Even though Miriam Vargas is not in prison, she said it can sometimes feel like it. For nearly a month now, she has been living inside an Ohio church, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ordered her to her native Honduras after living in the U.S. for over a decade.
Vargas knew she couldn’t leave. She has two young U.S. citizen kids, and this is their home. This is her home, too. So hours before her scheduled flight, Vargas and her two girls went into sanctuary at First English Lutheran Church in Columbus, becoming “the fifth person to seek asylum in a church in Ohio, ranking Ohio to the second-highest spot for public sanctuary cases,” ABC 6 reports.
It’s not easy for any of the family. Within the walls of churches, immigrants facing deportation can be safe, but only as long as they stay within those walls. Her daughters miss being kids, including “playing outside, swimming, and being with their friends.” But they’re also the reason why she’s fighting. "My daughters, I do it for them,” she said.
Church World Service estimates that as many as 44 immigrants like Vargas may be in sanctuary across the U.S., but with some preferring to remain under the radar due to unleashed ICE agents, the number could be much higher.
Those who come come forward do it at great risk. "The system itself,” said Columbus Sanctuary Collective’s Ruben Castilla Herrera, one of Vargas’s advocates, “it’s removing us, it's detaining, it's criminalizing, it's deporting, and so we have to raise our voice and be brave and take those chances.”
Others recently taking chances in the sanctuary movement are a group of Kansas Mennonites, who just pledged to shelter other immigrants facing deportation, even if it means the possibility of church leaders facing persecution and arrest.
For Vargas, she hopes her story goes beyond her own family and the church they’re living in. She wants her story to uplift others, and to remind us all of what we’re fighting for: to keep families together. To other immigrant families facing being torn apart, Vargas said that she “would tell them to continue to fight, stay informed, and never lose hope.”