CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Devotional candles to St. Jude, the Holy Trinity and the Virgin of Guadalupe sit on a bookshelf by the door of a classroom in a United Methodist church. A sewing machine is a few feet away between a bed and a set of wicker furniture. In a corner, an electric skillet warming chicken thighs acts as a kitchen.
It is from these makeshift quarters that Maria Chavalan-Sut, an indigenous woman from Guatemala, has spent 10 months staving off a deportation order to a country that she says has scarred her life with violence, trauma and discrimination. Her fight for asylum could cost her at least $214,132.
Chavalan-Sut is among a number of refugees taking sanctuary at houses of worship who have received letters from immigration authorities threatening them with huge fines under the latest move by the Trump administration. It's unclear how many people have been targeted, but Church World Service, an organization that supports refugees, is aware of at least six who've received letters.
"Where am I going to get (money) from? I don't know," said Chavalan-Sut, who worked for a while at a restaurant after arriving in Virginia more than two years ago but hasn't been able to hold a job since seeking sanctuary. "God still has me with my hands to work, and they're the only thing I have. If God thinks that with my hands I can pay that, give me a job."
Chavalan-Sut began living at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church on Sept. 30, 2018, the day she was told to report to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office for deportation. She crossed the border into and was arrested in November 2016 near Laredo, Texas, after a weeks-long journey that started in Guatemala' City. She said her decision to emigrate and leave her four children behind came after her house was set on fire.
Chavalan-Sut, 44, doesn't know who set the fire while she, her children and their father were asleep inside. But she believes it was linked to a dispute over land rights because she is an indigenous woman, her immigration attorney Alina Kilpatrick said.
Chavalan-Sut said a fire official refused to investigate because there were no fatalities.
Refugees have sought relief from deportation at houses of worship because immigration officials consider them "sensitive locations" in which enforcement action is generally avoided. Forty-five people live in sanctuary at churches across the United States, up from three in 2015, according to Church World Service.
Among them are Honduras native Abbie Arévalo-Herrera and Edith Espinal-Moreno, of Mexico. Arevalo-Herrera took sanctuary at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Richmond, Virginia, in June 2018, while Espinal-Moreno has been living at the Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, since October 2017.
Like Chavalan-Sut, both women received notices of fines. The three letters were signed on June 25. Arevalo-Herrera's fine is $295,630, and Espinal-Moreno's was set at $497,777.
Attorneys, activists and faith leaders have decried the fines. Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, called them a "scare tactic."
"So long as ICE continues to respect its own policy of avoiding sensitive locations like churches, which may not be a given, the agency will have to continue to resort to psychological games to coerce families out of their legal protections," she said.
