Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York is a photography gallery on Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Founded in 1884, it is one of many unassuming, mostly unpopulated, art galleries scattered across lower Manhattan. I walked through the door during a Friday golden hour in June. There were two docents staffing the small gallery. Other than the two caretakers, the only other figure occupying the space was a truncated church pew sitting in the center of the exhibit, ushering the viewer into a synecdoche of a church sanctuary.
Cinthya Santos Briones, the anthropologist, ethnographer and artist behind the gallery exhibit “Living in Sanctuary,” captures the ambiguity of living in a literal sanctuary. For refugees and immigrants spending from four months to four years in sanctuary, the church that shelters them is a sanctuary — a sacred space — a safe haven and a prison cell. “It’s like a VIP jail,” Santos Briones told me in a Zoom call.
Santos Briones is a native of Mexico, where she studied anthropology and worked as an ethnographer and photojournalist.
Her husband, Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, who is featured in the exhibit, co-founded the New Sanctuary Movement 20 years ago in New York City, in response to the creation of the Unites States Immigration Customs and Enforcement office. Ruiz is the pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bayridge, Brooklyn.
Although a pastor’s wife — and the student of a Jesuit mentor, Alfredo Zepeda González, SJ — Santos Briones describes herself as not a deeply religious person. Her work is infused with reverence, however, for the human person in its focus. Her photography is a “gesture of care,” that unites the author, the viewer and the subject — her co-author — rather than an objectifying or distancing gaze.
Elements of Ignatian imagination can be felt within the gallery. The ornately carved choir stall where a footsore New Yorker can absorb the images around her came from the Church of the Good Shepherd. Its presence is a tool to aid in contemplation — it composes the place the photographs contemplate around us. We are written into visual stories that our eyes absorb hanging on the wall.
Immigrants seeking shelter at Ruiz’s congregation in Brooklyn are featured in the exhibit alongside immigrants seeking haven in churches in Boulder, Colorado; New Haven, Connecticut; and New Mexico. Many of the photographs date from the first Trump administration, from 2017 to 2019, and there are also a few more recent portraits from 2025.
“Living in Sanctuary” is an intimate invitation to dwell with our fellow humans who seek safety in a tabernacle and the ambiguous role that the house of worship plays for an immigrant seeking safe haven and yearning for freedom of movement and new life.
Imagination
The resiliency of imagination and the new avenues they open are at the heart of Santos Briones’ “Living in Sanctuary” project. Imagination is an essential tool for the immigrant, a counter-imagination to the nationalistic and political imaginations that form borders. Just as a border is a reality created through the imagination of political forces, immigration is a reality built from an imagining grounded in hope, as Javier Serrano, an immigration scholar, wrote. The immigrant imagines future possibilities for herself and for her family beyond the boundaries of their current lives.
Santos Briones’ work honors the imagination it takes to transform “precarious spaces,” into a “re-enactment of home.”
Santos Briones’ photographs capture the materiality of living in abandoned office spaces, damp basements, rooms created with pipe-and-drape in century-old churches. They are sensory experiences — the creature comforts of home piled up on an office table — a toy or makeshift kitchen interrupting gothic architecture. The juxtaposition between the human and the sacred creates a tension throughout these photographs. These may be sanctuaries, but they are not environments for human living. Sometimes there are no showers in these churches, Santos Briones pointed out.
In “The Room,” a stuffed Pokémon character sits on a bed underneath an office door whose window has been papered over. The harsh fluorescent lighting is a hard edge that the soft bed and stuffed figure try to soften. A room is a room is a room, but the photograph conjures up the tension between the gentle nourishing space for a child’s bedroom and the hard, utilitarian world of business conference rooms. In other photographs, church rectories and kitchens are festooned in balloons and tinsel for birthday parties and family celebrations.
“They transform these places,” Santos Briones said.
One refugee, “Khadim,” who took shelter at a church in New Mexico, exercised his imagination by covering a basement window with a photograph of a light-filled forest. Numerous studies have shown that the human immune system can be strengthened after spending time in the woods. Studies have demonstrated that mental wellness indicators go up and stress goes down even after simply looking at photographs of trees. The window provides a portal of imagination, a window into the disposition on immigrant — hoping against hope — that literally lightens a basement home.
“He was a really melancholic person,” Santos Briones recalled of her subject, who recently passed away.
Advocacy
Santos Briones said that her work was about connecting the current crisis in the streets with long-standing U.S. immigration policy, which she describes as an antagonist of this hope-filled, resourceful imagining.
“A lot of my work is with children,” Santos Briones said, “What the state is doing is tearing the imagination of these children apart.” The current state of immigration policy — with a surge in detentions, mass deportations of contested legality, and doubling the use of remote monitoring via ankle monitors and smartphone apps — has sparked mass outrage. “They’re trying to make it uncomfortable and get people to leave,” Fr. Brian Strassburger, SJ, of Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries said in a January Zoom panel.
“Living in Sanctuary” is an intimate invitation to dwell with our fellow humans who seek safety in a tabernacle and the ambiguous role that the house of worship plays for an immigrant seeking safe haven and yearning for freedom of movement and new life.
Santos Briones described the current policies as a “war against children.” She describes the images outside of the gallery that fill the news: “Children in detention centers, children being taken from their families from ICE agents.” Reports show that more than 400,000 children have appeared in immigration court without a lawyer. And deportations and detention policies have separated more than 145,000 children from their parents. “They are tearing apart the imagination of the future of children,” she said.
Children are political actors in the immigration process, Santos Briones said. Immigration has often stolen childhood from children: Children accompany their parents to immigration hearings, serve as translators for their parents and attend meetings with lawyers. Part of her goal of portraying children in sanctuary was to show their agency in a different way.
In “La gravedad del juego,” a young boy plays football (soccer) in a darkened church. The game persists, with incredible seriousness even in dark circumstances — his life, his childhood, depend upon it.
Santos Briones made an effort to highlight the voices of children in the project. She included polaroids with children’s drawings of home and their reflections on home, immigration and church sanctuary. She invited migrants and ministers to share their experiences of crossing the borders, making an exercise of immigrant imagination in response to the nationalistic imagination, and to share their experiences of turning a non-home — this sanctuary church — into their home.
“Your home is not here, your roots are not here,” Santos Briones observed of the contradictions of the immigrant experience, “but the idea of home is present all the time.”
Santos Briones, as a participatory artist and trained ethnographer, remains sensitive to the colonial power dynamics underlying sanctuary. The immigrants seeking safety in sanctuaries are often powerless, without the documents that make them political persons in this country. The churches that offer them shelter, the volunteers who bring meals, who help offer refuge, are often led by white Europeans.
“There’s lots of romanticization of the movement that does not discuss the patriarchal and colonial aspects of the movement,” Santos Briones shared.
Sacramentality
Santos Briones described her work as documentary and participatory, drawing the subjects of the photograph into the process of journaling their own experience of sanctuary. Aesthetically, she said, she was drawn toward the quality of light in the church spaces, noting that God is often symbolized as a ray of light. Light is an element that suggests the divine to our imaginations.
Santos Briones’ work honors the imagination it takes to transform “precarious spaces,” into a “re-enactment of home.”
Although the sanctuaries can be prison cells, they are, for most immigrants, transitory dwellings. The hushed light of the sanctuary, stained glass sunlight filtered on grey stone walls, casts an aura of liminality. The children are our guides into this strange limbo. Perhaps church will always be the realm of the dead — monuments on the wall and flagstones on the floor remind Mass-goers of when a crypt was filled with the bodies of the faithful departed and a site of worship was surrounded by the Church Triumphant. In these darkened, grave-like churches, our child guides infuse fresh life into old rituals and spaces.
In “The Pew,” two young women sit in front of a wall monument for a deceased member of the congregation. Their hair is wrapped in towels, a domestic tête-à-tête of two women fresh out of a shower. They sit on a pew, in the form of the sacrament of confession.
In some of the most affecting photographs, Santos Briones captures the supernatural lighting interacting with childhood in motion. In “Camila,” a small girl runs toward a spotlight in the nave — her literal journey across a tessellated church floor spirals out into a mosaic of meanings: spiritual pilgrimage, the political reality of immigration, the force of imaginative hope, running to the light.
In “Playground,” two young girls play in a chapel, walking on an altar rail like gymnasts on a balance beam. Behind one of the girls, a sconce creates a halo around her hair. The young women frame the tabernacle like two patrons in a medieval painting. They might be children; they might be two saints lining the Immaculate Conception hanging above the altar; they are also, in this composition, angelic. They are emblematic of the sacred practice of hospitality at the heart of the sanctuary movement.
“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing this some people have entertained angels without knowing it,” the Letter to the Hebrews enjoins (Hebrews 13:2). While, yes, hospitality like Abraham and Sarah’s is often rewarded with an unexpected divine blessing dispensed via entertained angels, what the author really promises is more fearsome. The Hebrew word for “angel” means a “messenger,” one sent from God to deliver a divine word. Perhaps the message you have opened your home to is one you do not want to hear, and yet you need to.
Sitting on the old church pew, gazing through the stained glass frames into the lives of Santos Briones’ subjects, I could not help but feel that these small lives her lens had captured, living in the shadows, confined in church basements, coming from the margins, have given us the divine message we so desperately need to hear.
Top photo: The Pew, New York City, (2017) by Cinthya Santos Briones. Courtesy of the artist and BAXTER ST at CCNY.