The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  Later, Corbett described this decision in a letter: “Last spring I planned to do a study of radical reformation, the process that leads Christians to discover that they are Jewish. (Beneath the veneer of Orphic otherworldliness and Manichaean dualism is the suffering servant who opens the way toward community fulfillment of torah.) My focus was to have been the Diggers of 17th Century England, but unforeseen circumstances wrenched me into the 20th Century.” This is a fair sample of Jim Corbett the thinker, the writer, the moral theorist. In person, on the other hand, he is utterly plainspoken and direct.

  What Corbett learned, over the next few days and weeks, was that large numbers of Salvadorans who had fled north from the killing were being held by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (of which the Border Patrol is one enforcement arm) in jails and camps while the INS processed them for deportation back to E1 Salvador. He also learned about Guatemalans in the same situation, campesinos and Indians from the highlands especially, who had escaped a murderous army in their own country and were now too facing deportation. In the preconceived notion of the INS and the State Department, Corbett discovered, these terrified Central Americans had merely snuck into the U.S. looking for jobs. By this view, they represented just another small part of the great dreary deluge of poor Latinos (mainly Mexicans) flowing illegally across America’s southern border, upon which the INS expends most of its effort. By this view, the Salvadorans and Guatemalans could have no valid claim to political asylum in America. They were not “refugees.” They were “economic migrants.” A trick of perspective was involved.

  Corbett saw it differently. “So I began in June of ’81,” he says, “going down to Nogales, giving the people precrossing counseling. Working out ways for them to get across. Safe-house systems for them to get off the street as soon as they did get across. Ways to get them around the roadblocks and the Patrol surveillance, on into Tucson.” And each time he performed one of those services, for each individual Salvadoran or Guatemalan, Jim Corbett risked a long stint in the slammer. A Quaker philosopher had become a refugee smuggler.

  But running a few desperate Central Americans through the border blockade between Nogales and Tucson, in contravention of the Immigration and Nationality Act, was not Jim Corbett’s ultimate goal. How many Salvadorans, after all, could he and his wife, Pat, feed and shelter at their own house? No more than twenty at a time, Corbett says. That wasn’t enough. “The creation of a network of actively concerned, mutually supportive people in the U.S. and Mexico” was, instead, what he had in mind.

  So it was fortunate that, in the summer of 1981, Corbett met John Fife, a lanky Presbyterian minister who had been edging up on the situation along his own separate path.

  • • •

  The plane doesn’t return.

  They follow the canyon northward over easy terrain, low rolling hillocks covered sparsely with mesquite and prickly pear and cholla. Across the driest flats, water-starved clumps of creosote bush are scattered evenly, standoffishly, with almost nothing alive in the spaces between. The young Salvadoran father walks hand in hand with his daughter. The boy dashes ahead to catch up with Jeff, then falls back to his mother. Each of the parents carries a single leather bag, which together now hold all the family’s earthly possessions; one larger suitcase was abandoned back at the safe house in the last Mexican town. The wife has brought along her Spanish Bible. During pauses in the trek, she unburies it to read silently from the Psalms. The journalist can’t see whether it’s Psalm 23 she’s consulting—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”—or some other.

  This is the stretch of ground for making good time. They stride out eagerly, even a little confidently, across sun-shattered rock and clay. Not yet 10 A.M., but already the day is quite hot. It will get hotter. The second week of May, in the Sonoran Desert, is too late for spring and too early for the cooling summer monsoon. Helen hoots in shock when a snake comes alert as she is stepping over it.

  But it’s just a gopher snake, not a rattler. This species is a heart-stopping mimic, tan-and-brown mottled much like the Massasauga rattlesnake, or the Mojave, and Helen’s specimen right now is holding its head flattened out wide to give the same fierce pit viper silhouette. A harmless and terrified creature, twitching its tail in empty bluff. Mistaken identity. The journalist has seen gopher snakes murdered for less, some vainglorious yahoo blasting the animal’s head off with a revolver and then mystified to find no rattle segments on the tail. Must have just shed its skin, is the normal and nonsensical explanation. Helen gasps a breath back into her lungs, laughs nervously, and moves around this worried snake. She is carrying a snakebite kit, she says, but would prefer never to have to read the instructions.

  Everyone has been tense. The false jolt of the snake has discharged that tension only slightly.

  Then, over the next knoll, they come to a five-foot-high barbed-wire fence.

  It is strung between metal posts, taller and sturdier than the average ranch fence, but not really so very imposing. They celebrate now: a drink from the canteens. Jeff climbs over first, so he can lift the kids down on that side. The husband assists his wife. Then he follows. Then Helen. Lastly, trying hard not to rip his pants, the journalist climbs into America.

  • • •

  Reverend John Fife, extraordinarily long-legged, tips himself back in a chair, chain-smoking away the restlessness. With his neatly trimmed beard, his cowboy boots, and his irreverent, self-mocking sense of humor, he is not what you expect in a Presbyterian minister. He prefers calling himself a “preacher.” As a young seminarian, he went to Selma during the early civil rights battles, then quickly realized he should be back home fighting the same battles less gloriously in Pittsburgh. Fifteen years ago Fife moved down here to become pastor of a small congregation in the Hispanic section of Tucson. The matter of Central American refugees forced its way into his life only when, over the Fourth of July weekend in 1980, thirteen Salvadorans died of heat and dehydration in the desert borderland southwest of Tucson.

  They had been trying to cross into the U.S. Their professional smuggler—known in the argot as a coyote—had abandoned them. After two days of wandering through the hills, desperate for water, they had turned to drinking their own urine. They were found by the Border Patrol. Some stronger members of the group had survived; most of the dead were women and children.

  “That engaged my attention,” John Fife says. “The fact that people were willing to risk that kind of venture, coming across our border.” Fife’s church was one of several that provided aid to the survivors. From them, he says, he learned “some incredible stories about E1 Salvador.” With a measure of throwaway scorn for his own ignorance, Fife stresses that, in the summer of 1980, he couldn’t have placed E1 Salvador on a map. “I had assumed that people were coming across from Central America for the same reason that people were coming across our border from Mexico. It was hard in the village, they were poor. . . . But these folk from Salvador were telling a different set of stories. They were talking about death squads, and about torture, and about the kind of terrorism and violence that we now know about. . . . And so I started to do my homework, after that experience.”

  Fife’s homework led him to the conclusion that right-wing zeal and government paranoia in E1 Salvador were resulting in, among other things, a pattern of bloody persecution against the Church. In March of that year the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, had been assassinated in the act of saying Mass. Local priests and lay catechists were being threatened, jailed, killed. In December of the same year, three U.S. nuns and a Catholic lay worker would be murdered near the capital city. Fife resolved not to sit idle.

  He and a good friend, Father Ricardo Elford, began holding a weekly prayer vigil—ecumenical, informative, and unabashedly political—each Thursday at rush hour in front of the Federal Building.1 Another step was also taken, a seemingly small thing that proved far more consequential. Fife and his co
ngregation offered their church as a physical refuge for the Salvadorans and Guatemalans that Jim Corbett was smuggling in.

  Southside Presbyterian Church is a modest stucco building with a saguaro cactus out front and one chain-pull church bell hung over the front portico, and decorated inside with little more than a rough wooden cross made of railroad ties and a few cheerful cloth banners. The congregation is small, and neither affluent nor homogeneous: about 130 members, a mix of three native American tribes (Papagos, Pimas, Navajos), plus blacks, Hispanics, and Anglos. On a Sunday morning the building rattles with old-time gospel hymns in a distinctly Southern Baptist vein—there’s clapping and blackstrap harmonies and a good dose of hallelujah. Preacher Fife himself admits that “the Presbyterian Church has been called ‘the Republican Party of prayer,’ and not for unsound reasons.” But Southside Presbyterian is something quite different. Perhaps because the members possess so little themselves, they feel they can afford to offer it all.

  For a few months Fife and his congregation proceeded discreetly, providing food and clothing and temporary shelter for undocumented Central Americans, helping them assimilate into the local Hispanic community or assisting with links to other generous folk in other cities. It was a quiet operation, meeting the needs of a few dozen refugees, and the government showed no inclination to interfere—probably because the government was oblivious. Eventually this lack of concern began to look like a serious problem. “The government policy wasn’t going to change until we got people’s attention,” says Fife.

  In November of 1981 there was a meeting of the small group who had been working together on this issue—Fife, Corbett, Father Elford, a few other clergy and lawyers. What to do next? “We were really in despair at that point,” Fife recalls. “We had tried the legal defense thing. We had tried the underground smuggling thing. And, as far as we could see, it wasn’t gonna change anything. People in Tucson didn’t even know there were refugees here—let alone people in the rest of the United States. The government was continuing to deport people at the rate of twenty-five or thirty a day. The bloodshed and death squads were increasing down there. The persecution of the Church was just overwhelming. All of the legal defense efforts had managed to save a few people. The underground was saving a few more. But obviously we could keep that up for the next ten years, and save a few hundred people, and lose thousands. Really—we were trying to say—what can we do? And the idea of sanctuary emerged.”

  The concept of sanctuary in the sense Fife uses the word—meaning a church or other holy place into which a fugitive can retreat and be protected at least temporarily from blood enemies or civil authorities—is as old as the book of Exodus: “Then I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee.” Christian sanctuaries were first recognized in Roman law toward the end of the fourth century; eventually, medieval canon law and English common law also codified the practice. In England a person accused of a felony could take refuge in a church and be immune there for forty days, until he decided between standing trial or leaving the kingdom. Even after forty days the civil officials would not invade church property. Instead, they would begin trying to starve the person out. In America the tradition was broadened toward outright civil disobedience by the original “underground railroad.” When Congress in 1850 passed the Fugitive Slave Law, making it illegal to harbor or transport a runaway slave, churches from the borderlands into New England became key points in a network of defiance.

  Fife and the others discussed these precedents, as well as a negative example: During World War II, Christian churches did all too little to help Jews flee from Nazi Germany. It shouldn’t happen again, Fife thought. So two hundred letters were sent to churches and religious communities around the country. The message was: “We’re going to do this. Do you want to join us?”

  On March 24, 1982, Southside Presbyterian Church (joined by a handful of other congregations in California, New York, and Washington, D.C.) announced, by way of a press conference and an open letter to the U.S. Attorney General, that they would henceforth be providing sanctuary for certain undocumented Central American aliens.

  Fife and his congregation were deliberately escalating the stakes for themselves, and for the INS, by going public. They were challenging the U.S. government to march into the church, if it dared, and haul people away.

  Duke Austin, a spokesman in Washington for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, says: “There is no such thing as sanctuary, legally, in this country. These people have no more right to harbor an illegal alien than they have to harbor a criminal.” On the tactical level, though, Austin pragmatically adds: “We will not go into churches and remove illegal aliens. We’ve always said that we cannot change our priorities of enforcement. Our priorities are to stop aliens at the border and take them out of the workplace.” Besides priorities, of course, the INS also has some sensitivity to the factor of nasty publicity.

  The entire Border Patrol, Austin stresses, comprises fewer personnel than the Baltimore Police Department. Yet in 1983 the Patrol apprehended one million illegal aliens—of whom the vast majority were Mexicans. Meanwhile, as of 1984 only three hundred Central Americans (by Austin’s rough estimate, which is lower than some others) successfully made the passage into sanctuary. Austin suggests (and despite some disagreement over numbers, the point is generally persuasive) that, as far as the immediate INS mission is concerned, the traffic of undocumented Central Americans represents little more than a biting mosquito on the arm of a man who is about to be trampled by a rhino. For the State Department, however—and for the White House—it is another matter.

  Especially now, after the election of Napoleon Duarte as President, the Reagan Administration cannot afford to admit that E1 Salvador remains chaotically violent—a place from which innocent people must sometimes flee for their lives.

  • • •

  “Here’s the spot where we saw the Gila monster last week,” says Jeff. He points to a small undercut ledge in the wall of the narrow gulch. The journalist inspects it distractedly while the others catch breath.

  Last week was a dry run, an innocent day hike in from the U.S. side to scout a path through these connecting canyons. This particular gulch, a water-cut gash into the desert floor, tight as a big-city alley, with a few cottonwoods gripped thirstily into the sand and stony shoulders rising on each side, seemed a good route, deep and sinuous enough to offer cover. In Arizona you call this sort of thing a “wash.” It’s cooler and more pleasant than the bleak open hills, though a bad place to get caught during a rainstorm. Also prime habitat for Heloderma suspectum. That might seem to recommend it or not, depending on your predisposition. But no, no Gila monster is cooling itself under the ledge today. A small disappointment for the journalist.

  Heloderma suspectum in its native environment can go a great while without food or water. During good times it stores away fat in its long dragging sausage of a tail. With weeks or months of starvation and drought, the tail thins away and the whole animal shrinks down to a scrawny lizard shape inside the flaccid bead-work skin. Reduced to that minimal existence, not eating, not moving, unseen, it still tends to be a survivor. Seems to have no natural enemies except the coyote, various raptors, and of course the cruel and acquisitive Homo sapiens. Not much traffic by any of those three taxa, through a woebegone drywash like this.

  Humans in particular are poorly engineered for the terrain. As the morning wears on, the Salvadoran woman is moving a little more slowly. She needs help climbing up and down these rocky shoulders. Advance word to Helen and Jeff said that the Salvadoran husband and the children should be capable of an arduous hike, the woman perhaps less so; but no one was sure whether to credit that warning or to dismiss it as a sexist assumption.

  Now it turns out that the woman is suffering from mumps. She knows the symptoms, because she is a nurse.

  • • •

  John Fife says, “The whole function of public sanctuary is to encourage as many churches—and people—as po
ssible to have to deal with this moral, legal problem. To make a decision and then communicate it to the legislative bodies.”

  In some measure, it seems to be working. With surprising speed, the sanctuary idea has taken hold in other consciences, other congregations, other cities, and become a national movement.

  Immediately after the Southside declaration, Fife and his compatriots began getting calls from religious people of every denomination all over the country. What could they do to help? How could they take the same step? There were also calls from Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had themselves escaped to the U.S. but who had relatives still in danger. Could those relatives be rescued by the underground railroad? The Tucson people were swamped beneath a huge volume of inquiries; at the same time they were still also trying to move refugees northward, and to cope with those people’s immediate physical needs. At last came a call from a group called the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, a confederation of forty religious organizations in the Chicago area, who asked for information that they could pass on to their members—and as a result of that contact, Tucson gratefully turned over its central communications role to the Chicago Task Force.

  Today2 about 140 congregations and religious communities in over sixty cities have officially declared sanctuary, in defiance of U.S. law as interpreted by the INS. More are adding themselves each week. The variety is striking: a Mennonite church in Illinois, a Presbyterian church in Minneapolis, a Friends’ Meeting in Cincinnati, a Lutheran church in Palo Alto, a Unitarian Universalist in upstate New York, a temple in Wisconsin, a Catholic parish in Louisville, a Brethren Discipleship group in Indiana, a Sisters of St. Joseph community in Concordia, Kansas, a monastery in Vermont. The total membership of those sanctuary support groups runs close to 50,000 people, and each responsible member who has partaken of the decision faces the prospect of prison, if the Justice Department should choose to prosecute.