Seeking sanctuary
Caravan by regional organizations to support immigrant who sought sanctuary in an Austin church
It has been three months since Salvadoran immigrant Alirio Gámez claimed sanctuary from deportation by entering a north Austin church.
On Wednesday, Gámez will step out of the First Unitarian Universalist Church for the first time to ask for a deportation stay. Faith leaders and members of the Austin Sanctuary Network will then lead a caravan from Austin to San Antonio to file a stay of removal application and meet with ICE officials.
“We are telling ICE to respect my right to safety,” Gámez said in a press release. “We are going to show ICE our strength in unity, and we expect to have a victory in our hands.”
Gámez’s efforts to remain
in the country have since drawn the support of hundreds who have signed a petition on his behalf to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sparked the #LetAlirioStay hashtag.
After fleeing the violence in El Salvador in 2015, Gámez filed a request for asylum but was denied after being held in three detention centers.
“I have the right to live and to have my life respected,” Gámez said at a press conference
shortly after he began living at the church on Sept. 5. “That’s why I’m asking this government to please stop my deportation.”
The campaign to keep Gámez from being deported is also part of a growing church sanctuary movement across the country. About 800 churches have joined the movement, with an estimated 32 congregations housing immigrants at risk of deportation. About two dozen churches and religious groups have joined the Austin Sanctuary Network.
The church sanctuary movement has roots in a similar tide of activism in the 1980s when churches and synagogues offered refuge to those escaping civil war in El Salvador and Guatemala.
“We are going to demand that Alirio stay in the country and be granted a stay of removal,” Alejandro Caceres, immigration organizer with Grassroots Leadership, said in a press release. “We have built a network that supports him and is enriched by him. Because of this, we also believe that ICE has no authority to come into our city and deport anyone from our community.”