This episode features a conversation with former pastor and co-founder of No More Deaths, Rev. John Fife. John reflects on the sanctuary movement that his church in Tucson, Arizona built in the 1980’s. He shares how the movement has changed and shifted in the decades since and how social change arose out of a deep commitment to faith and the initiative of communities to protect and care for each other.
Resources
-No More Deaths/ No Más Muertes
Episode Transcription available here
Host: Ry O. Siggelkow
Producer: Adam Pfuhl
Podcast Engineer: Michael Moua
Music: Kavyesh Kaviraj
Episode Recorded on December 11th, 2023
You can find out more about the Leadership Center for Social Justice on our website and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
This episode features a conversation with former pastor and co-founder of No More Deaths, Rev. John Fife. John reflects on the sanctuary movement that his church in Tucson, Arizona built in the 1980’s. He shares how the movement has changed and shifted in the decades since and how social change arose out of a deep commitment to faith and the initiative of communities to protect and care for each other.
Resources
-No More Deaths/ No Más Muertes
Episode Transcription available here
Host: Ry O. Siggelkow
Producer: Adam Pfuhl
Podcast Engineer: Michael Moua
Music: Kavyesh Kaviraj
Episode Recorded on December 11th, 2023
You can find out more about the Leadership Center for Social Justice on our website and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
In Conversation with John Fife
Ry Siggelkow [00:00:03] Hello everybody. I'm Ry Siggelkow and I direct the Leadership Center for Social Justice at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Today, I'm really excited to be in conversation with Reverend John Fife, a retired Presbyterian minister who lives in Tucson, Arizona. John served as a minister for 35 years at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. During that time, he became deeply involved in what is often referred to now as the Sanctuary movement, a movement that first emerged in the early 1980s in response to the expulsions and deportations of Central American migrants who had been seeking asylum in the United States. John was an active leader in that movement. It's really a great honor to be in conversation with you. Welcome to the podcast, John.
John Fife [00:01:03] Thank you. Good to be with you.
Ry Siggelkow [00:01:09] John, I thought we could begin by having you share a bit about yourself. How did you end up becoming a Presbyterian minister in Tucson, Arizona? What were some of the important people and events that shaped your life prior to becoming a minister?
John Fife [00:01:26] Well, I grew up a long way from the southwest border of the United States. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, in a small town with roots in an ancestral farm that my grandfather owned, in southwestern Pennsylvania. And hillbilly is probably a good way to describe my culture at that point. And I began to date a young woman when I was in college in western Pennsylvania, who after a year of dating my senior year in college and her freshman year, transferred to the University of Arizona and her father retired from Pennsylvania, moved to Tucson, and we stayed in touch and decided, well, maybe this relationship might work. And so could I get an internship after my first year in seminary? And I called and made all the inquiries of the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church. And I get a call from Tucson, and this guy says, we have an internship out on the reservation here for the summer and we got your name. Would you be interested? So we talked a bit about the job, and I said, you need to understand that I don't know anything. I'm from Pennsylvania. I don't know anything about Native Americans. I don't know anything about the desert. I don't know anything. And he said, well, the church has done a lot of damage to Native Americans over the years. You probably can't do too much more in three months. Why don't you come out? And I did, and spent three months on the Tohono O'odham reservation. And the relationship grew with this young woman. And, so I fell in love with the desert and border and multicultural context and Native American culture and everything that, you obviously know that this is where we decided to put down roots.
And when I graduated from seminary in 1967, the only positions available for Presbyterian Church positions for seminary graduates were not anything related to my call, as I understood it. I felt I was called to urban ministry. The sanctuary, the civil rights movement had changed my life and my theology and my experience in seminary. And so I took a job in Canton, Ohio, with a group called the Inner City Ministry of Canton. And it was to relate seven downtown congregations, cathedral churches of various denominations to the neighborhoods around those churches, which they had no relationship at all. Their membership was driving in from the suburbs to go to church downtown. And so they hired three of us to do that work. So for the next three years in Canton, Ohio, I was working in urban ministry during the time of Doctor King's assassination.
During the turmoil in the cities and cities were on fire, I was working with gangs on the streets and doing community organizing. And then I heard at a church conference that Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona was looking for a pastor. And so I called contact and I got a call back from a Presbyterian pastor in Tucson who said, you're too late. The presbytery decided to close the church because there were only 25 members left, and they were going to merge it with another congregation. And, so I continued to make calls and argue that that Presbyterian church in the oldest and poorest barrio in Tucson was exactly where the church needed to be in 1970. And I eventually persuaded the Board of National Missions to give us three years, to put the church back together again. And we moved to Tucson, to that church and began to practice ministry as the pastor of a congregation and stayed for 35 years. So obviously the church began to grow and to develop, and we became anchored in ministry in that oldest barrio in Tucson.
Ry Siggelkow [00:07:26] That's remarkable. Thinking about you in 1967, graduating from seminary and starting in this urban ministry in Ohio, and you talked about how the civil rights movement had a big impact on you. I wonder if you could share a bit more about that, some of those formative experiences, whether that was when you were a young person, you know, going through college and seminary. Of course, 1967 was a turning point in the civil rights movement in many ways as well. So, yeah, I wonder if you could speak a bit more about some of the formative experiences around that.
John Fife [00:08:01] Sure. Well, the most formative was, Doctor King and the movement invited some of us from some northern seminaries to come south and to join in whatever the action was at that point, in whatever place that was, and some of us went there, and had this amazing conversion experience. I saw the church as the center of sustaining a movement through the most difficult times when people were going out every day and getting beaten and fire hosed and clubbed, and some of them killed. Where did they go? They went back to the little black church in that community. And somebody began to play some music and people began to sing. And by the end of the evening, they were ready to go right back out the next day. It was an astonishing experience of movement building, of the role of the church in relationship to movements for civil rights and human rights. And it changed my theology that I was learning in seminary. It changed my understanding of the reading of Scripture. It changed my vocational call to urban ministry. And in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw the same thing, the church, the black church became the center of organizing and sustaining a movement for civil rights and all of the actions of the movement during that time. So it was not only formidable, it changed my life and my call.
Ry Siggelkow [00:10:22] So the sanctuary movement emerged in the early 1980s and you were a critical part of its beginnings. I know that it involved lots of organization and lots of risks. Could you describe the origins of the movement for us and why you got involved in the work?
John Fife [00:10:41] Sure. Well, I had been the pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church for ten years in 1980, when a couple of events kind of determined that that would be an important part of our ministry, from that point on during that next decade. I had been involved in efforts to meet the needs of the oldest barrio and the poorest barrio in Tucson. So that necessarily involved organizing around issues for Native Americans in that community and in my congregation. Southside Church was one of the most diverse congregations historically in the Presbyterian Church. Had a great history. Which is why I desperately wanted to seek to be the pastor of that church. I knew it from internships I'd spent in seminary in Arizona. And I knew that it began as a Native American congregation in the little community outside the city of Tucson, where Native Americans had to live because they couldn't live in Tucson by law. Right. And when they migrated from the reservation to work in Tucson, they formed their own little community there. And so the Presbyterian Church followed, from ministry on the reservation to this small growing community in Tucson. And built a Presbyterian church there for the Native Americans. And that continued through the depression.But after the depression, the community had changed. It was a Mexican American and Native American barrio by that time. And so they called, that congregation called, a Mexican American pastor, and nobody said that was going to work because they didn't even speak the same language. Right. And he made it work. It became an important part of that community. And then that bunch of Mexican Americans and Native Americans in that congregation called an African American pastor. Try to imagine that in 1952. And he, of course, the church became a center of organizing for civil rights during the 50s and 60s and the desegregation of all the institutions of Tucson. And it had that great history and then it had all fallen apart under some not so great pastoral leadership in the 60s.
And so when I came, there were 25 members and we had to re-envision that very diverse congregation developing as such again. And it did and so there was this foundational history of the church being the place I envisioned when I accepted the call to be there. And that was a center for organizing to meet the needs of the community, for the diverse congregation that we were and the diverse community we lived in. And so we had help to organize Native American young people to organize for treaty rights during the 70s. And we had help from Chicano organizers to organize a downtown golf course run by the city so that lawyers and business people could get easily to a golf course and hit a few golf balls and play a nine hole round and still pretend they were at work downtown. And the community organized to occupy the golf course until the city built a community center for the needs of the community in the same place. And so we naturally were involved in immigration issues. Because I think it was the figure back then was 40% of the students where my sons were going to school, in the community, were from undocumented families. And to meet those needs, we had to work on legal resources to try to get those folks some relief and some identification. And so that was all just part of ministry in that community.
And so in 1980, when Romero was assassinated in El Salvador, a Catholic priest and I, who had led prayer meetings on the first tee of the golf course for some time to get the community center downtown, decided to have a demonstration to help people understand the persecution of the church in El Salvador, and to begin to provide some assistance to Salvadoran refugees who were living in the community by then, having the major exodus happened after Romero's assassination there. And so we started a Legal aid joint venture between, what was called the Tucson Ecumenical Council, which was the Catholic diocese and the mainline Protestant churches in Tucson, partnered with barrio legal aid organization called Manzo Area Council, to provide legal support and legal representation for refugees from El Salvador who were there without documents, during that initial period.
And as that legal aid effort continued, this interesting guy showed up who said he was a rancher, and happened to mention he had a master's degree in philosophy from Harvard, and wanted to help with the legal aid effort. His name was Jim Corbett, and he was probably one of the brightest people I've ever worked with or known. And he helped with the legal representation of Salvadoran refugees at that point. And came to me after about 8 or 9 months of that effort to provide legal support and said to me, John, under the circumstances. And he articulated the circumstances which were if people were from El Salvador or Guatemala, they would automatically be refused by the immigration courts for political asylum. We take in people that were tortured and fly in Amnesty International doctors who would testify. Yeah. This guy's been tortured. I'm an expert in the physical effects of torture. And the immigration judge would order them deported the next day. I mean, literally no one was because the military and the government of El Salvador, at that time, were allies of the United States. And we were supplying the military of that country. And then Guatemala, with arms and training and support and covering up, as best we could, the death squads and the massacres of literally hundreds of villages in Central America, by those militaries. And he said to me, under those circumstances, if nobody's getting political asylum, we need to start smuggling people safely across the border so they're not captured by Border Patrol because inevitably they will be deported. And deportation meant death to many of the people who were being deported.
And I, of course, said, how do you figure that, Jim? And he pointed to history. He said, look at the history of faith. He said some people during the abolition movement helped runaway slaves cross state lines and moved to safer and safer places through an underground railroad, to protect slaves from being captured and returning to slavery. And he said those folks who did that were faithful. They got the faith right. And I said, well, yeah, that's the way I read history. And then he pointed to the almost complete failure of the church in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s to protect Jews and other victims of the Holocaust who were fleeing Nazi Germany. And he said that's one of the worst chapters in church history. It's a complete failure of faith. And I said, well, yeah, that's how I read history. And he said, he looked me right in the eye, and said, I don't think we can allow that to happen on our border in our time. And after some sleepless nights, I went back to him and said, yeah, you're right. I'd have to burn my ordination certificate wouldn't I? If I told you no.
And so we began with a group of about 20 people, friends, colleagues, to begin to smuggle people across the border referred to us by a Catholic priest in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, who was running a shelter for Central Americans because they were undocumented in Mexico and were being hunted down by Mexican immigration authorities and deported. And so we embarked on what we thought was a very secretive smuggling group, and of course, as the needs of people to get safely across the border increased, so did the number of refugees we were trying to assist to cross without being captured. And it took about eight, nine months until the Border and Border Patrol Intelligence unit finally came to us and said, we know what you guys are doing. Stop that or we will indict you. And so the question then became, well, what do we do now? And we knew we couldn't stop. There were lives on the line of all those refugees on the border. And so the decision was eventually made to, we'd have to go public. What we thought was a very secretive smuggling operation on the border needed to be a public witness of the church. And so, on the anniversary of Archbishop Romero's assassination, after a three month process with the congregation at Southside Church, we took a vote of the congregation by secret ballot so no one knew how anybody else voted and there were only two negative votes out of the congregation to go public and to be a sanctuary for refugees from Central America. And to do that publicly. And so we did on the anniversary of Romero's assassination in March of 1982. And when we did it, we believed we were doing civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin King and Gandhi and so many others. And said so and answered questions about that and said yes, we were willing to break the law in order to protect the lives of refugees.
And I guess it was about a month after we declared sanctuary with four other congregations across the country, one in New York and one in Washington DC, and one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco. I'm in my office and this guy calls in and says, I'm a human rights attorney from New York. And I'm calling to tell you to stop talking about what you're doing as civil disobedience. You're not violating the law. It's the government that's violating the law, not you. They're violating the 1980 Refugee Act. And every time they deport somebody to El Salvador, Guatemala, they're violating US law. And I said, well, I think I understand, but what do we call what we're doing? And he said, I don't know, make it up. So I went to my friend Jim Corbett, and he came back about two days later with a paper he called Civil Initiative to distinguish it from civil disobedience. And he defined it as the legal right as well as the ethical responsibility to directly protect the victims of human rights violations when the government violates human rights. And from that point on, it transformed what we had called sanctuary from a movement grounded in civil disobedience to a movement grounded in civil initiative, the legal right to protect refugees from violating their basic rights under U.S. law. And that gave legs to the movement and an incredible movement started that began in churches and then synagogues and then temples and Quaker meetings and Unitarian churches and continued to grow throughout the 80s.
And so it pretty much preoccupied my ministry and the life of our church. We provided sanctuary for somewhere over 13,000 Central Americans during that decade of the 1980s. And that required everybody in the church to cook meals and doctors and nurses to provide medical care for traumatized refugees and sometimes wounded or tortured refugees. And everybody is just pitching in to provide protection and care for all those refugees. So that kind of changed the course of ministry and mission along the border for our congregation and several hundred others across the country.
Then we started, of course, getting requests from churches across the United States and Canada to send refugees who needed protection and their willingness to provide sanctuary wherever they were. So we had to sit down and restudy the old Underground Railroad during slavery. Replicated it as closely as we could to how their protocols worked and began what became called the new Underground Railroad, which succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. The government in 1984 infiltrated the sanctuary movement with undercover agents and FBI agents and paid informants and even broke into church offices trying to find out the keys to this Underground Railroad. And they never did. They tapped our phones and had to put up with my teenage son's conversations on our phone. I hope they didn't transcribe them. And it was remarkable. Those folks back in the 1840s and 1850s were pure genius. They figured out how to do that, move people safely across the country.
Ry Siggelkow [00:31:29] Wow. That's very inspiring. Gustavo Gutierrez wants to define theology as critical reflection on praxis in light of the word of God. I wonder if you could reflect on how your involvement in the sanctuary movement, your praxis, so to speak, shaped your theological reflection, your preaching and your ministry at Southside Presbyterian?
I mean, you spoke earlier about having this conversion, during the civil rights movement and these experiences that shaped your life throughout the 60s. And then, of course, your work in the 70s as well, which preceded the sanctuary work, which has contributed to new ways of understanding God, new ways of understanding the work of ministry. But how did this work shape you? Because I know that it does shape you, when you act like this, when you take a risk like this. It shapes you. And at the same time, you also encounter various kinds of ministerial challenges. You know, so I also wonder, how did you respond to the challenges that you faced, not just from, you know, the FBI? I mean, those were real, but also from within your congregation, from within the community, there are other needs that you had to set to the side, right, in order to do the work that you were doing with the sanctuary movement. So I wonder if you could speak a bit about the impact in that way.
John Fife [00:32:54] Yeah. I think the second conversion in my ministry happened in 1982. When we declared sanctuary, we had not one conversation about starting a movement. It just happened, as a result of the plight of those refugees, and the persecution of the church in El Salvador and Guatemala. I mean, priests and pastors were being killed. Hundreds and then thousands of catechists, trained lay leaders in the church were the targets of the military death squads and the intelligence units of the militaries of Guatemala and El Salvador. And the church was seen as a threat to the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. And so part of what we needed to do on the border of Arizona and Mexico was to make really difficult choices about who we would assist to cross safely and then protected in the sanctuary of the church. And we had to do a kind of triage set of meetings to determine that with all of the needs of the refugees and their families and their children on the border. So how do you do that if you're a gringo pastor from western Pennsylvania originally and had been on the border for ten years. Well, I needed to go to Central America and to establish relationships with human rights organizations and the church in Central America, in order to do the work we had to do on the border here.
And so the Presbyterian Church enabled me to go and spend six weeks in Mexico City with exiles there. We went to Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, to the seminary there, in order to build relationships of trust so that I could call human rights organizations or the church and pastors in Central America and have them help us make decisions about who was at greatest risk. If we could not help them more, if we could help them. And those relationships introduced me to persecuted church and leadership in El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Church was not being persecuted in Costa Rica, but that's where the seminary resources were to begin to understand my second conversion in ministry.
When I returned to my congregation, my first sermon began something like, I know I've been your pastor for 12 years now, and I think I've recently been converted to the Christian faith by a bunch of Jesuits and Maryknoll Sisters in El Salvador and Guatemala. And I'll try to explain that to you as we go along. And it was my immersion in liberation theology, but most importantly, the church that had decided to, through faith and organizing within the church, take up the cause of the poor of Central America. And to be the church of the poor and the oppressed, instead of the church of the wealthy and the military rule of dictatorships in Central America since the conquest. And that reform of the Church in Central America became my second conversion experience in the Christian faith. And I came back understanding that the leadership of the sanctuary movement had to change dramatically, that churches and church leadership in North America were striking a deal with refugees fleeing the church and the persecution in Central America. And that deal was we will provide you with protection and sanctuary. You are responsible from this safe place for being the voice of the persecuted and the refugees from Central America. And you need to tell North Americans your story and your experience and why you fled. And you need to be the voice of sanctuary. So the leadership shifted, within the sanctuary movement and certainly shifted in terms of my reading of scripture. And those Central American refugees became our theological teachers about how North Americans could and should read the Bible, Torah, prophets and the Gospels from that point on. And that was a dramatic shift for all of us and one that was gratefully engaged in.
Ry Siggelkow [00:40:27] I know you were involved in the founding of an organization called No Mas Muertes or No More Deaths, which is an organization that has long been devoted to providing water for migrants who are moving through the desert. Could you share a bit about the work of this organization and the challenges it has faced? I know that it has come under attack by the Border Patrol at various points.
John Fife [00:40:56] The sanctuary movement succeeded in protecting somewhere around 500,000 Central American refugees, through an agreement that was reached with the government. A number of us were charged with criminal acts in 1985-86 and put on trial, in Texas and in Arizona. And two of our colleagues in Texas spent six months in prison. Those of us in Arizona were only sentenced to five years probation and continued to do sanctuary. But we spent a lot of time with lawyers who convinced us that that original phone call I got from a human rights lawyer in New York was correct, that it was the government that was violating the United States law, and not us. And so we sued, the sanctuary movement, sued the Attorney General of the United States in the Department of Justice in a civil suit. And it took three years to get that into court, finally. But we did in 1989. And the federal judge who was hearing that case gave us the right to put the Attorney General of the United States, the head of the Immigration Service, and the Under Secretary of State for Human Rights under oath, and take their depositions in preparation for the trial. And within 24 hours, we got a call from the Justice Department saying, wouldn't we like to reach a settlement on this case so it didn't go to trial? And their opening offer was substantial. And so the lawyers negotiated for a couple of months in Washington, and we reached an agreement that essentially accomplished what we'd set out to do in the sanctuary movement. And that was, the government agreed to stop all deportations to El Salvador and Guatemala. They agreed to give everyone temporary protected status who was here without documents so they could work legally and not be afraid of capture and deportation. And they agreed to a whole series of reforms of the political asylum process. And so we held a dance and called an end to the sanctuary movement when the peace accords were signed in Central America in 1992.
And then two years later, in 1994, the government unveiled a new border enforcement strategy they called prevention through deterrence. And that border enforcement strategy was to build walls through the urban areas where everyone who had crossed without documents back and forth for decades and crossed within relative safety. They decided to put walls and quadruple the number of Border Patrol agents and helicopters and vehicles and all the enforcement stuff and technology. And seal off those urban areas. And they said, and once we do, we know people are going to go around and then we'll build more fences and walls and we'll move the enforcement out. We'll quadruple the number of Border Patrol agents again. And they said, and when we do that, we know people will still try to go around the edges of that enforcement pattern. But now they'll have to go through the most hazardous areas of the border and they will begin to die. People will begin to die out there, and we will use those deaths as a deterrent to other people trying to cross, and thereby we will gain control of the border. And they said we're going to ramp up enforcement in Texas and California first, because the Sonoran Desert in Arizona and New Mexico will be a geographic barrier to migration. Nobody will try to cross through there once we wall off the cities and move those walls out. And people began to die by the tens of thousands in the Sonoran Desert out here.
And so the question was, what's the role of the church on both sides of the border again? And we tried to take what we'd learned in the sanctuary movement in the 80s, take it out to the desert. And practice civil initiative in the desert as we had practiced in the sanctuary movement. And that led to the founding of humane borders that put water stations out there, to Samaritan's which was a ministry of SouthSide Church to take food and water and emergency medical care and four wheel drives out into the most remote parts of the Sonoran Desert, and to save as many lives as we could. And the practice of civil initiative was to document the violations of human rights by the Border Patrol in their apprehension and deportation process. And we did that. And as we began, we found ourselves being charged with criminal prosecutions, felonies and misdemeanors by the Border Patrol, who saw us as a threat to their border enforcement strategy that used the deaths of tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor in the desert as a deterrent to other people trying to cross. It was essential to their border enforcement strategy. And so as those plans unfolded, we found ourselves doing legal defense for Samaritans and No More Deaths volunteers all over again in federal court.
I'm pleased to tell you that we have successfully defended all of those 54 different charges that have been brought against our volunteers out there. Some of them, we had to go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to get a proper not guilty of any crimes decision by the federal courts. But we have succeeded and as you know, we're very much involved with our colleagues from Texas and California, in providing humanitarian aid to the increasing numbers of people seeking political asylum as well as migrants seeking to cross and work here in the United States through a deadly, deadly desert. But even more deadly are the human rights violations of the Border Patrol here on the border. And so, we're still very much involved in that humanitarian aid work, in that conflict, with the Border Patrol about their violations of human rights.
Ry Siggelkow [00:50:04] Wow. Yeah. Well, today, you know, it's interesting to hear how things have changed over the course of the last several decades and how in the 90s, with this prevention by deterrence policy, how that shifted how you decided to act, what needed to happen. Being responsive to what was happening in the community and what was happening at the border.
And of course, today we witness, the rise, increasing rise, it seems of racist nationalist authoritarianism not only in the United States, but all over the globe. Borders and walls are increasing, and forms of state surveillance of migrants are rapidly multiplying. From robots in the US Mexico borderlands to the use of electronic ankle shackles right here in Minnesota. And I know elsewhere, border regimes and their deterrence strategies are leading forms of state violence, and not only in the United States. We see this in the UK and across so-called fortress Europe. With the many ecological crises associated with climate change growing, it seems as though repressive and restrictive immigration policies are on the rise, particularly in the overdeveloped or so-called First World. Many of the people on the move across the globe are moving because they cannot survive otherwise. And in a sense, borders and border regimes have become a way to police the global poor.
So how can people have faith? How can congregations respond to the massive challenges we face today? How might congregations link up some of this practical work, like providing water to people in the desert with the work of dismantling the root causes of violence, the violence of borders themselves? I know these are very big questions, but they feel especially pressing today, and it feels increasingly difficult for pastors to challenge nationalism within our churches, even our progressive churches. I mean, we do hear of challenges today about Christian nationalism, but what about challenging nationalism as such? What about challenging borders as such? Given your long history of work in this area, as a minister who has been responsive on the ground, I wonder what advice you might have for ministers today in the face of these new challenges?
John Fife [00:52:52] Yeah. Wow, what a great question. It's one that the Church and Faith-Based organizations are entertaining globally. And I'm grateful to tell you that the sanctuary movement that began in the 80s here in Arizona is a global movement now of resistance to what you have just described. And that is the gross violations of refugee and human rights that are being undertaken by over developed nations around the world. And we began in the 1980s to form what is called a group of sanctuary institutions, churches and NGOs around the world, literally, and globally to resist all that you have described about the racist and deadly immigration and refugee policies that are being adopted by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, literally globally, and so sanctuary is very much a choice of resistance to faith based organizations in all of those geographic locations.
And as that unfolds, it reveals the failure of each country's efforts to use death as a deterrent, to ignore their responsibilities under basic international law and their own laws adopted after World War two, to protect refugees and to provide asylum for them. Almost everywhere, initiatives are taking place and political initiatives are successful in demonizing immigrants and refugees, especially. On a global scale, the European Union is using the Mediterranean Sea and the deaths of thousands of refugees there, as a deterrent to other people trying to cross into Europe. And we're forming a global movement of resistance. But, this is a long haul project.
One of the mistakes I made was back in the middle 60s after the civil rights movement had succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, all of the legislation that was federal here. I was in a meeting with some incredible civil rights leaders, and I said in my youthful enthusiasm, wow, we changed the whole world in five years. And they said, sit down, son. And they began to teach me about 100 years of struggle from slavery to Jim Crow and segregation to that moment and the sacrifices that had been made and the determination of the movement to get to that point, over a century, and I tried not to forget that lesson.
And so what I want to say at this point in the struggle for refugee rights and human rights on a global scale and to find global resolution to the global migration of the poor and the oppressed and those who are fleeing for the lives of their children and themselves. That struggle is going to take a long time, in my judgment. I think we're going to first create a global table to resolve the climate issue. I think that's going to be because we're either going to destroy the planet or we're going to make it habitable in this century. And to do so, they're going to have to create a table that has not existed up to this time. And that is the table to do what's necessary and to parse out the responsibility for that among all the nations of the earth, and to reach agreements to enforce those standards and to do it in a global economy so that it's doable. In terms of being enforced, to what their responsibility is going to be. And once we do that, then I believe the second item on that list to come to that table is going to be migration and refugees. And the same thing is going to have to happen, but it's going to be the next century, and we're going to have to be the people now who create resistance to all violations of human rights and refugee rights that are going to continue for some time because no one nation, everybody's tried to do it as individual nations. And of course, they have failed. All the attempts by the United States have failed. All the attempts by the European Union have failed. Death has not even been a deterrent to that global migration which is increasing and will continue to. But we're going to have to just do what we can to resist and to educate and to advocate until we get the climate crisis resolved. And once we do that, we're going to inevitably get to global migration, in my judgment. So this is long haul faithfulness we're talking about.
Ry Siggelkow [01:00:43] And it is a global struggle. I mean, so many social justice struggles are connected to the freedom of movement. And, you know, in today's world, the freedom of movement needs to be front and center, I think, as we reflect on the future of our planet to a habitable world and a world that could be shareable, right?
John Fife [01:01:03] Yes. You got it.
Ry Siggelkow [01:01:04] A world where people can be free to live, to move, to grow, to belong in a place without fear of deportation or expulsion or imprisonment, but free to be, free to live. John, thank you so much for your time.
John Fife [01:01:20] I think that will. I think that'll preach, brother. I think that'll preach.
Ry Siggelkow [01:01:28] Yeah. And it has to be lived too as ministers, right? I mean, it has to be lived. We have to discern, you know, where the borders are in our particular place, right. Because borders are not just in the borderlands, right? The physical borders, but we have borders in our communities. Where are those borders that keep people from living freely? And how do we resist them? And how do we begin to practically build alternatives and work with others? And, those things, you know, the road is not always clear how to move toward those things, but taking that first step, taking a risk. Right. Connecting with others is a good first start. So thank you so much, John, for your time and for your brilliant work. I think we continue to have much to learn from that time period and the work that you all did. I know there are many others involved in that organization, organizing work in the 1980s. So I really appreciate you and everything that you've done. Take good care.
John Fife [01:01:32] Right. Will do and you do the same. We're in for a long haul here.
Ry Siggelkow [01:02:47] La lucha sigue. The struggle continues.
John Fife [01:02:50] Sigue.