Convicted of the Gospel

During the long, exasperating, painful experience of the Tucson sanctuary trial, several sanctuary workers found themselves turning to their Salvadoran and Guatemalan brothers and sisters—the very refugees they were on trial for helping—for advice and comfort. "How did you react when you were unjustly treated?" they would ask the refugees, who had endured torture, imprisonment, death threats, and the killing of family members. "Were you able to love your enemies, your torturers? It is so hard," the sanctuary defendants would confess to the refugees. Then they would cry together, pray together.

It was as if the suffering and the compassion had, through the trial, come full circle. One refugee, while testifying on the witness stand, was asked to implicate the woman who had helped him. Pointing to 26-year-old defendant Wendy LeWin, he said, "Yes. I remember her with much love."

Out of their common suffering, their common sacrifice, and their common love and respect for one another, both refugees and sanctuary workers found new life, new hope, and new strength for the struggle—even as the sanctuary workers faced possible prison sentences and the refugees faced probable deportation to certain violence and danger in their homelands.

It is such spiritual bonding between North American sanctuary workers and Central American refugees that U.S. government prosecutor Donald M. Reno Jr., who throughout the long trial continued to refer to it as a "simple alien-smuggling case," failed to understand. And it was that quintessential failure, the government's refusal to acknowledge and its inability to grasp the spiritual foundation and glue of the sanctuary movement, that caused its extraordinary attempt to squash the movement not only to fail but to backfire.

The U.S. government spent an estimated $2 million on the trial and its nine-month-long "Operation Sojourner" investigation to make sanctuary, as one U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service official said, "a non-issue." Instead, even though the government secured convictions, subject to appeal, against eight sanctuary workers, and managed to keep the true issues of sanctuary out of the courtroom, it did not keep the true issues out of the churches or the media.

And while the government's all-out effort to discredit the sanctuary movement and intimidate its opponents was aimed at silencing criticism of its Central America policies, it was actually the government's policies and methods of investigation that were thoroughly publicized, criticized, and discredited.

As a result of the trial, tens of millions of U.S. citizens who hadn't heard of sanctuary now know all about the movement. And there are some 300 sanctuary churches and synagogues, 19 sanctuary cities, about 20 sanctuary universities, and—what sanctuary defendants believe is a watershed development—a sanctuary state, New Mexico.

Perhaps most important, while the sanctuary trial dragged on month after month, while the government was trying in a federal courtroom to sound the death knell for the sanctuary movement, while all the media attention was focused on the 11 defendants and the courtroom theatrics, the actual work of sanctuary—helping Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees across the Mexico-U.S. border and getting them settled safely in sanctuary churches and homes—went on, a little more shrewdly and a bit more carefully, but no less faithfully or willfully.

And for an unknown number of spectators, court officials, volunteers, attorneys, and even jurors, the sanctuary trial was a conversion experience. Their understanding of their government, their experience with human suffering, and their encounter with living faith and steadfast commitment changed them in profound ways.

"This effort to eliminate witnesses to the truth will fail," Sr. Darlene Nicgorski said of the trial on May 1, the day she and seven other sanctuary workers were convicted of conspiracy to smuggle, transport, and conceal "illegal aliens." "The government has failed to understand what Central American campesinos have given us—and that is a determination for life, which is irrepressible, even in the midst of death."

THE SANCTUARY TRIAL was everything but the "simple alien-smuggling case" Donald Reno said it was. It wasn't simple, and it wasn't about "alien smuggling." It was long and complicated; boring and fascinating; tragic and humorous; depressing and inspiring. It involved broad constitutional principles as well as technical immigration laws.

Some of the 11 church workers on trial didn't even know each other until they were indicted. But once the trial began, they spent at least four days of every week together for six months. And although the defendants were a diverse group, with different theologies, ministries, and politics, they were brought together and they stayed together because of their common commitment to Central American refugees, a commitment so strong that it overshadowed all their differences.

• Maria del Socorro Pardo de Aguilar, of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, is the 58-year-old widow and grandmother who was indicted for ministering to Central American refugees detained in a Nogales jail, allowing refugees to stay in her home, and sometimes helping them to cross the Mexico-Arizona border. When Judge Earl H. Carroll would not allow a defense attorney to tell the well-known Latin American story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Socorro Aguilar said that proved that the judge "knows the power of our Holy Mother—he knows her power perfectly."
• Rev. Anthony "Tony" Clark, 37, is a parish priest in Nogales, Arizona. Clark said he hadn't even realized he was part of a "movement"; he just helped refugees when they came to his church just across the Mexico-U.S. border. Clark, a former boxer who coaches a boxing team of Nogales street youth, sent a ripple of laughter through the courtroom one morning when he wore a jacket that read "Guadalupanos Boxing" on the back.
• Jim Corbett, the 52-year-old Quaker and Harvard-educated philosopher, is credited, along with John Fife, with founding the sanctuary movement. Unconcerned about whether he would be found innocent or guilty (the jury found him innocent), he says he is willing to go to trial again and again for his work with refugees.
• Mary K. Doan Espinoza is a 31-year-old mother of four and the coordinator of religious education for Anthony Clark's church. Espinoza's attorney described her as "the human hands of the church."
• Rev. John M. Fife, the tall, lanky, and bearded 46-year-old pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church, was appreciated for his good humor throughout the trial. But occasionally even Fife was angered by the proceedings, and he would stand, turn facing the audience, cross his arms, shake his head, and glare.
• Peggy Hutchison, 31, is soft-spoken but passionate and articulate. A graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arizona, she was indicted and eventually convicted for her work as director of border ministry for the Tucson Metropolitan Ministry. After a long five-and-a-half months of hearing the prosecution argue her guilt, followed by only a few days of closing arguments by the defense attorneys, Hutchison told her lawyer, as if his arguments had reminded her, "Hey, I really am innocent!"
• Wendy LeWin, 26, formerly of Phoenix and now of Tucson, attended Bible study groups with refugees and transported them on occasion. For a short while, she shared her studio apartment with a pregnant refugee woman. LeWin later accompanied the woman to the hospital where, according to the refugee's courtroom testimony, LeWin fainted during delivery.
• Nena McDonald, a 38-year-old Quaker and registered nurse, now lives in Lubbock, Texas, with her husband and two children and is studying to be a counselor. The only count against McDonald, of which she was acquitted, turned on whether she made a phone call from an office in Southside Presbyterian Church.
• Sr. Darlene Nicgorski, 42, of the School Sisters of St. Francis, is herself a refugee from Guatemala. She was forced to leave her mission work there after her pastor was killed. Nicgorski, of Phoenix, worked with the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, coordinating the screening, orientation, and transportation of refugees in Arizona.
• Rev. Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, 50, of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, has been a parish priest for half his life. He has ministered to refugees in the Nogales jail, and he helped a Salvadoran brother and sister, who were eventually reunited with their parents in Phoenix, cross the border. He and Socorro Aguilar were the two Mexican nationals who chose to come to the United States to clear their names of the charges against them. Both were convicted of two counts each.
• Philip Willis-Conger, 28, the son of Methodist missionaries to Latin America, was the director of the Tucson Ecumenical Council's Task Force on Central America. In an earlier case, he was arrested for transporting Salvadoran refugees in March 1984, but those charges were dropped due to a legal technicality.

OTHER KEY PARTICIPANTS included 12 defense attorneys, including a few self-described Jewish atheists, a former assistant U.S. attorney, a $250-an-hour corporate lawyer working for free, and one who told the "Chicken Little" story as part of his closing argument; an iron-pumping, fundamentalist Christian prosecutor who once defended pornographers and owned a nightclub; a judge whose bias in favor of the government was so obvious that even high school students sitting in on the trial for one day commented on it; and a juror who said before the trial began that he thought sanctuary was something for birds.

Individual defendants adopted different mechanisms to help them cope with the stress, the boredom, the uncertainty, and the injustice of the trial. Fife tried to learn about the practice of law. Hutchison was often seen studying Arabic, and Clark walked into the courtroom every morning, sat down, unbuttoned his collar, and proceeded to go to sleep. "Wake me if something important happens," he'd say.

The feeling among the defendants was relaxed, easygoing, and often jovial. They mingled with their families and supportive spectators; they sometimes passed notes; they joked with one another, with reporters, even with their opponents. And during afternoon recesses, they walked around the corner from the courthouse for downtown Tucson's biggest attraction: 19-cent ice cream cones.

But the mood on the left side of the courtroom, where prosecutor Reno sat with his assistant, was altogether different. Reno's no-nonsense manner was as rigid as his posture, a trait reporters jokingly attributed to his 1,000 sit-ups a day, which were not a joke but a morning ritual. Reno was almost never seen outside the courthouse.

Presiding over the whole affair was U.S. District Court Judge Earl H. Carroll, a bespectacled, white-haired man, whom one defendant described as "a second prosecutor." He was lenient with the prosecution, strict with the defense, and, because he would not tolerate laughter, tears, movement, or any other "disruptive" signs of emotion in the courtroom, he intimidated the jury and the audience. He often refused even to listen to defense attorneys, and at least once he actually walked out of the courtroom while a defense attorney was trying to argue a point. After such incidents many spectators in the audience refused to stand up when Carroll entered or left the courtroom.

Another key character in the trial was government informant and key witness Jesus Cruz, the man who befriended the defendants, their families, and many refugees, only to turn on them later. A former coyote who smuggled refugees for profit, Cruz also smuggled guns, lied on the witness stand, and went to extraordinary lengths to increase his earnings from the INS, which reportedly paid him about $21,000 for the investigation and his court appearances.

Defense attorneys focused much of their closing arguments on Cruz, urging the jury to disregard his testimony. They referred to Cruz as "a man who loves money," "a crook," "one who did know how to make crime pay," "the artful dodger," "the constant dissembler," "a real criminal," "a master of deception," "a professional liar," and finally "the great taxicab of all time," for his frequent transporting of refugees. However, the jury apparently chose to accept Cruz's character and his testimony, convicting the defendants on some counts that relied almost solely on his testimony.

MANY PEOPLE, particularly the defense attorneys, still don't understand why the jury returned so many guilty verdicts. Until the last minute, defense attorneys were counting on a hung jury, and apparently one juror was holding out for acquittal on all counts throughout most of the 48 hours the jury deliberated. David McCrea, the juror who had thought sanctuary was for birds, said after the trial that he and some other jurors "sympathized with [the defendants] and didn't agree with the law, but we had to follow the law and had to follow the instructions....We kept hearing references to the 1980 Refugee Act, but it wasn't allowed to be admitted." McCrea also said he regretted that the defense rested instead of presenting its case.

But defense attorneys said their case would have been harmed more than helped by such action. Because of the judge's restrictions against discussion of motive, religion, conditions in Central America, the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, and the Geneva Conventions, the defendants were left with no substantive defense and could only attack the government's case. And if the defendants themselves had taken the stand, they would not have been able to deny their work with refugees.

Sentencing of the eight convicted defendants is scheduled for July 1 in Tucson. But defense attorneys plan to appeal, and with all the irregularities in the Tucson trial and prior experience with similar cases, the prospects for reversal are good, attorneys say. The 1985 conviction of sanctuary worker Stacey Lynn Merkt in Texas, for example, was overturned less than a year later. Merkt's retrial on the charges of transporting and conspiracy to transport was scheduled to begin June 2 in Brownsville, Texas.

Still pending is a defense motion to dismiss the Tucson case on the grounds of selective prosecution. Defense attorneys argue that because of the defendants' vocal criticism of U.S. policy in Central America, which was their First Amendment right, they were unfairly targeted by the government, while far more substantial "illegal alien" smugglers have gone unprosecuted.

The sanctuary movement has helped about 4,000 Central American refugees in the last four years, and some 1,500 refugees are now in public sanctuary. But none of the growers and ranchers in Arizona commonly known to encourage multitudes of "illegals" to cross the border every year to harvest their crops has ever been prosecuted. The court hearing on the selective prosecution motion was scheduled for June 10 in Phoenix.

TO GET A GLIMPSE of the future of the sanctuary movement, one need only see and hear sanctuary workers in action. Then it is clear—with or without trials, verdicts of guilty or innocent, prison terms or not—the work will continue. Yet, throughout the publicity, the fund raising, and the stress of the Tucson trial, such behind-the-scenes work was almost forgotten—at least by the media.

Members of the Tucson Refugee Support Group meet at least once a week to deal with the all-important details of transporting refugees from the border area and finding safe homes for them. In the past few months, the group has seen the flow of refugees increase, due largely to the reactivation of death squads and the U.S.-financed and -authorized saturation bombing of the countryside in El Salvador.

At a TRSG meeting last April, 10 people, including defendant Jim Corbett, a local minister, a college student, and a grandmother, discussed the "border run" made that day and made arrangements for three refugee families coming across the border the following week. The families, all from El Salvador, included a woman whose husband was being sought by the Salvadoran military, whose cousin was beheaded, and who had lost five uncles to death-squad violence in the previous months. Others included women and children being threatened because their relatives, who had already fled El Salvador, had organized farm cooperatives.

Group members discussed how to get the refugees across the border, possible routes to use in bringing the refugees from the border to Tucson—including those that required walks of several hours through the desert—how far apart to space cars, how to deal with infants, and how to finalize the arrangements without using their home telephones, which they assume to be tapped.

These people, and thousands more across the country, will continue to help refugees as long as they are forced to flee their homelands. Threats of arrest, indictment, and prison do not intimidate them.

BECAUSE HE BELIEVED, or at least wanted to believe, the Tucson sanctuary trial was just a "simple alien-smuggling case," prosecutor Donald Reno opposed any efforts to complicate or muddle things with religion. But Reno erred in thinking that by keeping religion out of the courtroom he could censor spiritual matters as well.

For the sanctuary movement is, more than anything else, a spiritual movement. And the spiritual source and strength of the movement cannot be locked behind bars. As defense attorney Ellen Yaroshefsky said at the beginning of the trial, "There is only one leader of the sanctuary movement, and he is just beyond the reach of the INS."

Sr. Darlene Nicgorski expressed it this way: "Our government has called us criminals, yet it is this administration that violates the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 and the United Nations Protocol Accords of 1967, which state that any person having a grave fear of persecution if returned to their homeland may not be deported. Our government indicts us for conspiracy, yet at the same time conspires to suppress the right of Central Americans to determine their own future.

"Our government indicts us for transporting [refugees], yet in the past three years our government has transported 30,000 refugees back to their homelands to face possible torture and death. Our government indicts us for aiding and abetting refugees, while the State Department aids and abets their killers. Our communities have been indicted for inducing the refugees to cross the border, yet our government had induced thousands of refugees to flee across borders by providing the Howitzers, the Huey helicopters, the machine guns, and the gunboats that are used to terrorize those refugees.

"We ask the American people to judge on this basis: Have we been faithful to the God of history discovered amongst the poor and oppressed struggling to go free?

"Therefore, we now call on all people who seek a just peace in Central America to join us in committing ourselves to actions in solidarity with the people of Central America and with all those who have been indicted. The government calls this a criminal conspiracy; we call it a conspiracy of love. Join with us as co-conspirators seeking a just peace in Central America."