While the United States government arrested, indicted, and imprisoned Sanctuary Movement workers, churches and religious groups fought back with a civil lawsuit alleging the government was discriminating against Guatemalan and Salvadoran applicants for asylum. 

 

In May 1985, with sixteen Sanctuary activists under federal indictment, more than seventy religious and human rights organizations sued U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese demanding there be no further prosecutions of Sanctuary Movement workers, and that the Immigration and Naturalization Service be prohibited from arresting and deporting Central Americans until human rights conditions improved in their home countries.1

 

That lawsuit eventually became American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh and led to the ABC Settlement Agreement. 

 

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services describes the lawsuit as claiming “that the government discriminated against certain Guatemalans and Salvadorans who had filed for asylum.”2  

 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the suit, describes it “as a case filed against the U.S. Attorney General and the head of the INS that alleged they violated domestic and international law when they denied asylum to Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing political repression in the 1980s.”3 

 

Further, the lawsuit alleged that the United States government had interfered with the “First Amendment religious rights of sanctuary workers, who have participated in individual and collective acts of resistance by providing ‘sanctuary’ to refugees from those countries.” The court rejected the religious claim in October 1988, but allowed the rest of the lawsuit to continue.4 

 

In January 1991, the suit was settled out-of-court with the government agreeing to reconsider all asylum requests from Salvadoran and Guatemalan applicants made since 1980. 

 

The government agreed that those applicants eligible under the settlement would not be deported until they had the opportunity to receive a new asylum interview and a new decision, and would be eligible for work permits. They also could not be detained unless they were convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude” and sentenced to more than six months in jail, or were deemed a national or public safety threat.5 

 

There were about 300,000 Salvadorian and Guatemalan asylum seekers who were allowed to reapply, receive work authorization, and were protected from deportation as a result of the settlement.6