This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!

Act three of Elvira, a play written by Raúl Dorantes and directed by Mark Litwicki, opens with a male reporter standing on a bare platform save for a microphone stand and two wooden posts. The reporter faces the audience and announces that it’s August 2006, and Elvira Arellano has just entered sanctuary in a church in Humboldt Park, a historically Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago. He walks offstage to sit among the crowd as Elvira enters the frame carrying a bulging duffel bag, accompanied by her pastor.

The pastor, who goes unnamed in the play but stands in for Emma Lozano, a prominent migrant justice organizer and the founder of Centro Sin Fronteras, opens the press conference: “When the rulers of the ancient world died, they would go to the gods of the underworld. The gods would ask three questions: had they fed the pilgrims, had they dressed the poor, and had they helped women in need. If they answered ‘no’ to any of those, they were denied eternal life.” There is a brief pause before the pastor concludes her monologue. “Do you have any questions?” The auditorium lights turn on abruptly as the reporter eagerly raises his hand, interrogating the pastor: “What kind of temple is this?” When the pastor explains that the church is a Methodist one, the reporter counters, “But with Catholic images?” as if hoping to discredit Lozano. She holds firm: “It is a temple of life.”

Donald Trump has vowed to rid the United States of sanctuary cities. In an Executive Order signed on the first day of his second term in office, titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” Trump directed the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to withhold federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions. On January 20, 2025, his administration rescinded a “sensitive locations” memo that prevented immigration enforcement in schools, hospitals, and places of worship—targeting the tradition of seeking sanctuary in sacred spaces. Nine months later, in April 2025, Trump directed federal officials to “pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures” to bring sanctuary jurisdictions into compliance. Cities like Chicago, where I live and work, have already experienced the consequences of these orders, enduring the months-long occupation of our communities by federal agents who throw smoke bombs onto crowded streets, raid apartment buildings in the middle of the night with flash-bang grenades and Black Hawk helicopters, and endanger the lives of protestors and journalists through the use of chemical agents and near-lethal projectiles.

“Sanctuary emerged in the United States as a response to the mass migrations of Salvadorans and Guatemalans out of their war-torn countries—and the Reagan administration’s refusal to grant them asylum.”

It is no coincidence that Chicago is among the first sanctuary cities targeted by the Trump administration. Long before Elvira sought refuge in Humboldt Park, sanctuary emerged in the United States as a response to the mass migrations of Salvadorans and Guatemalans out of their war-torn countries—and the Reagan administration’s refusal to grant them asylum. In 1982, Chicago’s Wellington Avenue Church became the second church to declare itself a sanctuary in the country. That same year, the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America arose as one of the most prominent groups coordinating migrants’ transnational movements. Since at least the 1980s, migrants and other organizers in Chicago and North America more broadly have turned to sanctuary to subvert border regimes and their death-dealing controls.

From the 1980s “New Underground Railroad” to Elvira and post-Trump 1.0 abolitionist struggles, migrants and other activists have turned to sanctuary to refuse immobility and displacement. These practitioners prompt us to reimagine this tradition not as a singular place of protection, such as a church or a city, but rather as an insurgent practice that shelters people as they traverse militarized routes and refuse the criminalization of their movements. As the second Trump administration internalizes bordering practices, including deploying the Border Patrol to cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, earlier histories of sanctuary point us to the radical and creative potentials of fugitivity, abolition, and hemispheric solidarities.

The cast of Raul Dorantes’ play welcomes Elvira and Saul Arellano to the stage for a talkback after their performance on October 4, 2024. (Barbara Sostaita)

“¡Yo vengo de todas partes … y a todas partes voy!”

When Elvira takes the stage during act three of Dorantes’ play, she is poised and quietly defiant as she responds to the reporter’s hostile line of questioning. She says that something changed inside her when she was arrested while working at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2002. From that moment on, Elvira was no longer squarely focused on survival or making ends meet as a single mother. Rather, she saw herself as part of a collective of 600,000 parents with U.S. citizen children who lose sleep at night due to the threat of family separation. “For them and for myself, I’ve asked for sanctuary. Immigration agents know where I am. Whenever they want, they can come for me.”

“These sanctuary ties were hemispheric and mobile—building on long traditions of care and flight in the Americas, including Indigenous regions of refuge and cimarronesor maroons who fled plantations and created refuges in marshes, swamps, and forests.”

Elvira is often credited with launching The New Sanctuary Movement in 2006. She and her seven-year-old son, Saul, lived at Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago for a year, where they received refuge from Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican community, who, like Elvira, intimately understood the realities of displacement and forced migration. Organizers in the early 2000s took inspiration from the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, a network of safe places and clandestine routes that extended across Central America and Mexico into the United States and Canada, led and coordinated by groups of mothers of the disappeared, workers’ unions, and religious workers. North Americans learned from Central American practitioners, and their sanctuary practices were directed not only at offering refuge to people displaced by war but also at addressing root causes. They led political education initiatives and organized campaigns to stop U.S. aid to genocidal governments in El Salvador and Guatemala. These sanctuary ties were hemispheric and mobile—building on long traditions of care and flight in the Americas, including Indigenous regions of refuge and cimarronesor maroons who fled plantations and created refuges in marshes, swamps, and forests.

Elvira’s flight into sanctuary took place in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, a period marked by the escalation of the security state, the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and legislation like the Patriot Act, which granted the state unprecedented power to surveil, detain, and remove migrants. These policies laid the groundwork for the raids and forced disappearances of migrants we are witnessing under Trump. A year after entering sanctuary, Elvira announced her intention to leave the protection of the church and participate in a protest against family separation in Washington, D.C. She was soon detained and deported to Mexico.

Elvira continued organizing for migrant justice in the wake of her deportation, practicing sanctuary across borders. One year after she was deported, Mexico partnered with the United States to implement the Merida Initiative, a “security” agreement that funded surveillance technology and the militarization of the country’s borders. As Amarela Varela Huerta argues, the fortification of Mexico’s “vertical border,” or the expansion of border controls across the country, is a response to neoliberal economic treaties implemented in Central America from the 1990s through the 2000s. These neoliberal reforms led to a drastic increase in Central American migrants attempting to cross Mexico by land, sea, and air. As a result of border externalization, these migrants are subject to criminalization, surveillance, and detention while in transit. Elvira, changed by her own experience seeking sanctuary, co-founded Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, a group that defends and organizes with Central Americans and others in transit across Mexico. Alongside Movimiento, Elvira coordinated the caravan of mothers of missing migrants, a collective of Central American women who participate in an annual pilgrimage across Mexico denouncing migratory policies and looking for their children who disappeared on the migrant trail, along the vertical border.

“Sanctuary is a mobile tradition, one that travels with migrants as they move and are moved, transgressing borders and limits; a todas partes va.“

In Elvira’s first act, the playwright depicts Elvira participating in her first protest in May 2006 as part of Primavera de Migrantes, an unprecedented mass mobilization led by immigrants across the country against the Sensenbrenner bill, which would have made undocumented status a felony. At first, Elvira is visibly uneasy and timid at the protest, especially as she and her friend Yadira encounter mobs of Mothers Against Immigration and others who refer to themselves as Minutemen—white supremacist vigilantes who police the U.S.-Mexico border. But Elvira and Yadira are emboldened as they encounter the many diasporas present at the protest, representing Asia, Latin America and Africa. They invent their own chant to celebrate the tenacity of the Global South:“Yo vengo de todas partes … y a todas partes voy! ¡En yolas, cayucos, pateras y balsas! ¡En yolas, cayucos, pateras, y balsas!” (I come from everywhere… and everywhere I go! In skiffs, canoes, small boats, and rafts! In skiffs, canoes, small boats, and rafts!). Elvira’s flights into and out of sanctuary suggest that this practice does not merely provide refuge to people fleeing enforcement but rather celebrates the creativity and insurgency of migrant mobility. Sanctuary is a mobile tradition, one that travels with migrants as they move and are moved, transgressing borders and limits; a todas partes va.

Read the rest of this article, available open access for a limited time.

Barbara Sostaita is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, documents practices of care and intimacy along the migrant trail.