Elvira Arellano was living in Chicago when she was arrested by immigration agents in 2002 for working without authorization at O'Hare International Airport.
In 2001, she co-founded La Familia Latina Unida (the United Latino Family) as an expansion of the Methodist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), a movement fighting for the rights of unauthorized immigrant families to stay together, and in May 2006, she and an activist Flor Crisostomo carried out a three-week hunger strike against deportation.
[1][2] Arellano gained national fame when she took sanctuary in a Chicago church in August 2006, in an effort to avoid being deported away from her U.S.-born son Saul.
Elvira Arellano continued her activism for migrant rights in the Mexican state of Michoacan with La Familia Latina Unida - Sin Fronteras (Latina Family United - Without Borders), supporting families divided by U.S. deportations, and Central American immigrants detained or affected by the violence in Mexico.
[4] She has lived in Chicago since then, continuing her human rights defense work while pressing her case for asylum.
Before that, she sought safe haven for a year in Amor De Dios United Methodist Church with Pastor José S. Landaverde, who began the new immigrant sanctuary movement in Illinois.
Within hours of her arrest Arellano was repatriated to Mexico by U.S. federal agents in compliance with an existing deportation order.
[11][12][13][14][15][16] On August 29, 2007, Elvira Arellano asked Mexican President Felipe Calderon to request the U.S. government for a special visa to visit her son, and called for assistance to the 600,000 Mexican mothers who are in similar circumstances, as well as the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. On February 9, 2008, Elvira Arellano was denied entry into Canada where she was scheduled to arrive in Vancouver to speak at a public forum on Sanctuary and Migrant Justice on Sunday Feb 10th and to join the U.S.-based Marcha Migrante on February 12 at the border.
[17][18] In support, La Placita, a historic Los Angeles church, declared itself a sanctuary for any undocumented immigrant facing deportation, something it did during the 1980s for the first refugees from war-ridden Guatemala and El Salvador who escaped to California.