Two Boston-area faith leaders received honorable mentions in The Boston Globe’s “2017 Bostonians of the Year” list for offering sanctuary to undocumented immigrants facing imminent deportation. Both Bethel AME and University Lutheran were among the 800 congregations who pledged “holy resistance” to Donald Trump’s mass deportation force in the days following the 2016 presidential election. “We take a cue from many different Scriptures: You love your neighbors as yourself,” said University Lutheran’s Rev. Kathleen O’Keefe Reed:
In May, University Lutheran became the first church in the state in recent years to offer sanctuary to an undocumented immigrant, a 26-year-old woman from Ecuador, and her two small children. In September, Hammond’s congregation at Bethel AME began hosting a 33-year-old man from El Salvador. Across the country, about 30 churches have offered harbor to immigrants in similar circumstances.
“These are the friends, the neighbors, the colleagues that we see all the time,” Hammond says. “People get scapegoated and stereotyped for political purposes to distract all of us from the real problems.”
The Ecuadorean woman lives with her children, ages 1 and 3, in former Sunday school rooms at University Lutheran, which has operated a homeless shelter for 35 years. She was arrested in 2012 after crossing from Mexico and has been ordered to leave, despite having received what she said are death threats at home. The Salvadoran man, who also has a deportation order, has been in the United States since 2005 and does not want to be removed from his five children, all of whom either have permanent legal status here or are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was canceled in September but may be revived.
At University Lutheran, a sermon by Harvard Divinity School student Kristofer Rhude sparked discussion that led to a unanimous congregational vote to offer sanctuary. For Bethel AME, believed to be the first historically black congregation in the country to shelter an undocumented immigrant, the pews echoed with applause when Hammond made the announcement during a service.
The exact number of immigrants in sanctuary is unknown, but some advocates estimate it to be in the dozens. This past May, undocumented mom Jeanette Vizguerra won a stay of deportation until 2019 after spending nearly 90 days in sanctuary. During her time in the Denver church, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people. The Boston Globe: “Janine Carreiro, codirector of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, which advocates for social justice, calls them ‘shining examples of what it means to be a person of faith in our time.’”