In the midst of a civil war, married couple Ernesto and Linda Fuentes fled their home country of El Salvador and headed for Philadelphia, via Mexico, in November 1983.

Ernesto was an activist who dispensed food and medicine in Salvadoran refugee camps. Linda was a union organizer for banks and clothing factories.

The Salvadoran government viewed activists, especially suspected guerrilla fighters and union leaders, as threats to its regime. It placed activists’ names on “death squad hit lists.” The couple decided to leave after receiving threatening letters and phone calls.

With false documents and the help of a humanitarian church group, they arrived at the Tabernacle United Church in West Philadelphia on May 12, 1984. The congregation declared itself a public sanctuary for undocumented refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. An estimated 500,000 undocumented Salvadorans lived in the U.S. around that time.

The Fuenteses used the pastor’s office as their bedroom. Church members were instructed to keep the doors locked and not admit strangers, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

As a historian of race and policing in Philadelphia after the Civil Rights Movement, and the daughter of an immigrant, I’ve been exploring Philly’s history of sanctuary and how religious congregations, activists and city officials have supported local refugees over the past 40 years.

A ‘welcoming city’ for immigrants

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has emphasized since May 2025 that Philadelphia is a certified “welcoming city.” She notably does not call Philadelphia a “sanctuary city.”

Welcoming cities have immigrant-friendly initiatives that make education, housing, workers’ rights, legal aid and language services accessible to immigrants and refugees without using the term “sanctuary city” in their laws and policies.

The presumed goal of this phrasing is to keep Philadelphia off the Trump administration’s radar and protect its US$2.2 billion in federal funding for health and human services.

However, Philly was, at various points, an official sanctuary city.

In 2014, then-Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order detailing that local police were not required to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless the case involved a warrant or violent felon.

Nutter later rescinded Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status in an effort to dissuade congressional Republicans from passing a House bill that would deny sanctuary cities federal money earmarked for law enforcement and recidivism reduction. However, the next mayor, Jim Kenney, reinstated the order on Jan. 4, 2016.

Throughout 2017, President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions used executive orders, speeches and the immigration raid Operation Safe City to force Philadelphia officials to assist ICE or lose federal grants.

In 2018, Philadelphia won a lawsuit against the Trump administration that denied ICE access to police databases to find undocumented immigrants and prohibited city employees from assisting ICE.

Roots of sanctuary cities

The sanctuary movement started back in the 1960s. But it wasn’t immigrants who were seeking sanctuary. It was Americans.

Around 1968, drafted resisters who were opposed to fighting in the Vietnam War sought refuge in churches in the U.S. Northeast. One of the earliest cases involved Robert Talmanson, who received sanctuary in Boston’s Arlington Street Unitarian Church. He was later arrested by U.S. marshals and local police and incarcerated in Virginia for three years.

In November 1971, Berkeley, California, became the first sanctuary city in the country when 12 local churches inspired the City Council to pass a resolution offering sanctuary to draft resisters. It also banned city employees from “assisting in the investigation or arrest of any sanctuary seeker.”

In the two decades that followed, several Quaker, Presbyterian, Catholic and Jewish congregations across America and Canada used their houses of worship as sanctuaries for Central American refugees who were fleeing civil war, government repression and genocide.

Philly joins national movement

Frustration and outcry over the United States’ low acceptance rates of Central American asylum-seekers sparked Philadelphia’s sanctuary movement.

In January 1984, members of Tabernacle United Church, where the Fuentes couple would soon take refuge, voted to join the national sanctuary network. As the Rev. James MacDonald explained at the time, the congregation chose to “violate a human law in order to respond in obedience to God’s law.”

By May, the First United Methodist Church of Germantown also became a sanctuary church. A few months later, the church sheltered a young Guatemalan couple, Joel and Gabriela, and their 3-year-old daughter, Lucy. Joel, an activist who worked with unions and student groups, had been tortured by Guatemala City police.

On Jan. 14, 1985, INS staged nationwide raids of sanctuaries and arrested 60 undocumented immigrants and 16 sanctuary workers – including pastors, nuns and priests – for violating immigration laws. Joel and his family were among those seized. They were released when church members bailed them out as they awaited deportation hearings.

A new pathway to citizenship

By the mid-’80s, 42,000 people from 2,000 religious institutions in 60 cities nationwide had joined the sanctuary movement.

On Nov. 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It granted undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before 1982 one year to apply for amnesty. If eligible, they would begin a five-year pathway to citizenship.

Approximately 3 million people successfully became naturalized citizens through the amnesty program.

In the Philadelphia area, at least 5,000 to 7,000 people were undocumented in 1986. Advocates at the nonprofit Nationalities Service Center and American Friends Service Committee noted that many immigrants wanted to apply for amnesty but feared the program was a trick.

A decade later, immigration enforcement got tougher.

Local police assist ICE

In 1996, Congress passed Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This granted local police the right to assist immigration officials in arresting and detaining unauthorized immigrants.

As of April 2026, over 1,600 law enforcement agencies in 39 states and two U.S. territories have a 287(g) agreement with ICE. The program offers local police free training in ICE procedures along with funding for equipment, vehicles and overtime pay.

While the Philadelphia Police Department has never signed a Section 287(g) agreement, about 68 Pennsylvania agencies have, including in neighboring Delaware County.

But these agreements aren’t always long-lasting. Between January and March 2026, two departments in Bucks and Chester counties rescinded their agreements with ICE to make residents feel safe after American-born protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed during ICE operations in Minneapolis.

Community activism continues

According to Pew Charitable Trusts, nearly 16% of Philadelphia’s 1.6 million residents are immigrants, largely from Asia and the Caribbean.

The exact number of undocumented immigrants in Philadelphia is unknown. However, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 250,000 immigrants in Pennsylvania – 1.5% of the state’s total population – are undocumented.

Since January 2025, ICE crackdowns in sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and New York have resulted in the number of people held in ICE detention jumping from 40,000 to 73,000 people in January 2026.

Citizens and advocacy groups have stepped up to protect immigrants from ICE. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and the AR-12-toting members of the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity participated in protests in Philadelphia. Public school students from Northeast and Edison high schools have led anti-ICE walkouts.

On Jan. 29, 2026, City Council members Kendra Brooks and Rue Landau introduced an “ICE Out” package. The bills aim to codify the right of police to not share immigration, citizenship and personal data with ICE, or detain and hand over arrested individuals to the federal agency.

The legislation also proposes a ban on ICE agents who wear masks or hide their badges, use unmarked cars and city vehicles, or use municipal spaces as staging areas for enforcement and raids. And it would prohibit city employees from giving ICE access to libraries, shelters, health centers and recreation centers without a judicial warrant.

Community activists have long used civil disobedience and humanitarian aid to protect undocumented immigrants who are searching for a fresh start in the U.S.

An interfaith network inspired Philadelphia to become a sanctuary city. Today, churches such as Center City’s Arch Street United Methodist Church and North Philly’s Church of the Advocate, along with other congregations, uphold this tradition while a multicultural community across the city continues that fight.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Menika Dirkson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Whiteness appears to be an official immigration credential in the eyes of the United States government.

The Trump administration in late 2025 slashed the annual cap on refugee admissions to 7,500 for budget year 2026, down from the 125,000 cap set in 2024 by the Biden administration. That’s a historic low that will shut out thousands of global refugees from war and persecution, such as the victims of Taliban repression in Afghanistan or the Rohingya minority in Myanmar facing documented mass violence.

The new refugee cap, however, will mostly benefit white South Africans, known as Afrikaners. The State Department is building infrastructure to process 4,500 refugee applications per month from Afrikaners, a pace that would easily exceed the administration’s global cap.

The Trump administration’s justification are claims of racial persecution.

Elon Musk, born in South Africa, posted on X in March 2025 that “there is a major political party in South Africa that is actively promoting white genocide.” President Donald Trump agreed. “They’re being killed,” he said in May 2025. Casting blame on the news media, he said, “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.”

Tucker Carlson had spent years on Fox News pushing the claim that white South Africans were being murdered en masse. Trump had apparently been listening. The white genocide claim moved from fringe websites to cable television to the Oval Office.

As a historian who has spent years studying how racial supremacy gets weaponized as policy, I’d say these claims are worth examining carefully. The numbers don’t support the claims.

Over a year in 2023-2024, AfriForum, an Afrikaner civil rights organization, recorded 49 murders of Afrikaners. That’s .2% of the 27,621 murders across the country. As the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria concluded, “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false.”

A useful fiction

White genocide is a contemporary rallying cry for a project that predates it by over a century: keeping English-speaking nations white. The claim persists because it’s useful. Claims of white genocide, partly rooted in the fear that nonwhite populations are growing while white ones are shrinking, has been a far-right organizing concept for decades. But that fear was called “replacement theory” well before that.

Afrikaner lobby groups have successfully embedded their cause within a transnational far-right network, projecting South Africa as a warning for the U.S. and Europe. The Afrikaner myth is supposed to be a warning: white people are already being crushed in South Africa, and the same fate awaits whites everywhere unless something is done.

This has a specific history, one I’ve traced in my latest book, “White Supremacy: A Short History.”

Some English-speaking settler colonies explicitly identified themselves as “white men’s countries.” And in the early 20th century they coordinated immigration restrictions to keep them that way through a succession of acts passed in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States between 1901 and 1924.

These were pieces of a linked ideological network, as I trace in the book, with ideas and personnel circulating between countries that understood themselves as outposts of the same white civilization.

Australia passed immigration acts from 1901 onward that largely barred people from East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Pacific Islands. Attorney General Alfred Deakin justified the restrictions to Parliament in 1901 in the name of “the purity of race.”

In that same September 1901 debate, another member of the Australian House warned that Black political power in the United States offered a cautionary lesson: “The black people there have increased to such an extent, and have gained such power, that the jurists and statesmen there pause and look with fear upon them.”

Canada’s Immigration Act of 1910 gave the government authority to exclude “any race deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada,” implementing what historians call the “White Canada” policy. The aim was to limit immigration to “healthy, white, preferably British or American agriculturalists.” By the early 1920s, most nonwhite people were categorically excluded.

New Zealand’s Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920 required entry permits for anyone “not of British or Irish parentage,” establishing what contemporaries called a “white New Zealand” policy.

The United States passed its own Immigration Act in 1924 to preserve what its proponents called an “unadulterated” and “Nordic breed,” restricting immigration from southern and eastern Europe and barring most Asians entirely.

A shared fear

South Africa was part of this network. The career of one eugenicist, who promoted the theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations, shows how it worked.

Harold Fantham, who lived from 1876 to 1937, was educated in London, taught zoology at Cambridge, then moved to South Africa in 1917. There, he took a leading role in promoting racial immigration restrictions, arguing in the South African Journal of Science in 1924 that the goal was “safeguarding our nation from racial deterioration.”

He praised the U.S.’s 1924 act for barring “idiots, feeble-minded, paupers,” and admired Germany’s compulsory sterilization laws. He became president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. Fantham bore his ideas across the English-speaking world, picking up American and German models along the way.

Behind all these restrictions was a shared fear: that growing numbers of nonwhite people would overwhelm white populations. Eugenicists imagined a race to make babies that whites were losing. They believed democracy itself was a liability, because more nonwhite immigrants could mean more nonwhite votes.

Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the federal civil service after taking office in 1913, agreed. His intellectual framework was plain. As he wrote in The Atlantic in 1889, only “races purged of barbaric passions” could be entrusted with self-governance.

Whiteness as proof of citizenship

The Afrikaner program reactivates this logic. It treats whiteness as a refugee status and frames a former colonial ruling class as victims. It sits alongside a deportation campaign targeting people the president says are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The countries that coordinated a century ago to build white nations are doing the same work again, with the same tools.

The majority of people suffering violence in South Africa are Black South Africans. They are not invited to the United States as refugees.

And while the Trump administration builds a race-based welcome for white South Africans, it’s also building a race-based enforcement apparatus.

In September 2025, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that federal agents could use “apparent race or ethnicity” as a factor when stopping people to check their immigration status. Critics call the resulting detentions “Kavanaugh stops,” after Brett Kavanaugh, the justice who wrote the concurrence.

As justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in dissent, “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

Whiteness is functioning as a credential on the streets of American cities. And white skin qualifies Afrikaners for expedited entry. Darker skin qualifies you for a stop.

John Broich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.