Unitarian Universalist Church in Utah Provides Sanctuary for Asylum-Seeking Mother and Her Daughters

A playground surrounded by a large shade tree stands right outside the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, where Vicky Chavez and her two young daughters have been taking sanctuary for the past six months. The church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation, has provided a safe space for the family, allowing them to live in relative comfort while they fight for asylum.

But Chavez never allows her daughters, Yaretzi, 6, and Issabella, 11 months, to play in the playground. They never go outside the church. Chavez, 30, is afraid that U.S. immigration officials would round them up and send them back to Honduras, where she said she feared for their safety because of an abusive boyfriend. Her fears led her to seek asylum in the United States four years ago.

Despite immigration judges repeatedly denying her request, Chavez told reporters Monday night that she was determined to remain in the church and fight to stay in Utah, where her parents and siblings live. In a longshot effort, her lawyers are seeking relief from a federal appeals court.

“I shall keep fighting. I can help to be the voice of the other mothers that are seeking asylum from domestic abuse,” Chavez said, surrounded by supporters holding signs. “We come to this country to feel safe and protected.”

She said seeing other immigrant parents separated from their children at the border made her even more reluctant to return home and face a possible split from her daughters if she tried to seek U.S. asylum again.

“I can’t imagine feeling the pain of being separated from one of my daughters,” Chavez said in Spanish during an interview with The Associated Press last month. “Sleeping in a detention center is not easy at all. I lived it. And I lived it with my daughter, but not separated.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers Chavez an immigration fugitive, spokesman Carl Rusnok said in an email Monday.

She entered the United States illegally in June 2014 and was ordered deported by a federal immigration judge in December 2016, Rusnok said. Chavez exhausted her appeals on January 30, he said.

That night, Chavez had a plane ticket home to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. But instead she accepted an offer of sanctuary from the First Unitarian Church.

She and her daughters sleep in a converted Sunday school room and spend most of their time in another room with a TV, easel and other games. Yaretzi, the 6-year-old, receives piano classes in the chapel, and they dance and run in an open room with wood floors.

Baby Issabella learned to walk in the church and celebrated her first birthday early there this month. Yaretzi gets tutored instead of attending school.

The family is among 44 people taking sanctuary in the U.S., according to information from Church World Service. But they are the first known immigrants to take sanctuary in Utah, according to local immigration advocates and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The practice has been used by religious groups and others to protect individuals from deportation.

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