The news that 13 Salvadoran refugees had perished in the Sonoran Desert drew national headlines, making the summer of 1980 a watershed in America’s changing understanding of its southern border. Time magazine, in particular, sought to capture the sea change, writing of how this “infernal place of Gila monsters, scorching earth, mesquite and giant cactus” had long served as an entry point to America, albeit for “Spanish explorers, missionaries, [and] men drawn by California gold.” Suddenly, the demographics looked different. “They come now, still seeking the golden dream, from Mexico and Central America, an illegal but relentless stream.”
This evocation of an unstoppable foreign invasion would shape US policy over the next four decades, but back in Arizona, the initial response to the plight of the growing number of Central American refugees attempting to cross the desert was informed by humanitarian compassion, not fear. In the first hours after the refugees were rescued, John Fife, the longtime head of Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church, received a call from the town of Ajo. In a series of sermons Fife delivered on Southside’s history in advance of his retirement in 2009, he remembered, “The hospital asked some of us who were pastors to provide pastoral care for the survivors. We began to learn stories about death squads, and torture, and persecution of the church, and labor unions, and all those who were working with and on behalf of the poor in El Salvador.”
As more and more Salvadorans were rescued from the desert of southern Arizona in the early 1980s, Fife and other local faith leaders educated themselves about the history of what the Salvadoran American journalist Roberto Lovato has called “the tiny country of titanic sorrows,” from the genocidal campaign against its Indigenous population in the early 20th century to the financial and military support the Reagan administration was providing to the junta that was killing tens of thousands of its own citizens in the ’80s. Those same American officials insisted that the Salvadorans fleeing the violence were crossing the border only to find work, and thus did not qualify as refugees under international law. Appalled, the clergy embarked on a legal aid effort for migrants being held at detention centers near the border.
“We would file political asylum applications for them,” Fife remembered, “and we would bond out those who had been in detention the longest and bring them here to Tucson.”