A sanctuary of one ...... maybe 40

A sanctuary of one
Facing deportation after 30 years in the United States, a woman’s decision to take refuge in a church is changing the lives of a rallying community — and her own spirit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/03/31/feature/after-30-years-in-america-she-was-about-to-be-deported-then-a-tiny-colorado-church-offered-her-sanctuary/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1484&t=20170517a

“Don’t tell me what it is,” Rosa Sabido had said when someone started to elaborate on it the week before. She had been in United Methodist Church of Mancos since June 2, 2017, one of 40 known cases of undocumented immigrants living in churches across the country to avoid deportation, and wanted something to look forward to beyond what life had become. A blur of waiting. A blur of sleeping. A blur of people stopping by to see how she was doing, to say how sorry they were that it had come to this.



She was not a “dreamer,” one of the 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and now waiting for the courts to decide whether they can be deported. She was not one of the violent criminals often singled out by Trump, or one of the life-or-death cases that sometimes appear in the news. Rosa Sabido was one of the rest — roughly 10 million immigrants without proper legal documents living ordinary lives in America.

She was 53, unmarried and without children, and said she first came to the United States on a visitor visa in 1987 to see her mother and stepfather, both naturalized citizens who lived in Cortez, Colo. She said she traveled back and forth between Colorado and Mexico for a decade until immigration officials raised questions about her visa and told her to leave the country, at which point she crossed back into the United States illegally and settled into a quiet life in Cortez.