Conclusion: Samuel Never Left Sanctuary

“Sanctuary is not the building. Sanctuary is the people of the church. The brothers and sisters,” cried out Daniel Oliver-Perez during a vigil for his father, Samuel, who was detained without warning during a biometrics appointment after living in sanctuary for eleven months. This conclusion affirms Daniel’s claim that sanctuary is not a building and considers the ways sanctuary travels in the desert, with the deported, the detained, and the dead in the Sonoran Desert and across the country, including in places like North Carolina. It returns to theories of the sacred to consider how sanctuary poses a problem for a world of law and order, how the charter and the city fail to contain this practice, and how it is nowhere and everywhere at once.