For 10 months and two days, Sandra Lopez envied her friends who helped drop off her kids at school.
She didn’t get to hug her 14-year-old son as left for his first day of high school. When her 2-year-old daughter went to day care for the first time this year, Lopez remained in the church basement apartment serving as her sanctuary. To keep her family together, she had to let others take her spot in witnessing those firsts.
Since October, Lopez has lived in the basement of a Carbondale church’s parsonage to avoid deportation. She is in the country illegally and sought sanctuary in fear that she would be split from her husband and three children, who are U.S. citizens. Lopez said she fled Mexico in 1998 to escape violence and poverty, but living in the confines of the basement hasn’t been easy either.
Her routines returned to normal Wednesday morning.
“Bye mijo, I love you,” Lopez said Wednesday to her 14-year-old son, Edwin, as he left their Silt home for school.
Last week, she received an email from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stating that she was not a priority for deportation. After talking with her lawyer and family, Lopez decided she could leave the basement of Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist. Tuesday evening, she took her first steps outside the parsonage in nearly a year.
“Finally, I’m free,” she told a crowd gathered Tuesday night at the building’s front door.
Except for small ventures to the church’s backyard patio, Lopez didn’t leave the parsonage while she stayed there.
“To be in sanctuary isn’t easy for anybody,” Lopez said in Spanish. “You miss lots of things, like being a human being.”
More than 1,100 congregations across the country are part of the sanctuary movement and have housed dozens of people, , which helps organize the movement. In recent years, many of those cases were from Colorado, home to about 200,000 people in the country illegally.
The board members of Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist first considered establishing the church as a sanctuary for immigrants facing deportation in March 2016 when another person approached them needing help, said the Rev. Shawna Foster, the church’s pastor. While that person never needed sanctuary, the church’s board voted to create the refuge as part of their effort to better serve the Latino community, which accounts for almost half the Carbondale population.
Renovations were underway but not nearly complete when Lopez moved into the 500-square-foot basement apartment. The floor was unfinished and the toilet wasn’t working yet.
Over time, the 80-person congregation installed a kitchenette and wood flooring with the help of donations from the community.
Beside nasty Facebook comments from strangers and two disgruntled phone calls, nobody ever criticized the church for taking in Lopez, Foster said.
“We’re ready for the next person who needs it,” Foster said. “But sanctuary is really only an option for when there’s no other hope.”
While she was in sanctuary, Lopez passed the time practicing English, learning yoga and reading self-help books. She also cared for her 2-year-old daughter, Areli, who is learning “Spanglish.” A therapist helped her manage the transition to living in the parsonage, and friends and family visited her regularly.
“Those people have always given me support,” she said. “They would visit and encourage me to keep going.”
Her future remains uncertain, though. She owes about $11,000 in attorney fees and isn’t able to legally work because of her immigration status. There’s still a chance that immigration officials could change their minds and deport her now that she has left the church. But Lopez said she feels that she has to trust that ICE is acting in good faith.
“This means that in ICE’s grand scheme of priority targets, Sandra is not one of them,” said Jennifer Smith, Lopez’s attorney.
The immigration agency didn’t indicate why Lopez wasn’t considered a priority, but Smith said Lopez was likely helped by her lack of criminal convictions and longstanding ties to the community. Smith continues to fight Lopez’s order for removal and is hoping to secure permanent legal residency for her client in the coming years, though itap likely to be a long process in a complicated system.
“(Immigration law) is a complex web of varying priorities and policies and itap very outdated,” Smith said. “It doesn’t sit in reality.”
Despite her precarious status, it feels good to be part of the community again, Lopez said. She wants to continue her advocacy for immigrant rights and help the three other women who are still living in sanctuary in Colorado churches: Rosa Sabido in Manco, Ingrid Encalada Latorre in Boulder and Araceli Velasquez in Denver. All of the other women have been living in sanctuary for more than a year.
The four women got to know each other with phone calls from their respective churches and formed a deep bond. Lopez said Wednesday that she plans to visit her peers in their sanctuaries soon.
“I have three friends that are still there,” she said. “In that way, my fight continues.”
