A History of the U.S. Sanctuary Movement, with Lloyd Barba

The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life will present “Making a Refuge of Resistance: A History of the U.S. Sanctuary Movement,” with Lloyd Barba on May 8, 2025, at 5:00pm at UCSB’s Wallis Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315). This event is free and open to the public.

Is sacred space protective space? This question lies at the heart of the Sanctuary Movement. From the 1980s to the present, this practice has protected undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation by offering them refuge in churches, where federal immigration agents to this day still fear to tread. In this lecture, Lloyd Barba asks how these houses of worship in the 1980s protected migrants from immigration enforcement authorities. What histories and testimonies rendered such spaces sacred and lent houses of worship qualities of safe refuge? And what is the applicability of these practices today?

Lloyd Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (2022), co-editor of Oneness Pentecostalism: Race, Gender, and Culture (2023), editor of Latin American and US Latino Religion in North America: An Introduction (2024), and co-host of the limited podcast series Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State (2024).

This event is co-sponsored by the departments of History, Religious Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB.