Imagining Expanded Sanctuary: From Immigrant Rights, to Prison Abolition, and Beyond – Teresa Ross Tellechea
Abstract
In this thesis, I compare the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to the New Sanctuary Movement started in 2007, to understand how the concept of sanctuary has expanded in New York City, by mapping each of its features and the movements interacting with it. I draw on my personal experience of coming to understand sanctuary and expanded sanctuary through volunteering and interning at New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) as well as organizing with MoMA Divest Coalition in 2019-2020. I focus mainly on the cross-movement coalition between prison abolition and sanctuary because of the rising involvement and influence of the private prison industry in U.S. immigration enforcement and the expansion of the immigration detention system. (Luan 2018) By focusing on the cross-section between immigration and the prison industrial complex, I have been pushed to explore how neoliberal ideologies driving privatization of traditionally public domain have invited private actors to push for a more securitized state, resulting in social and political impacts on the lives of immigrants and Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. (Moreno and Price 2017) My analysis draws from my participation in the New Sanctuary Movement in New York City, and my academic research on notions of political imaginations of solidarity and expanded sanctuary. I hope to translate practice to theory in social movements and vice versa; this will help my reader better understand the reality of sanctuary as it is happening right now through one perspective. Through my involvement with NSC and organizing work with MoMA Divest, I attempt to demonstrate that imaginations of expanded sanctuary may tangibly reach within and beyond immigrant rights organizing spaces. I argue that sanctuary could lead to to cross movement coalitions in solidarity with undocumented people that can address broader structural issues such as detention, deportation, displacement, and dispossession and fight them as part of a larger local/global community.