Review: Examining the sanctuary movement at an important political moment
Two volunteers with a Catholic Charities Disaster Relief Team and a Central American family at the reception hall of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Tex. (iStock), on July 8, 2014.Published before the 2024 presidential election, Gina M. Pérez’s Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities focuses on the sanctuary movement during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president (2017-21), a time of precarity and fear within the immigrant community. During his 2024 campaign, the newly elected president has again promised mass deportation and militarized border control. Therefore, Pérez’s book on sanctuary—a commitment to defend and accompany vulnerable migrants—comes at a crucial political moment, elevating a power greater than states and borders and making a case for progressive, public expressions of faith.
By centering the voices and experiences of Latina/o sanctuary leaders in her research, she presents sanctuary as both a sacred and secular reality. It is both deeply rooted in faith, deriving power from its appeal to a transcendent authority, and a practical political strategy to cultivate safety, trust and belonging in all communities. It includes both physical sanctuary, where sacred space becomes a place of refuge, and a broader commitment to accompaniment and public advocacy. It is both a bold resistance to xenophobic and exclusionary immigration policies and an intersectional movement toward decriminalization and anti-racism in solidarity with all marginalized communities.
By embracing a both/and approach to sanctuary, Pérez resists simplistic definitions that either trivialize faith or ignore its secular expressions and public significance.
An anthropologist and professor at Oberlin College, Pérez focuses on the Latino/a community in Ohio in her ethnographic research. This might not be the first place we associate with the New Sanctuary Movement; however, Pérez points out that among other states during the same period (2017-21), Ohio saw one of the highest rates of people entering physical sanctuary in religious congregations.
By highlighting the lived realities of the people—mostly Latina mothers—housed in religious congregations, she makes visible the suffering experienced in physical sanctuaries. She also points out a painful paradox. When these women take refuge in a congregation, they are separated from their children for a period of time—the very reality they sought to avoid through sanctuary.
Pérez continually highlights the agency of Latina/o sanctuary leaders in this context, avoiding paternalistic approaches to sanctuary that center the experiences of mostly white, economically secure Christians. One of the ways Latina leaders shape the sanctuary narrative is by emphasizing their identities as mothers facing the threat of family separation. In doing so, they strategically call out the hypocrisy of politicians who espouse pro-family values and support immigration policies that rely on detainment and deportation.
Pérez makes vivid the impact of family separation on immigrant communities by highlighting one of the largest workplace raids that occurred in Ohio—and the community response to protect vulnerable children whose parents were detained. This story and others in the book reveal the cross-coalitional solidarity that emerged within and beyond faith communities in response to the needs of their neighbors.
Reinforced by her interviews with faith leaders across the country, Pérez acknowledges physical sanctuary as powerful and important while also recognizing that sanctuary goes beyond the physical realities to transform immigration policies and walk with migrants navigating them. Thus, Pérez demonstrates the coherence within the history of sanctuary and the New Sanctuary Movement, which emphasizes advocacy and accompaniment—and for many, abolition involving a transformation of the criminal justice system represented in the criminalization and detention of migrants. Pérez argues that this expansive definition is “one of sanctuary’s greatest strengths” by connecting communities across identities in a shared struggle for liberation, belonging and safety.
While acknowledging the multi-layered expressions of sanctuary, Pérez emphasizes the importance of religious narratives and the memories of faith-driven action to sustain the sanctuary movement. She contextualizes sanctuary in anti-war activism and expressions of solidarity with Central America in the 1980s. Interviews with members of sanctuary congregations lead Pérez to lift up the importance of place, memory and story in forging sanctuary commitments. She notes that the memory of Óscar Romero and the North American church women killed in El Salvador—Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan—are an inspiration for social justice activism.
As a scholar of Catholic social thought, I was particularly struck by Pérez’s multi-layered understanding of accompaniment as a central tenet of sanctuary. Pérez regards accompaniment as an expression of Catholic social teaching and liberation theology, from which she appropriately interprets the preferential option for the poor as a call to walk with those who are marginalized and oppressed. Here, Pérez sees what some observers of sanctuary activism miss: the centrality of faith, particularly within the Latina/o community.
At the same time, Pérez recognizes the significance of accompaniment beyond Catholic social thought, pointing to its diverse and non-religious expressions. In doing so, she affirms the public quality of Catholic social thought, which scholars such as David Hollenbach, S.J., and Kristin Heyer have articulated.
Accompaniment is widely evoked among sanctuary networks as a call to walk with migrants, respecting their personal agency and grounding any assistance or advocacy in relationship. Accompaniment also offers language preferred by some over sanctuary because of the connotations and risks associated with the word.
Pérez highlights situations in which cities, colleges and congregations avoid declaring sanctuary, either to avoid overpromising protection against federal authorities or to circumvent the risk of losing federal support because of their sanctuary status. In her understanding, efficacious sanctuary is not limited to communities that have made a formal declaration or who practice physical sanctuary. Being a “sanctuary people” is about the praxis of accompaniment that can be observed within and beyond these contexts.
In her conclusion, Pérez raises a question that readers interested in debates within public theology will appreciate: “What do we gain and what do we lose when sanctuary circulates in more capacious ways that unmoor it from its religious and spiritual foundations? Is there a danger of secularizing sanctuary?”
Pérez takes seriously the appeal to a divine authority against human institutions as a definitive quality of sanctuary. She observes the power of religious narrative, practice and memory for sustaining sanctuary commitment. At the same time, she argues for an expansive understanding of sanctuary because it offers a way to envision a community of belonging and liberation for all.
Pérez’s book does not settle the question of whether something is lost when we secularize sanctuary, but it does point to many gains when people unite across and beyond faith communities to become a sanctuary people. Her research presents an invitation to recognize the public significance and political implications of faith, and to foster spaces of dialogue and collective action among all who believe in the sacred dignity of the person and power of accompaniment.
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