Woman facing deportation gets sanctuary at city church
While people rally nationwide against the separation of migrant parents and children, local activists are pointing to a mother here in Columbus who faces being separated from her young daughters.
Miriam Vargas, a 41-yearold immigrant from Honduras, sought sanctuary with her family Tuesday night inside First English Lutheran Church on the Near East Side. Vargas went to the church after reporting as instructed to the local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office downtown last Monday and was told she needed to be on a plane back to Honduras at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning.
“I’m 100 percent dedicated to being a mom,” said Vargas in Spanish, through a translator. She said she couldn’t bear to leave her two daughters, ages 5 and 9, both U.S. citizens, or to take them back to Honduras, from which she fled in 2005 after she and her family were threatened by gangs.
On Friday afternoon, she sat at a dining table in a church room, surrounded by furnishings that she and her husband had brought from their small West Side apartment.
Her kids don’t like the room where they sleep on a bed next to one for their parents, but Vargas said it’s their home for the foreseeable future.
Vargas is one of 44 people who have publicly sought sanctuary nationwide and the fifth person to seek a haven in a church in Ohio. Her case bumps Ohio to second-highest spot of public sanctuary cases, behind North Carolina, with six, said the Rev. Noel Andersen, national grass-roots coordinator with Church World Service in Washington, D.C.
Though there have been an increasing number of undocumented immigrants seeking public sanctuary, some people are against the idea of houses of worship offering protection.
Pav Sterry, 58, of the Northwest Side, speaks out against illegal immigration locally and nationally.
“Somebody is here illegally and you’re helping them stay, that’s illegal,” she said of churches harboring immigrants. “I don’t see where a church, mosque or temple should have any special powers to be above the law.”
The Rev. Sally Padgett, pastor at First English Lutheran Church, believes that harboring immigrants is what Jesus did. Her congregation, which is heavily involved in social justice issues, voted two weeks ago to welcome Vargas and her family.
“You always have some kind of trepidation; you don’t like making people angry,” Padgett said of the decision. “I hate that the country is so divisive, but you get to a point where churches have to decide who they are and what they’re about. We have to live this out.”
Edith Espinal, a 40-yearold mother of three from Mexico, has been in sanctuary at Columbus Mennonite Church on the North Side since October. Hers was the first public sanctuary case in Ohio. People such as Espinal and Vargas seek refuge in churches when facing removal from the country because of an Obama-era immigration policy that identifies churches as “sensitive locations” where enforcement actions should be avoided.
Espinal is a leader for the movement and Vargas sought her advice before making what she called the tough decision to enter sanctuary with her family.“I feel really blessed because I have the support from the (Columbus Sanctuary Collective) that made it possible for us to be here,” Vargas said. “But at the same time I’m well aware I can’t leave.”