http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=563695

Sanctuary for now
One illegal immigrant battles in the public eye

By BILL GLAUBER
bglauber@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Feb. 8, 2007

Chicago - Her world is six rooms and 12 church pews.


Photo/Kristyna Wentz-Graff
Elvira Arellano, a 32-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who is living in Chicago, refused an order to report for deportation. She is fighting to stay with her 8-year-old son, Saul, who is a U.S. citizen.


Kristyna Wentz-Graff
Facing deportation, Elvira has sought sanctuary in a Chicago church with her son, Saul, for more than six months. From their small haven, Arellano and her American-born son have assumed activist roles on the issue of illegal immigration.


Photo/Kristyna Wentz-Graff
Adalberto United Methodist Church Rev. Walter Coleman, left, talks with Elvira at the apartment above the church.

Gallery: More photos of Elvira's life

She has a cell phone, a computer and a MySpace account. She has room to work, watch television, eat, sleep and pray. Once a week, a young man from the local laundry comes by to gather the dirty clothes and wash them at no charge. Friends do her shopping. Small ladies wearing large coats come by every weekday morning and afternoon, shepherding her 8-year-old son to and from school.

This is the world of Elvira Arellano, 32, single mother, activist, illegal immigrant.

On Aug. 15, 2006, Arellano and her son, Saul, sought sanctuary at Adalberto United Methodist Church. She flouted an order to report for deportation, refused to go back to Mexico, refused to leave her American-born son behind in Chicago.

Together, mother and son made headlines and became symbols of the battle over immigration in America, just as the battle heated up during the mid-term election campaign. Days passed, then weeks, now months.

And mother and son are still here, symbols, yet also flesh-and-blood figures.

"I want to struggle to stay here for my son," Arellano says. "At the last moment, if it's my fate to leave, it will be forever."

Her son, she says, "has to stay here. He'll fight here."

Arellano speaks in Spanish, the translation provided by a community activist, Emma Lozano, whose husband is the church's pastor. Together, Arellano and Lozano organized La Familia Latina Unida to lobby for illegal immigrant families with U.S. citizen children.

Illegal immigration is a subject fraught with controversy, about costs to the society, consequences for American workers and the very nature of what it means to be a citizen of the United States. But Arellano and her son take the abstract controversy and make it personal.

She has given hundreds of interviews, prayed with supporters and met clergy and labor leaders in the modest storefront church.

Her son has traveled to Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and Mexico City, a little kid carrying a large message.

They hold fast to an ancient, symbolic right of sanctuary inside a church, making a home in a second-floor apartment. But sanctuary in a church has no force of law in modern America.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials vowed in a statement last year to enforce the nation's immigration laws "and ensure they are applied fairly, without regard for a person's ability to generate public support. Ms. Arellano willfully violated U.S. immigration laws and is now facing the consequences of her actions."

They could come in and take Arellano at any time.

Arellano knows there are critics - not just those millions of Americans who oppose all undocumented workers, but even those immigrants' rights supporters who say she should not be sending her son to plead her case.

"If they would have kidnapped me, who would they ask information from? My son. If I die, who will they ask? My son," she says, providing a rationale for sending her son to speak in her name.

Arellano broke the law by entering America illegally and working under a false Social Security card.

In 1997, she made two illegal crossings. She was caught the first time and deported. On her second attempt, she passed unnoticed.

She traveled to Washington state, worked as a baby sitter and later gave birth to Saul. She and the boy's father are no longer together.

She moved to Chicago in 2000 and got a job at O'Hare International Airport cleaning airplanes for $6.50 an hour. She worked the night shift, driving an old car along the fast expressways, sometimes carrying extra water to feed the overheating engine.

Two years later, she was arrested during Operation Tarmac, a nationwide crackdown against illegal immigrants working at airports, and was later convicted in federal district court of Social Security fraud, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement.

After her arrest, Arellano found her voice and thrust herself into the immigration debate. Several private bills were introduced on her behalf in Congress to allow her to remain legally in the U.S., though none was enacted.

She grew bolder, addressing tens of thousands at a pro-immigrant rally in Chicago early last year.

"We'll never come out of the dark until we speak for ourselves," Arellano says.

But her luck ran out that summer, when the government ordered her to report for deportation. She refused.

"I thought we could run away to another state, start all over again," she said. "But I'd live a life of fear."

She didn't run; she went to the church.

Now she wonders what her future will be. She hopes that another private member bill can be introduced in Congress, hopes that this time it will be signed into law.

She spends one day like the next, praying, cooking, eating, exercising, working the phone, working the computer, sending her son to school and welcoming him home.

She waits.

"I represent millions of people," Arellano says. " . . . I've been chosen by God to be this symbol."