The sanctuary pluriverse: theoretical and empirical context

Sanctuary scholarship fashions a global repertoire based on family resemblance in political rhetoric, organizing tactics, and policy strategies that operationalize the terms sanctuary, refuge, or asylum. The empirical literature on urban sanctuary and solidarity is not naïve about the city, largely due to the constitutional status of municipal governments being subordinate to the national state. Legal scholarship documents an organized anti-sanctuary counter-movement, in which states and localities mandate cooperation with national enforcement and punish municipalities that refuse (Armacost Reference Armacost2016; Gulasekaram et al. Reference Gulasekaram, Su and Villazor2019; McCormick Reference McCormick2016; Villazor and Gulasekaram Reference Villazor and Gulasekaram2018). Anti-sanctuary cities exist alongside sanctuary ones, and both are produced by the same federal architecture. Nor does the literature confine solidarity to the city limits: work on the City of Sanctuary (CoS) network in the UK and the politics of presence traces relations of responsibility that stretch well beyond municipal boundaries (Darling Reference Darling2014, Reference Darling2017; Squire and Darling Reference Squire and Darling2013), while others catalog sanctuary in transnational and diasporic terms (Alonso Reference Alonso2021; Foerster Reference Foerster2019; Maira Reference Maira2019). Any account of the sanctuary pluriverse that casts “the city” as structurally welcoming has to explain why the same jurisdictional tools produce anti-sanctuary cities with equal ease.

Sanctuary enactments can roughly (and admittedly not exhaustively) be grouped as: (1) safe space policies, (2) quasi-membership regimes, or (3) practices of universal hospitality. While these empirical cases are predominantly located in North America and Western Europe, this concentration is the subject of ongoing research expanding its focus to identify cases in the Global South (Bauder and Setrana Reference Bauder, Bauder and Setrana2025a, Reference Bauder and Setrana2025b).

Imaginaries and the historical-geographic ontological markers

Having established the rough context of sanctuary practices worldwide, I now turn to how the Sanctuary-polis imaginary emerges in the study of these safe spaces, quasi-memberships, and forms of universal hospitality. In sociological terms, scholars elaborate an imaginary wherever their observations or theory tie a locale’s and time’s emotive associations to evocative imagery and established feelings like danger, crisis, or resistance (Lim Reference Lim2019). National immigration politics and policy discourse are replete with social imaginaries of a “crisis” coming from the Global South and with “the West” as a cohesive whole under threat. Often, maps depicting migration illustrate this with large, colorful arrows representing “flows” and “influxes” pointed toward Europe, as if it were an invasion, emerging from the cartographic geopolitical imaginary popularized during World War II newscasts’ use of illustrated maps (Bacon et al. Reference Bacon, Clochard, Honoré, Lambert, Mekdjian and Rekacewicz2016).

Edward Said (Reference Said1994) in Culture and Imperialism demonstrates that geographic and cartographic imagined spaces function as figurative terrains where authority and identity are strategically projected. He examines how fiction and non-fiction writers embedded within the imperial core come to define their traditions and identity. Through their imagined metropolis, the empire’s urban centers housing writers came to project cultural constructs onto historical geographic icons, both near and far. In mapping a history that upholds the image of the metropolitan core’s relationship to the periphery of empire, literature, philosophy, and policy analysis conjure the image of Ancient Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome as classic referents of Western civilization (p. 15–16). Drawing on Bernal and Hobsbawm and Ranger, Said shows how a “privileged, genealogically useful past” excludes “unwanted elements, vestiges, narratives” (p. 15) that might complicate a cohesive identity. This is pertinent when considering the Sanctuary-polis omitting or overlooking the history of cities as outposts or administrative centers in settler-colonial contexts, and church sanctuary’s role in administering colonial rule worldwide (skaidra Reference Skaidra2022).

Notation through imagined pasts and places is central to how political legitimacy is maintained. Said (Reference Said1994) engages with how nationalism is imagined to qualify and illustrate his argument: not all imaginaries are bad, they are often necessary. The same holds for sanctuary. Its imaginaries do real organizing work: they rally coalitions, name a moral stake, and hold municipal actors to account. My aim is to specify what this imaginary does and for whom, rather than to discount it. For Said, the cultural projection of power through imagined historic geographies is highly contextual. For instance, during decolonial struggles, Third World nationalist independence movements evoked imagined histories of their locale to reconstitute society and unify the people (Said, Reference Said1994, pp. 216–218). Yet that same imagined national image can project different power over time as contexts change. Said remarks that once Third World independence movements gained self-determination, the past resistance of the imagined community (à la Anderson Reference Anderson2006) came to serve the conservative orthodoxies of new ruling elites, diasporas, and other postcolonial regimes. Tradition flows from imagined places and spaces, and the telling of cultural traditions indicates what power is being projected. Said remarks that colonizers would imagine nations for their colonies that were later viewed as inauthentic when colonized populations mobilized them for independence (pp. 217–219).

Said’s analysis elaborates his theory of Orientalism into a method to unsettle and put into play the notion of “tradition” as discursively and aesthetically constituted and constitutive. The theory of “structure of feeling” that Said draws from Raymond Williams describes a process of imperial consolidation, elaboration, and support without suggesting involvement on par with conscious planning (Said Reference Said1994, p. 14). When Said analyzes how early twentieth-century European literary sources understood their own metropolis and the colonial holdings of their respective empires, he notes that historical geographic milieus evoked feelings that infuse imperial power projection onto an affective plane. Inventing the “West” occurs as much through imagining Ancient Greece in a manner that omits Egyptian cultural dominance at the time (Said Reference Said1994, p. 15). The metropolitan intellectual both inherits and operates within cultural horizons that expressed contemporary imperial anxieties and self-expression; a horizon that situates barbarians and terrorists through historical geographic referents (Said Reference Said1994 ibid., pp. 26, 58).

Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson2006) demonstrates how the nation is an imagined community because its members share media that constitutively creates a sense of communal belonging and tradition. Print media, the census, and the map came to constitute, in part, the nation-state into being. Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2004) widened the concept beyond nationalism, treating social imaginaries as the shared background understandings through which ordinary people picture their collective existence and understandings that make common practices possible and confer legitimacy on them.

The fluidity of tradition and the significance of historical geographies associated with power consolidation create a horizon and terrain that intellectuals must navigate. This is precisely the productive move that Tully’s (Reference Tully and Tully2022) “fourth family” of non-statist, relational democracies performs to direct imagining a better future. Tully’s imaginative projects consolidate and support a “global tradition” that invokes emotive imagery of civil rights-era civil disobedience, Indigenous treaty-making, the Ancient Greek parrhesiastic pact, Gandhi’s satyagraha and swaraj programs, and Buddhist nonviolence, alongside Nelson Mandela’s Ubuntu ethics and Kwame Nkrumah’s policies (pp. 7–8). The geographical scale and historicity of these cases are imagined as participatory democratic communities in themselves, assembled as an imagined family that wields, or has wielded, the power to demonstrate that this “is the way to local and global peace and democracy” (p. 8). The Sanctuary-polis, too, draws on historical and geographic locales to imagine a tradition that creates an affective plane where a path to non-state-centric democratic futures exists, albeit through the city-unit, localism, and church-based asylum traditions.

What the Sanctuary-polis depends upon, as Said, Anderson, and Taylor describe, is to create feelings, community, and locales through iterated spatio-historical-geographic examples. It selects a genealogically useful past, including the Greek polis, the medieval free city, and the biblical cities of refuge, and discards the vestiges that complicate it, such as the modern global city’s role as colonial administrative outposts. It consolidates affect: through a structure of feeling, the selected past attaches sentiments of freedom, welcome, and democratic intimacy to the city-unit, so that the “city” comes to feel like the natural home of refuge before any argument is made. And it assigns agency: by picturing the “city” as the protagonist of sanctuary, it directs strategy, advocacy, and research attention toward municipal ordinances and away from the movements, congregations, and networks that animate them.

Polis-as-city: political theory’s ontological city-state

For the political theoretical canon, the city-as-polis has long been imagined as the essential “form” or regime (politeia) that enables the transition from barbarism to human excellence (Strauss Reference Strauss1963, pp. 30, 47). In this classical rendering, the city constitutes the horizon of the political itself. Cultural feelings about Ancient Athens express political theory’s long-held imaginary of political life.

Contemporary sanctuary scholarship draws on comparable cultural feelings regarding historical geographies to express political ontologies. Bauder (Reference Bauder2017), in arguably the field’s most-cited international survey, frames urban sanctuary as a “threat to national sovereignty” (p. 181) and locates the city’s distinctive power in the scale they occupy: “because cities provide a territorial legal entity at a different scale at which sovereignty is articulated” (Bauder Reference Bauder2017, p. 182). Sanctuary discourses, he continues, “disrupt the nation state’s monopoly on defining who deserves to belong and who does not, and shift the scale of belonging from the national to the local” (p. 182). Ridgley (Reference Ridgley2008) reads San Francisco’s ordinance through what Holston and Appadurai call “spaces of insurgent citizenship” (quoted in Ridgley Reference Ridgley2008, p. 55); Darling (Reference Darling2010) presents Sheffield’s CoS as a relational re-imagining of the city against the national politics of asylum dispersal; Kuge (Reference Kuge2020) casts local sanctuary policy as a counter to “illiberal geographies” drawn at the national scale; and Lejeune (Reference Lejeune and Dauvergne2021) records the consensus that non-cooperation plus service access “constitutes a form of urban citizenship” (p. 140). The ontological status given to cities in Sanctuary City research thus stands in for the imaginative horizon where practices emerge through the interaction of civil society mobilization and municipal governance. The city becomes a heuristic device for imagining a politics that is immediate—specifically, how the role of national citizenship and belonging intersect with the delivery of essential services such as schooling, health clinics, and domestic shelters. Sanctuary policies become a site for documenting the micro-workings of non-nation-state power and dreaming of a future beyond the macro-structural hegemony of state sovereignty worldwide.

In political theoretical terms, the city is distinguished from both the state administrative apparatus and private subjective groupings of society. While their normative commitments differ, both Strauss and Tully perceive the city’s quality of multiplicity as harboring the essential, primal power of the polis and political life (Strauss Reference Strauss1963, p. 22; Tully Reference Tully and Tully2022b, p. 355). Leo Strauss, in his 1963 work The City and Man, provides a paradigmatic example of this imaginative labor, offering an account of the constitutive power of the city beyond spatial relations or administrative boundaries. For Strauss, specific geographical city references serve as ontological markers for the tension between the fundamental human conditions of motion and rest. Sparta is presented as the archetypal city of “rest,” characterized by moderation (sōphrosynē) and reverence for stability (Strauss Reference Strauss1963, pp. 156–159). Conversely, Athens represents the city of “motion,” with restless energy that became prone to war (Strauss Reference Strauss1963).

For James Tully, the concept of the “free city”—specifically within the fourth family of democracies—serves as an ontological marker for the human condition of civic freedom and the exercise of “power-with” (Tully Reference Tully2008, p. 42). This “free city” operates as a signifier for a democratic sphere reciprocally sustained by the active participation of its citizens, representing a mode of being characterized by relational agency and mutual recognition alongside its role as a jurisdictional unit. The free city signifies and is exemplified by Ancient Athens, which represents “a civic way of life reciprocally sustained by democratic citizenship” as “the freedom of participation” (Tully Reference Tully2014, pp. 39–40).

What, then, are the theoretical stakes of the polis-as-city being embedded within the sanctuary imaginary? To answer this, one must confront the reality that the democratic polis imagined from the Ancient Greek city-state creates the “barbarian” as its necessary outsider. The distinctness of the polis relies upon the exclusion of the non-citizen (skaidra Reference Skaidra2022). Democratic theories engaging Sanctuary Cities as inherently democratic must grapple with the relationship between the barbarian other and democracy constituted through a polis. Famously articulated by Giorgio Agamben (Reference Agamben1998), the relationship between the outsider and the polis remains unresolved as long as bordered space is governed by sovereigns who possess the exceptional power to determine who is and is not a citizen. In other words, wherever a polis, democratic or otherwise, delimits its territory, membership, and population, the enclosing political borders, no matter their scale, will separate that space from a universal whole and undifferentiated belonging and mobility. The localized city mirrors the structural mechanism of the national state. It operationalizes the power of the exception to fracture a universal whole into governed, jurisdictional parts.

The sanctuary literature concedes this, and the concession is what makes the imaginary visible. Bauder and Gonzalez (Reference Bauder and Gonzalez2018) acknowledge that “[s]anctuary cities do not offer absolute protection from federal immigration authorities in the sense that they nullify federal law” (p. 125). Houston (Reference Houston2019) finds that sanctuary policies “reborder local practices” even as they resist federal bordering, such that “the assertion of local values within sanctuary policies advances internal bordering” (p. 562). Bagelman (Reference Bagelman2013) goes further: “the City of Sanctuary certainly does not escape this expression of sovereignty and actually makes such a sovereign deferral possible” (p. 50). Even Magnusson (Reference Magnusson2011), the urbanist most committed to seeing like a city rather than a state, grants that in city life sovereignty, “although often claimed, is infinitely deferred” (p. i). The field, in short, already knows that the polis re-borders; my point is that the Sanctuary-polis imaginary is the discursive operation that lets this knowledge sit beside the challenge-to-sovereignty framing without ever undoing it. The concession and the celebration co-exist because the imaginary, not the evidence, holds them together.

How do these imaginaries the city-polis, democracy, and sanctuary interact? Taking Fonna Forman’s (Reference Forman and Tully2022) contribution, “Unwalling Citizenship,” in the volume Democratic Multiplicity as an example, we see how these theories graze against the tensions between democracy and migration that an imaginary can suspend without resolving. Observing that humanitarianism toward migration marks “an ethical society” and that a “charity” model fails to build “an inclusive society” (p. 139), Forman touches on the democracy–migrant tension at play. Society possesses the power to refuse migrants, and the conditions of admittance will express that society’s hierarchy between itself and an “other.” Forman seeks “more inclusive imaginaries of coexistence” (p. 129) and, in that vein, combines Tully’s notion of “civic freedom” while invoking the sanctuary image alluded to throughout the chapter. The term sanctuary draws a horizon, in imaginative terms, of home and sustainability, but fundamentally via the inclusive city that welcomes the migrant “into our collective civic identity” (p. 139).

City, local, and sacred antinomies

I now elaborate, in two sections, on the imaginative limits of the city-unit and theology embedded in the Sanctuary-polis. I do so by drawing on social scientific and humanist critiques of methodological city-ism, the “local trap,” and sacred jurisdictions which undergird the limitations of the Sanctuary-polis imaginary in the literature. Following these two sections, I will turn to the pressing and unfolding case of Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, which are each designated as a Sanctuary City and state, respectively. The commentary below serves to distinguish sanctuary from democratic movements that are confronting the US federal government’s mass rounding-up, detention, and deportation of racialized residents.

The limits of the city-unit

When considering the specific iteration of Sanctuary Cities that provide “safe spaces” through AWF and DADT policies, the Sanctuary-polis imagines municipal ordinances that represent non-state-centric counter-sovereign power. This notion of the city council as representative of the city is linked to imagined historical city-ness that predates the modern nation-state. This imaginary draws heavily on the feudal European city, which possessed the jurisdictional autonomy to grant protections to fleeing serfs (Bauder Reference Bauder2016a), and the biblical tradition of the six cities of refuge, famously invoked by Jacques Derrida (Reference Derrida2001). Here, it is necessary to engage two methodological critiques: first, the phenomenon of methodological cityism, and second, what is known as the “local trap.”

Methodological cityism presumes that the city possesses a corporeal unity that it lacks in practice (Angelo and Wachsmuth Reference Angelo and Wachsmuth2015). When researchers speak of cities as unitary actors resisting the state, they obscure the internal contradictions between municipal departments, police forces, and community activists. The literature often speaks of cities using shorthand such as “San Francisco resists.” Historically, cities function as a “difference machine,” designed to spatially sort residents, assign them zones, create respective identities, and thus manage relations of exclusion and inclusion (Isin Reference Isin2002). Adopting a “seeing like a zone” approach allows us to disaggregate unitary city actors and reveal the urban not as a cohesive polis, but as a constellation of competing performed spaces, and less like a mini-state (Das et al. Reference Das, Woods and Kong2026; skaidra Reference Skaidra2022).

This critique follows the tradition of James C. Scott’s analysis in Seeing Like a State (Scott Reference Scott1998), where he argues that looking past the state’s self-representation reveals an erased multitude of politics when presuming the entity of state agency. Similarly, presuming that cities possess a corporeal unity erases the plurality of conflicting practices responsible for democratic movements. Applying Scott’s work helps us recognize that it was the Civil Rights Movement, not the benevolence of the state apparatus, that furthered American democracy. The critique extends beyond simply nuancing the historical record. The point is to deconstruct the “city-ness” of various global municipalities that subsume diverse democratic forces into a jurisdictional bound, one that is then granted an imagined unitary political agency.

Sanctuary scholars citing Toronto, Barcelona, and Parisian AWF or DADT policy invoke medieval imagery most frequently (Bauder Reference Bauder, Bauder and Darling2019, Reference Bauder2017, Reference Bauder2015; Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2018). Other geo-historical markers of the imaginary include associating Toronto and Santa Fe with the Derridean or biblical city of refuge, which I discuss at greater length later (Moffette and Ridgley Reference Moffette and Ridgley2018; Ridgley Reference Ridgley2011). This literature represents these cities within an imaginary where city-ness carries medieval traditions or character. This can be seen in the work of Bauder (Reference Bauder2016a), a prominent Sanctuary City scholar, who opens his book Migration Borders Freedom with the medieval epigram Stadtluft macht frei (“city air makes you free”). However, if the city is a machine that produces and manages difference, then methodological cityism functions to naturalize the “others” that result from these governance technologies. The Sanctuary-polis implies that the “barbarian” is constituted at the national gate rather than through zones erased by the city-container laden in methodological cityism.

Sanctuary scholarship often identifies this scaling down to the local as an effective means to circumvent the abstract, exclusionary logic of the nation-state (Kuge Reference Kuge2020). This critique of the city-as-unit finds parallels in what Purcell (Reference Purcell2006) describes as the “local trap.” Writing in the context of development studies, he describes the fallacy wherein research assumes that the municipal or substate scale is inherently more just or democratic than the national scale. This trap fails to recognize that localization is a strategic social construction that can lead to tyranny and oppression just as easily as to social justice. Isin’s (Reference Isin2007) critique of scalar thought presses the same point from the other direction: the “local” and the “national” are not nested containers with fixed political qualities, and treating them as such conceals the overlapping practices that actually constitute political bodies. This rejection of hierarchical scale builds directly upon the conceptualization of the city as a “difference machine” (Isin Reference Isin2002, p. 49). Within critical citizenship studies, political being arises exclusively through active group contestation over space, making any reliance on pre-given municipal containers fundamentally incompatible with how marginalized groups actually enact rights (Isin Reference Isin2002).

Scaling citizenship down thus acts more as a recalibration of sovereignty than a liberation from it. Empirical analysis of Canadian “sanctuary city” regimes shows that formal non-cooperation policies are routinely undermined by information sharing, policing discretion, and uneven implementation across local and regional jurisdictions (Hudson and Kovalchuk Reference Hudson, Kovalchuk, Hudson and Atak2021).

California is often cast as the paradigmatic site of progressive sanctuary politics, a reputation anchored in the passage of Senate Bill 54 (SB 54), the California Values Act. SB 54 formally limits the use of state and local law-enforcement resources for federal immigration enforcement and was framed as a rejection of local participation in the deportation apparatus (Galeano Reference Galeano2022). However, the protections it establishes are deliberately qualified. The statute preserves substantial local discretion by permitting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when individuals have been convicted of specified categories of offenses defined through cross-references to the California Penal Code (Galeano Reference Galeano2022, pp. 1478–1482). Implementation guidance used by counties and sheriffs documents that these exceptions encompass several hundred qualifying convictions, giving local agencies wide latitude to determine when cooperation remains lawful (Mancina and Chan Reference Mancina and Chan2019, Razavi and Gomez Reference Razavi and Gomez2019, 2).

Quasi-membership efforts (such as LID programs) are readily overridden by state authority or rendered administratively untenable. State legislatures have pursued this override deliberately: at least 8 states introduced bills preempting local sanctuary policies in 2015, 29 were weighing such legislation by 2017, and the newest measures penalize jurisdictions and individual officials for noncompliance with federal immigration policy—Texas’s SB 4 provided for withheld state grant funding and removal from office (Riverstone-Newell Reference Riverstone-Newell2017, p. 415). Phoenix offers a clear example: although the city council voted in 2016 to create a municipal ID available to all residents, including undocumented immigrants, rollout was postponed indefinitely while the state legislature debated bills that would determine whether municipalities could issue such cards at all (Zetino Reference Zetino2017). No preemption law needed to pass; the mere threat discourages localities from acting (Riverstone-Newell Reference Riverstone-Newell2017, p. 403). In Florida, similar dynamics have been formalized through legislation targeting community identification initiatives. Senate Bill 1718 prohibits counties and municipalities from using public funds to support identification programs for residents without proof of lawful presence, effectively foreclosing local ID efforts unless they are privately funded (Florida Policy Institute 2023). Together, these cases illustrate how LID projects remain contingent, reversible, and structurally subordinate to state power.

Sacred jurisdictions: the purgatory of theological asylum

Central to this discussion is Derrida’s philosophical evocation of the Cities of Refuge. His work is most felt in scholarship addressing sanctuary that typifies the “universal hospitality” approach. These cases cite the democratic ideal espoused by Derrida (Reference Derrida2001) in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. In this text, Derrida suffuses the city with a democratic dream of cosmopolitanism that upholds universal ideals of unconditional hospitality. Derridean religious symbology contributes to the Sanctuary-polis’s fusing of democratic commitments with political theology. The imaginary at play here is one of revelation, tradition, and universal ideals. Compared to previous citations of administrative law, Derrida’s work allows the sanctuary imaginary to claim a transcendental status.

Derrida projects sacred and divine qualities onto city-ness, attempting to find a lever with which to pry open the closed logic of the nation-state. He draws on the notion of an asylum seeker’s humanity being sacred, tracing a lineage that begins with Hebraic and medieval traditions and the command to institute “cities of refuge” specifically for the “resident alien, or temporary settler” (pp. 17–18). Derrida, citing sacrality, mobilizes the image of the “stranger” as a symbol of the radical “other” that democracy must accept unconditionally if it is to survive its use of sovereign violence that places conditions on asylum. While Derrida envisions these cities as a “place (lieu) for reflection” on a “democracy to come” (pp. 22–23), his vision is grounded in the ancient jurisdictional claim carried throughout medieval Europe and the tradition of ecclesial and sovereign-granted sanctuary.

A primary historical precedent invoked in this imaginary is the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. During this mobilization, churches and congregations declared themselves sanctuaries for Central American refugees fleeing US-backed civil wars (Alonso Reference Alonso2021; Madokoro Reference Madokoro and Dauvergne2021). These churches, acting on a moral authority they deemed superior to federal law, refused to turn over migrants seeking safe haven on their grounds while simultaneously assisting asylum seekers with legal paperwork and basic material needs. Historically, individual churches may have provided safe haven, though to varying degrees, is distinct from the organized movement. This geographic practice refashions a biblical sanctuary tradition into a modern tool of resistance.

Scholars taking up Derrida find ample empirical examples to buttress this imaginary. Cities such as Berkeley, Boston, Oakland, and San Francisco (some dubbed the New Sanctuary Movement of the 2000s) have come to be inextricably linked to the notion of Cities of Refuge as a universal tradition stretching back to Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt (Foerster Reference Foerster2019; Madokoro Reference Madokoro and Dauvergne2021; Maira Reference Maira2019). Similarly, the UK’s “Cities of Sanctuary” movement, particularly in Sheffield and Swansea, is frequently associated with Derrida’s example (Darling Reference Darling2010; Squire and Darling Reference Squire and Darling2013). This imaginary invokes Derrida’s engagement with the Old Testament (Numbers 35:6), which prescribes the existence of “six cities of refuge.” Biblically, these cities carry the affect of peace and universal acceptance because their specific purpose was to mitigate the blood-feud system that led to cycles of prolonged violence (Lenard and Madokoro Reference Lenard and Madokoro2021).

This version of the sanctuary imaginary risks transforming the city into a vector for rehabilitating past universal claims to sovereignty that rely on hierarchy. The power of this sanctuary model lies precisely in its assumption of authority over a site of sovereignty: the border and the determination of citizenship. However, the Sanctuary-polis, via Derrida’s Cities of Refuge, brings a biblical tradition into conversation with democracy. A danger lies where affective attachment to an imagined history of church mercy substitutes for democratic politics. The theological basis for religious asylum often required the protected to perform deservingness and supplication to access safety (Bagelman Reference Bagelman2016). Church leaders of the 1980s sanctuary movement discussed conducting screenings of migrants to ensure that they were “legitimate” refugees worthy of protection, effectively acting as border guards of the sacred realm (Mars Reference Mars2025). As Villarreal (Reference Villarreal2019) notes, throughout history, those entering ecclesial sanctuary spaces were often required to convert or submit to religious authority. In a different vein, Pitts (Reference Pitts2018) observes that transgender migrants in both church and city contexts are frequently denied full protections due to a lack of documents reflecting their proper gender identity and experience transphobic discrimination during state and social service screening.

The Sanctuary-polis of Derrida offers but a purgatory where one waits for salvation at the pleasure of the host who dreams of “democracy to come.” Bagelman (Reference Bagelman2013, p. 50) names this condition “sovereign deferral,” observing that the CoS “certainly does not escape this expression of sovereignty.” Cases of universal hospitality sanctuary approaches in the literature see ecclesial asylum as an authority without macro-historical implications. This erases, as Said described imaginaries do, sacralized hierarchies that come to be projected onto protest movements adopting the label.