Immigration enforcement hesitant to make arrests in churches

CHICAGO (AP) - Everyone knows where Flor Crisostomo lives, even federal immigration officials who have ordered her deported to Mexico. Her address – Adalberto United Methodist Church – is the reason they haven’t detained her.

Another woman famously took refuge in that church as she championed immigration reform, and at least 13 other illegal immigrants are doing the same at churches around the country. So far, they’ve had little to fear.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have arrested illegal immigrants by the hundreds in raids at factories, restaurants, malls, farms and meat packing plants, but handle cases involving churches delicately.

“Our agency takes enforcement actions when we deem it appropriate,” said Julie Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security at ICE. “I am personally not aware of an instance when ICE has gone into a church. That being said, if there was a particular, extremely egregious, ax murderer or something else, that’s not to say we would not enforce the law at that time.”

Avoiding churches is unofficial policy for federal immigration officials, according to Doris Meissner, a former commissioner at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency that oversaw immigration until the Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2003. Since the 1970s, the unwritten rule had been “no churches, no playgrounds, no schools,” said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Some said storming a church to arrest a lone person would appear insensitive. Others said making exceptions for churches, where immigrants openly defy deportation, made the agency look lax.