Presidential election is this man’s last hope after 3 years in a sanctuary in NC
The November presidential election is important to many living in this nation, but especially for José Chicas.
If President Donald Trump is re-elected, Chicas will likely move or be forced back to his native El Salvador, he said.
“I just can’t stay here another four years,” he said.
Three years ago Chicas moved from his Raleigh home to the School for Conversion, an interfaith community-building and educating effort housed in a small, pale-yellow house on Onslow Street in Durham.
Chicas, who is married with four children, was only supposed to stay at the house for three months, he said. But on Saturday he and about 30 others gathered for a prayer vigil marking his third-year anniversary receiving sanctuary under a borrowed roof.
The gathering included prayer, singing and comments from Chicas, his wife and supporters.
“It’s been very difficult,” Chicas, 55, pastor of Iglesia Evangélica in Raleigh, said in an interview through an interpreter. “I honestly don’t know how I survived it. Only God has given me the strength.”
The biggest burdens, he said, are not being home with his wife and family. Not being able to preach to his church in person. And not being able to drive.
“I like to drive,” he said.
When he wakes up around 5 a.m. and realizes it’s another day, he said, it’s sad.
“I call my wife. She is on the way to work, “ he said. “Then I sit thinking, and the day just feels so long.”
Faith groups offer refuge
Chicas was among a small movement in North Carolina and across the nation in which faith groups offered refuge from deportations as the Trump administration made it more difficult for people to receive deportation delays and work permits.
While such items had been approved for years, in 2017, when Chicas and others did their annual check in with immigration officials, they received deportations orders.
Some individuals sought refuge at churches because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an internal policy of not entering sensitive locations such as houses of worship, schools, hospitals, sites of public religious ceremonies or sites of public demonstrations, The News & Observer reported.
Fled civil war in El Salvador
Chicas is from El Salvador and left in the 1980s to escape the country’s civil war. He applied for asylum in the United States in 1985 but was denied in 2008. He appealed the decision in 2009 and lost, The N&O reported.
Since 2010, Chicas had shown up every year at ICE’s field office in Charlotte and received deportation delays and a work permit. At his 2017 appointment, ICE gave him a final order to leave by June 28.
Emily Rhyne, who works with Witness for Peace Southeast, said there were up to seven people in public sanctuaries and Chicas is one of four who remain.
A couple left after the situation changed or they were no longer a target, Rhyne said, and one was deported.
Samuel Oliver-Bruno had been living in the basement of CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham for 11 months while he petitioned to have his deportation delayed. In November 2018, he left the church to keep an appointment with federal immigration services in Morrisville and was arrested and deported, The N&O reported.
Chicas said he spends his time praying, reading, and doing sermons on Facebook live, he said.
“I do them because if I did nothing I would be getting sick,” he said about the sermons.
He also details and cleans vehicles from the school’s parking lot, he said
Chicas wife, Sandra Marquina, said the situation is taking a toll as she has taken on more responsibilities. She and her children are living a life with an uncertain future. A future that depends on who is elected in November.
“I have faith that the Trump administration will end,” she said.
