Immigrants seek refuge in California churches

The last of four parts.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - One of the most dramatic stories in America’s immigration saga occurs here every Sunday morning on Royal Avenue outside Simi Valley United Church of Christ.

In this affluent, well-scrubbed community just down the road from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, a handful of people, bearing American flags and signs, parade up and down the sidewalk.

They used to shout anti-immigrant slogans through bullhorns, said the Rev. June Goudey, the pastor of about 80 souls.

The target of their ire lives in a small house behind the church and down the end of a driveway. She is Liliana, 29, a Mexican citizen.

She is one of the better-known participants in the new sanctuary movement, examined by The Washington Times in visits to eight churches to interview activists, pastors and the illegal immigrants they are sheltering. The subjects offered firsthand accounts of living on the run, insights into the goals of the movement and spiritually based justifications for flouting U.S. immigration laws.

California, which houses one-third of the nation’s immigrants, is the epicenter of sanctuary activity. Liliana, who shows up at an interview wearing high heels, gaucho pants and a stylish blouse, is one of the more outgoing and telegenic of several immigrants camped out in Sunday-school rooms and offices throughout the southern half of the state. She seeks not to be deported from a country where she has lived a third of her life.

Simi Valley UCC voted to give her shelter July 8, declaring itself a sanctuary congregation and plowing more than $5,000 into remodeling a house on church property. On Sunday mornings, she and her children walk to the church.

“There is something powerfully holy happening here,” Ms. Goudey said. “When that family worships with us, we are strengthened. People have rallied amazingly well.”

The raid

Liliana was 19 when she tried sneaking across the U.S. border in 1998, carrying a fake birth certificate and trying to join the rest of her family living in the United States.

“I didn’t know what the consequences of breaking the law were,” she said. When she was caught and deported, her name was placed in a database. Two months later, she paid a smuggler $2,500 to successfully sneak her across. She married a U.S. citizen, had three children - who are also citizens - and in 2005 bought a home in Oxnard, Calif., with her husband, a forklift operator and pizza delivery man.

But she was not aware of the deportation order issued for her in 1999. At 6:20 a.m. on May 16, 2007, five officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at her door.

She recalled that her husband shook her awake, saying the police had come for her. Groggily walking into her kitchen, she saw the ICE insignia on the officers’ coats. One of the agents asked her in Spanish why she was crying.

“You’re not police; you’re Immigration,” she said.

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