Courtesy of Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
NEWS
Rosa Gutierrez Lopez and her children
On ICE
Rosa Gutierrez Lopez has spent 18 months avoiding ICE at a Maryland church. She hopes the COVID-19 quarantine will help people better understand her ordeal. By Will Lennon and Anahi Hurtado Contibuting Writers While much of the United States saw spikes in COVID-19 infections, infection rates in D.C. and its suburbs skewed downward in June. Judging from cell phone data, the key to the trend may have been social distancing. Maryland and D.C. residents spent much of their first month of summer indoors. As a result of the decline, both Maryland and the District are taking cautious steps toward lifting restrictions. For some, it’s not happening fast enough. The Reopen Maryland Facebook group describes itself as a coalition of “citizens concerned about the impact of mass shutdowns … committed to peaceful advocacy for public health measures that respect Marylanders’ civil rights and economic well being.” The group has roughly 6,400 members. (In an ironic twist, one of its founders tested positive for COVID-19 in late June.) Things are moving in Reopen Maryland’s preferred direction, though probably not
as quickly as they’d like. Non-essential businesses, including nail salons and tattoo parlors, have opened their doors with social distancing measures in place. In many parts of the District and Maryland, people are back to shopping, getting manicures, and hitting the casinos. Among those cautiously venturing outdoors is Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, a longtime area resident and an immigrant from El Salvador. In the past few weeks, Gutierrez Lopez has donned a mask and gone out into her community to take short walks with her three children. The difference between Gutierrez Lopez’s situation and others is this: Most of those breathing a sigh of relief after stints in quarantine have been sheltering in place for a matter of months, while Gutierrez Lopez has taken sanctuary at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda for more than a year. When Gutierrez Lopez immigrated from El Salvador in 2005, she requested asylum. She misunderstood the paperwork given
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to her by a Texas court—it was written in English and she primarily spoke Spanish— and the misunderstanding led to a missed court date. The court then ordered Gutierrez Lopez deported, and since she wasn’t present to hear the order issued, she didn’t find out about the deportation order until several years later. Gutierrez Lopez found a lawyer in 2014 who was able to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement at bay for a few years, but in 2017 she was given a deadline to return to El Salvador, a country she had fled after being subjected to threats and harassment. By that time, she had put down roots in Virginia, where she was living with her children and working as a cook in an Italian restaurant. Gutierrez Lopez nearly complied with the deportation order and had already bought a plane ticket back to El Salvador when she discovered another option that would allow her to avoid being separated from her kids. ICE designates churches as one of the “sensitive locations” where the agency
rarely conducts enforcement. The policy turns church properties into sanctuaries for an undocumented person trying to avoid deportation offficers, provided the church is willing to provide the person with room and board. Cedar Lane voted to offer undocumented people sanctuary a year and a half prior to Gutierrez Lopez’s hour of need. “As a congregation, we are living our faith, resisting the unjust and family-fracturing immigration policies of our government, and broadening our social justice community,” says a page describing the sanctuary policy on Cedar Lane’s website. Gutierrez Lopez missed her flight to El Salvador and became the first undocumented person to take the church up on their offer. On Cedar Lane’s property, she could be safe. Leaving for even a day would mean exposure to ICE and potential deportation. Fortunately, the church is located on a sprawling, green campus just outside the Beltway. Before the COVID-19 crisis, a robust coalition of volunteers helped Gutierrez Lopez with errands and groceries and shuttled her children to and from doctors’ appointments, shopping trips, and even afternoon outings to zoos and museums. Meanwhile, Gutierrez Lopez kept busy. Aside from taking care of her children, she used her skills as a cook and organizer to help the church with fundraisers. She also took an interest in learning about the histories of oppressive governments that rose to power in the 1940s. The pandemic’s arrival in Maryland exacerbated the challenges of living in sanctuary. The volunteer network that had once helped Gutierrez Lopez get her children to and from their appointments was forced to mostly disband. “Now we need to stay home,” Gutierrez Lopez says in an interview conducted via Zoom. “We sometimes walk around in the grounds, but never too far. We always have that fear of getting sick … I am at risk to the virus because I have a high sugar level, and my son is at risk because with his Down syndrome he has a low immune system.” Gutierrez Lopez’s son with Down syndrome is her youngest. He and his brother are still in elementary school. Their sister recently became a teenager. Before the pandemic, the three were able to transfer to public schools in Montgomery County and join their mother in sanctuary. (Before that, they lived with pastors from Gutierrez Lopez’s church in Virginia.) Like others threatened by the virus, Gutierrez Lopez is experiencing both the relief of leaving her shelter for the first time in months and the threat posed by COVID-19. But fears of the virus are compounded by fears of ICE, of the conditions inside the agency’s notorious detention centers (many of which have seen COVID outbreaks), and of the threat of deportation to El Salvador, a country racked with civil unrest and gang violence.
