemed more often to say that their work — itself a violation of federal law — was a response to divine law, especially the Gospel mandates of hospitality, according to scholars studying the period.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as churches hid young men trying to avoid a federal military draft, some clergy members referred to themselves as sanctuaries — as did Yale chaplain William Coffin, who said his church would be “a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.”

Coffin and others called on churches to revive the notion of sanctuary for men trying to avoid the draft, but mostly framed that as an act of civil disobedience, rather than invoking it as a legal right.

In 1968, a Boston Unitarian church allowed two young men — one who had abandoned his military service, and the other selected for the draft — to take sanctuary in the church building. One surrendered to military police after nine days. But the other, Robert Talmanson, was forcibly removed from the church by federal marshals, with protestors demonstrating outside.

Other churches soon followed suit that year, and draftees or AWOL soldiers were arrested in several churches, which claimed to grant the men sanctuary.

In September 1971, a Catholic parish got involved, when Christ the King Parish in San Diego allowed nine sailors from the USS Constellation to claim sanctuary inside the church as their ship prepared for a tour in Vietnam.

According to reports, Bishop John Quinn, then auxiliary bishop of San Diego, conceded at the time that “[t]he concept of sanctuary does not apply in the United States, where church buildings do not have jurisdictional exemption from civil law.”

But Father Bernie Cassidy, SJ, explained to reporters that "our staff made the decision without the bishop's public support, though he did support … privately. We got … violent letters and phone calls calling us communists, but we kept the young men here for three days before they were picked up by federal marshals."

As the war in Vietnam wound down, the concept largely lay dormant in the United States, until a wave of illegal immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the 1980s saw both Protestant and Catholic churches declare themselves publicly as “sanctuaries” for Central Americans. This eventually led to more than 300 U.S. churches declaring themselves “sanctuaries,” as part of what became known as the “sanctuary movement.”

While Catholic churches were involved, the U.S. bishops’ conference did not take a position on the movement.

In recent decades, many U.S. churches have again emphasized their commitment to serving as “sanctuaries” for migrants facing the prospect of arrest and deportation, and numerous U.S. cities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” pledging not to enforce U.S. immigration law, or assist in its enforcement.

So is it illegal to offer “sanctuary” to immigrants facing deportation?

Federal law provides criminal penalties — including the prospect of incarceration — for anyone who “conceals, harbors, or shields from detection” a person who “has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law.”

It is not clear whether leaders of churches knowingly providing residency for undocumented immigrants would face conviction under that law, but the law does not provide religious exemptions.

In the 1980s, numerous leaders of the “sanctuary movement” were convicted for harboring people facing deportation. But since that time, no other church leaders have been prosecuted under harboring statutes.

Could immigrants facing deportation now be arrested at Mass?

According to the executive order, it is possible that people facing deportation could be arrested at Mass, or within churches.

But that would be relatively unprecedented. Even during the height of the 1980s “sanctuary movement,” immigration officials did not arrest people inside churches, and have not done so since then.

In recent years, immigration officials have made arrests near schools, in hospitals, and outside a church run shelter.

The Trump administration has urged that law enforcement officials “use common sense” with regard to the places they make arrests.