Woman’s refuge from deportation is changing lives
MANCOS, COLO. >> Inside a tiny Colorado church, a woman who had been taking refuge for nearly nine months was sitting by a window, watching the snow drift down. She watched for an hour, then another, reminding herself for the 257th day in a row why she had chosen to be here.
She had been in United Methodist Church of Mancos since June 2, 2017, one of 40 known cases of undocumented immigrants living in churches across the country to avoid deportation, and wanted something to look forward to beyond what life had become. A blur of waiting. A blur of sleeping. A blur of people stopping by to see how she was doing, to say how sorry they were that it had come to this.
Out in America, beyond the property line of a church that in effect had become her country, the decades-old debate over immigration reform was as loud and emotional as ever. President Donald Trump was stepping up deportations and highlighting immigrants he described as rapists, murderers and gang members. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was giving an eighthour speech calling young immigrants “courageous” and “patriotic” and speaking of their “divine spark.” Week after week brought more protests and accusations that both parties were using the issue for political gain while failing again to find a solution.
And all this time, Rosa was sealed off, watching the seasons change through the window — the end of spring, summer, fall, winter, and now almost spring again.
One of the rest
She was not a “dreamer,” one of the 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and now waiting for the courts to decide whether they can be deported. She was not one of the violent criminals often singled out by Trump, or one of the life-or-death cases that sometimes appear in the news. Rosa Sabido was one of the rest — roughly 10 million immigrants without proper legal documents living ordinary lives in America.
She was 53, unmarried and without children, and said she first came to the United States on a visitor visa in 1987 to see her mother and stepfather, both naturalized citizens who lived in Cortez, Colorado. She said she traveled back and forth between Colorado and Mexico for a decade until immigration officials raised questions about her visa and told her to leave the country, at which point she crossed back into the United States illegally and settled into a quiet life in Cortez.
She lived in a small blue house next door to her parents at the edge of Mesa Verde National Park. She got a job as a secretary for
the local Catholic parish. She made extra money selling homemade tamales out of her car, driving a route that took her to banks, pottery galleries, spas and offices around Cortez and the nearby town of Mancos, avoiding run-ins with immigration authorities until 2008, when she was arrested during a raid targeting relatives and released on the condition that she check in with the federal immigration office in Durango.
This was what she had been doing, checking in year after year, requesting stays of deportation and being granted them until last May, when she was notified that her latest request had been denied. Her next check-in happened to be scheduled for 10 days later.
Frantic, she called a lawyer, who told her she would probably be detained and deported if she went. She called her priest to see if he could do anything. She called a parishioner who did charity work, and that was when she first heard about a church that had recently voted to become what is known as a sanctuary.
“Standing with compassion,” was how the church’s pastor, Craig Paschal, had described the idea when his small congregation began discussing it not long after Trump was elected. He explained to them that being a sanctuary would mean taking in a family or person facing deportation, which the congregation was in a unique position to do since it was a long-standing federal policy to avoid enforcement actions in churches.
The vote was unanimous, even though people thought it unlikely that anyone would need them in the mostly white town of 1,700 people. A few months later, though, word came that there was a person in need, and it was the woman who drove around town selling tamales.
“They want to take Rosa,” the pastor recalled telling his wife.
Rosa realized that she knew the church. It was the small stone one with the nice garden where she always turned right on her sales route.
In Mancos, volunteers began hauling in a mattress and clearing out a classroom inside the church’s fellowship hall, preparing for what they imagined might be a stay of a few weeks.
In Cortez, Rosa began packing, suddenly panicked that immigration officers might show up at her door at the last minute.
At the church, the pastor and several volunteers were waiting, and Rosa walked up the four steps and went inside the fellowship hall.
As news spread, people began coming by the church with canned goods, and towels, and bath items, and in one case, a rocking chair. But the pastor realized that not everyone was supportive. One online commenter wrote that the church should be burned down. A few people wrote letters to the editor. “The Mancos church may appear to be doing a kind deed in the community, however, they are in their own way supporting lawless behavior,” one woman wrote.
The pastor answered that America had a long history of unjust laws and that it was the duty of Christians to stand with “the outcast.” He invited people to come meet this person that the government now considered an “ICE fugitive,” a designation that applies to more than a half-million undocumented immigrants failing to comply with final deportation orders. Come see the fugitive.
By summer, Rosa’s voice was hoarse from telling her story over and over to the steady stream of people stopping by, including the volunteers who slept on a mattress in the pastor’s office every night within reach of a folder scribbled with emergency instructions: “If ICE shows up, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR UNLESS THEY HAVE A BENCH WARRANT SIGNED BY A JUDGE!”