Make Sanctuaries, Not Walls
Ascending Boosktacks #5 - A. Naomi Paik's Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary (2020) and Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti (2020)
What is a sanctuary?
Sanctuaries are sanctums, inner space, holy places where God resides. Places of covenant. Places of celebration, reverence, and rest. Indeed, Catholics might imagine church altars, where priests celebrate the Eucharist, as the most familiar form of sanctuary.
Sanctuaries are also homes for the persecuted and poor. Some cities are known as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants—places where migrants are safe from harassment, where they can find shelter, and where their human dignity is respected.
Catholics are called to build both kinds of sanctuaries. We are called to the altar and we are called to the poor. We ought to make sacred homes for the Eucharist and sacred, safe homes for the vulnerable.
With Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century (2020), historian A. Naomi Paik historicizes Trump-era immigration policies—bans, walls, and raids—while using sanctuary as a lens to assess those policies’ costs and solutions. She deftly demonstrates how Trump’s policies relied on long, racialized histories of immigrant exclusion and exploitation in America. Paik proposes that, by enveloping vulnerable migrants within sanctuaries, we will move “towards a society where people take care of each other.”’
American Immigration History 101
I remember the exact moment when immigration policy clicked for me.
In 2012, demographers Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren wrote an article called “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America.” Four years later, over Christmas break, I read that article at my parents’ kitchen counter. In an “oh shit I had it really wrong” moment, I understood that immigration isn’t something happening to the United States. American government and American capitalism, together, created and continue to proliferate inhumane policies, environments, and attitudes against migrants—particularly migrants of color.
But Sam, what about laws? Laws change and their context matters. Check this out:
Entering the United States was not a crime before 1882, the year Congress passed a racist exclusion law prohibiting Chinese migrants from becoming citizens. Before Congress created the border patrol in 1924—hoping to stop Chinese migrants crossing through Mexico—the US-Mexico border was a porous, ambiguous zone where people crossed freely, usually without harassment.
Since World War II—when the Bracero Program (1942-1965) brought Mexican migrant workers to the United States on seasonal farm contracts—American agribusiness and government have facilitated and incentivized Latin American migrant labor while demonizing and policing those same migrants for staying when they lost their apparent economic usefulness.
Many Americans wanted migrants as laboring bodies, not citizens with souls. Picking up in the 1950s and 1960s, newspapers and government officials spread racist narratives about Mexicans as “wetbacks.” People started talking about Mexican migrants like invasive species. And after 9/11, migrants fell victim to fear-mongering terrorism discourses.
American employers continued to solicit undocumented migrant laborers while the government intensified its deportation power and made border crossings more dangerous. Since crossings were substantially hazardous by the 1990s and 2000s, migration patterns changed from circular sojourns to linear migrations. By continuing to police the border and punish undocumented migrants, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations exacerbated the border injustices created by their predecessors.
There’s a lot more to this history - this was just a brief overview and there’s much more to read and say about the experiences and mechanisms of American immigration regimes over time. Suffice it to say, legislating what constitutes an illegal entry, who should be deported, whether and where to build border walls and detention facilities—all of these measures are racial restrictions that determine belonging in America through fear and force. Bans, walls, and raids therefore constitute a moral crisis.
Creating Exclusion
Paik’s book frames the Trump administration’s border and migration policies within that history of racial exclusion. She devotes chapters to bans, walls, and raids respectively, situating each within their American historical context, before finally arguing for the moral and political urgency of sanctuary.
Bans are fundamentally exclusionary tools. Indeed, Paik argues, “It is the ban that in turn establishes the need for walls, raids, and other tools deployed against the ban.” No ban, no walls or raids.
Before unpacking Trump-era measures, Paik traces the history of bans from Chinese exclusion in 1882, Asian exclusion in 1917, and racially restrictive immigration quotas in 1924, to discrimination against Muslims under the Patriot Act in 2001. In each iteration, such bans reinforced a settler colonial ideal of an exclusive America meant for white people. 1 Paik argues that we see this ideal at work in Trump’s executive orders of January 27, 2017—through which the president instituted the “Muslim Ban,” intensified border policing, and broadened ICE’s authority to remove migrants. These orders clearly messaged what belonging meant in Trump’s America. To that end, Paik cites Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Trump v. Hawaii (2018):
While it does not ban most of the world’s Muslims, it does not need to in order to create an ever-more hostile environment for them.
The ban promulgated the administration’s unwelcome.
Paik then turned to walls. Firstly, our commonly held ideas about long, winding fences dividing nations fall flat at the border. According to Paik and other immigration scholars, the U.S.-Mexico border is a zone that extends for hundreds of miles. The federal government empowered Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—a successor to the border patrol—to police a one-hundred-mile “extralegal” zone from America’s borders that covers nearly two-thirds of Americans. If stopped in that space by CBP, warrants, habeas corpus, and due process lose much of their practical meaning. The American border zone also includes every U.S.-bound gate in international airports and most international borders in Central and South America.
Secondly, as immigration debates’ focal point, the physical border has been hardened with punitive infrastructure. No longer a transnational region where Mexican-American and indigenous communities moved freely, the United States has constructed “a militarized border and detention landscape” to be a “spectacle” of state power.
Paik also describes the invasive technologies deployed at U.S. borders. I have witnessed this personally. Traveling home on our last visit from abroad, I was surprised when the TSA submitted every incoming passenger to involuntary facial recognition scans. It didn’t matter that we had all been checked at our points of origin. It didn’t matter that we were American citizens. Everyone would be scanned, checked against criminal and terrorist databases, and logged for undefined future use. I found later that, technically, we could have objected, and that images of American citizens would—theoretically—be deleted after an indefinite amount of time. But the entire operation formed part of what Paik termed a “spectacle.” It was uncomfortable—and that was the point. By coercing passengers to receive facial scans—and, for others, fingerprinting, questioning, and searches—the American state flexed its power to control and exclude.
Trump didn’t build that infrastructure alone. He certainly took advantage of it. Nevertheless, Paik pushes us to look beyond the Trump border-wall campaign to a longer history of state power wielded against foreigners.
Finally, Paik unpacks the significance of immigration raids. She argues that raids are meant to terrorize, in a tactic the United States has historically exercised against nonwhite communities. This isn’t new. Native American removal campaigns in the nineteenth century, so-called repatriation campaigns against Mexican Americans amid the Great Depression, and Japanese American incarceration during World War II all built the groundwork for Trump-era “zero tolerance” campaigns and child separation policies. Immigration raids are never just about following the rules. From the nineteenth century to the present, these injustices collectively demonstrate that federal raids and detentions actively created “removable” people and defined who could belong in the United States along racial lines.
Creating Sanctuary
Paik argues that a just society starts with sanctuary. “At minimum,” she explains, “sanctuary provides a ground floor for survival and a strategy of resistance for targeted peoples like immigrants under deportation orders.”
What does sanctuary look like? Pointing to movements like Black Lives Matter and Freedom Cities, Paik suggests “an abolitionist approach to sanctuary” that actively “works on multiple, simultaneous fronts of struggle that against capitalist exploitation, borders, policing, caging, and patriarchal power, among others whose connections may not always be so obvious.” Sanctuary means relationships with the vulnerable—provisioning them without counting the cost, protecting them with laws, protesting injustices against them, and welcoming them into our communities as equals.
Sanctuary re-frames the entire national project. “It enacts,” according to Paik, “a notion of membership that is not beholden to sovereign power and that contests the notion of the state as the only authority that matters.” Citizenship status, ethnicity, skin color, religion, gender, etc. are not the point inside a sanctuary. Rather, in Paik’s words:
What matters is that you are here with us, which means that I am accountable to you, and you are accountable to me. The solidarity that drives an abolitionist sanctuary is about caring for each other, but it is also about defending the very ground of our relations to each other, of the ability to care for each other in the first place.
I love that. State power doesn’t get to define our love of neighbor. No ban, border, or raid is absolute. In a sanctuary, each person is honored, worthy of respect, regardless of how they got there.
Catholics and Migrants
In October 2020, mid-pandemic, Pope Francis published Fratelli Tutti—an encyclical “On Fraternity and Social Friendship.” While wide-ranging, the document explains in detail how and why Catholics are called to love and serve migrants. Read alongside Paik’s work, Francis provides a stirring case for sanctuary-building among Catholics.
Exclusion and Evangelization
In practice, the American Church has a bit of an immigration problem. Some American Catholics have fallen prey to nativist ideas that frame immigrants as threats to the nation, western culture, and even Christianity itself. They huddle behind a fortress mentality. The “other” is dangerous, we can’t let them in! - is the basic gist.
Francis proposes the exact opposite! “[W]hen we open our hearts to those who are different,” he explains, “this enables them, while continuing to be themselves, to develop in new ways.” By accepting migrants, welcoming them, and integrating them into our communities, we empower them to be free.
That freedom is fundamental to sharing and receiving the Gospel. Francis does not directly address evangelization with this encyclical, but Catholics believe that God calls us to love Him freely. When we provide for migrants in distress, we help them respond to that call in their own lives. The outsider isn’t an existential threat. We aren’t supposed to isolate and protect the faith or our culture as fragile artifacts. We are called to live our faith with radical love in the world.
Scriptural Sanctuary
Francis isn’t just imagining a borderless world on his own. The pope reminds us that the Bible is unequivocal about openness to migrants. In the Old Testament, for example, God repeatedly reminds Israel:
“You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9)
“When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)
We are all strangers—there is no distinction between “us” and the “other.” You owe the stranger what you owe your brother. The stranger is your brother.
Jesus and his Apostles take this even further. Welcoming the stranger is not just an act of empathy or justice, it’s self-emptying love. And that love isn’t optional, it’s a fundamental imperative of Christian life. Take, for example:
“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (Mt 25:35)
“For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’” (Galatians 5:14)
“Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
The exclusion and expulsion of migrants is not from God. We are all sojourners and are all included, loved, and known by Christ.
Fraternal Love on the Border
That’s why contemporary border enforcement distresses Francis. Border walls are a symbol of human failure—fissures that trace broken love across the dirt. Borders reduce neighbors to “them” while “[enslaving] those who raise walls . . . within the very walls they have built.” The wall embodies an egotistical prison for some and a sin against others.
Rather than keeping them out, Francis admonishes nations to give migrants access to local resources:
Seen from the standpoint not only of the legitimacy of private property and the rights of its citizens, but also of the first principle of the common destination of goods, we can then say that each country also belongs to the foreigner, inasmuch as the territory’s goods must not be denied to a needy person coming from elsewhere . . . If every human being possesses an inalienable dignity, if all people are my brothers and sisters, and if the world truly belongs to everyone, then it matters little whether my neighbour was born in my country or elsewhere.
National boundaries don’t ultimately matter to Christ and His Church. There is no Jew or Greek, according to St. Paul, and there’s also no citizen or alien in the eyes of God. Thus we can’t just rubber-stamp state efforts to exclude, incarcerate, and deport the migrant at our doorstep. Instead, Pope Francis commends us to follow the Good Samaritan’s example. We should drop everything and respond to the needy with “gratuitousness.”
Catholic migrant care is simple. When confronted with newcomers, no matter their condition or manner of arrival, Francis instructs us: “our response . . . can be summarized by four words: welcome, protect, promote and integrate.”
I think those four words also reflect the essence of sanctuary that Paik described. We are called to loving solidarity. We are called to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit and free the imprisoned, to seek justice for righteousness’ sake. We are called to open our homes, our nations, and our hearts to newcomers. All of this is fundamental to the sanctuary movement.
Catholics simply add that, in our accountability to each other, we are also accountable to the face of Christ in the poor.
So, how can we make sanctuaries where we live? How can we enact and embody sanctuary in our daily lives and communities? I think these two books have given us a great foundation. I would love to talk about it in the comments!
I hope you enjoyed reading Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary alongside Fratelli Tutti. I certainly did.
That’s all for today.
See you tomorrow.
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández once wrote that settler colonialism was the process by which white settlers claimed indigenous land, expelled/imprisoned/exterminated indigenous peoples from that land, and then peopled that land with exclusively white descendants. For more I would recommend reading her book, City of Inmates (2017).