Maria Chavalan Sut was unexpectedly: awakened early one morning in late summer 2016 by an explosion from a homemade bomb tossed on the roof of her Guatemala City home.

• Author: Goodman, James

"The police didn't even show up to make a report," says Chavalan Sut, who quickly evacuated her four children before the resulting fire gutted her home.

Chavalan Sut believes she was singled out because she belongs to an often-targeted Maya indigenous group and the culprits coveted her property. So, after the fire, she put her children in safe hands and fled to the United States, seeking asylum.

But Chavalan Sut, who is forty-five, never got the chance to present her asylum claim in immigration court because she was not notified of her hearing date, says her lawyer, Alina Kilpatrick. Faced with an order to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office for deportation in September 2018, Chavalan Sut instead sought sanctuary in the Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The church is among a growing number of congregations giving safe haven to undocumented immigrants since Donald Trump took office. Its members have rallied behind Chavalan Sut, who risks being grabbed by ICE and put on a plane to Guatemala if she ever steps off church grounds.

"I just want the opportunity to have my case heard, a decision to be made, so I can be free," says Chavalan Sut. She is one of forty-six undocumented immigrants living in the safety but uncertainty of public sanctuary, up from just five public sanctuary cases at the time President Donald Trump was elected, according to Church World Service, which keeps tabs on these cases.

Immigrants in public sanctuary are protected under a 2011 ICE memo that says houses of worship--churches, synagogues, and mosques--are "sensitive locations," off-limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents except in exigent circumstances.

While ICE has not gone into these sanctuaries, it has been pressuring some of those inside with hefty fines. In late June, Chavalan Sut was notified that she faced a fine of $214,132 for not leaving the country as directed. The order has only stiffened her resolve. "I find it ironic that I fled extortion and violence there and still encounter it here," she says.

But in October, ICE notified Chavalan Sut and seven others in sanctuary that it is withdrawing the fines. "ICE likely realized that they wouldn't succeed in the courts, so they backed off," says David Bennion, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer involved in opposing the fines.

ICE spokesperson Richard Rocha, in an email to The Progressive, says the agency will continue to pursue these cases "using any and all available means."

In November 2018, another sanctuary beneficiary, Samuel Oliver-Bruno, was nabbed when he left CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, to get fingerprinted for a humanitarian parole request in nearby Morrisville. He was tackled and put in handcuffs by waiting ICE agents, says Isaac Villegas, a Mennonite pastor who was one of twenty-seven supporters arrested at the scene, after they surrounded the car that ICE agents had put Oliver-Bruno in. Oliver-Bruno was then deported to Mexico, forced to leave his wife and son behind in Durham.

"Samuel was my neighbor," says Villegas. A sign with the words "Samuel's Seat, Keep Praying" is on the chair where he sat at CityWell Sunday services.

UNDER TRUMP, "sanctuary" counties, cities, and states have proliferated. They have attempted, by enacting laws and adopting policies, to prohibit local law enforcement from engaging in various collaborations and information sharing with ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

Such efforts are separate from, but related to, the sheltering of undocumented immigrants in houses of worship. As the Reverend Abhi Janamanchi of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland, puts it, "When the values and principles of what girds a democratic society are not being practiced or are being eroded, institutions and communities do need to respond."

The tactics of sanctuary have proven remarkably effective. During the first five months of 2018, after California's 2017 state sanctuary law took effect, ICE made 41 percent fewer arrests at local jails than during the previous five months, according to a study, "Turning the Golden State into a Sanctuary State." A big reason for the drop was that local jails are no longer supposed to provide immigration officials with the release dates of immigrants picked up on minor charges so that ICE can then detain them.

Nationwide, about 780 counties have adopted ordinances or policies that limit their involvement in immigration detention, says Lena Graber, senior staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Meanwhile, about 1,100 religious institutions have committed to backing immigrants in...