Immigration treats church sanctuary delicately

updated 5:20 p.m. ET July 12, 2008

CHICAGO - Everyone knows where Flor Crisostomo lives, even the federal immigration officials who have ordered her deported to Mexico. The reason they haven't detained her is her address — Adalberto United Methodist Church.

Another woman famously took refuge in that church as she championed immigration reform, and at least 13 other illegal immigrants are doing the same at churches around the country. So far, they have little to fear.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have arrested illegal immigrants by the hundreds in raids at factories, restaurants, malls, farms and meat packing plants, but they have handled cases involving churches delicately.

"Our agency takes enforcement actions when we deem it appropriate," said Julie Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security for ICE. "I am personally not aware of an instance when ICE has gone into a church. That being said, if there was a particular, extremely egregious, ax murderer or something else, that's not to say we would not enforce the law at that time."

Unofficial policy
Avoiding churches is unofficial policy for federal immigration officials, according to Doris Meissner, a former commissioner at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency that oversaw immigration until the Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2003.

Since the 1970s the unwritten rule has been "no churches, no playgrounds, no schools," said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Critics say making exceptions for churches, where immigrants openly — and in Crisostomo's case, very publicly — defy deportation, makes the agency look lax.

"These are people who deliberately violated the law," said Dave Gorak, executive director of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration. "We can't even enforce the laws without being criticized as Gestapo."

But Meissner said it wouldn't make sense for the agency to devote resources to arrest the relatively small number of people in sanctuary.

"An agency like ICE has far more work than it can possibly ever do," Meissner said. "You want to use those resources to thwart as much as possible egregious criminal behavior. A single person in a church doesn't really measure very high on a list."

Ignoring order to leave
Crisostomo came to the U.S. in 2000, paying a smuggler in Mexico to get her across the border. She was arrested in 2006 during a raid at a wooden pallet company in Chicago.

She has been at the West Side church for six months, since the Board of Immigration Appeals ordered her to leave the United States, holding news conferences, writing blogs and lecturing school groups about immigration issues.

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