On Dec. 12, 1985, he declared La Placita a sanctuary church. He fed, clothed, and housed refugees, letting hundreds sleep in the pews while arranging medical care, jobs, and schooling. He defied the archdiocese and federal prosecutors, daring officials to raid the church. He believed he had no choice. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1990, he died at La Placita in 1993 at age 59.

But Olivares was not acting alone. He was part of a broader movement that emerged across churches and synagogues, united by the conviction that moral obligations to vulnerable refugees could outweigh legal risks. The Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America framed its work plainly: sheltering the stranger was a Gospel duty that superseded civil law. The government responded with 71 indictments — eight workers were convicted across the nation as the movement grew. They knew prosecution was coming and acted anyway. One could disagree with Olivares’s conclusions but not easily argue that he was calculating. He paid the price.

The original movement practiced discernment. Olivares knew the refugees’ stories and specific suffering. Critics noted its ideological tilt, focusing more on victims of right-wing violence than those fleeing left-wing regimes such as Sandinista Nicaragua. Even so, it evaluated individual cases within a defined crisis rather than offering a universal welcome regardless of circumstance.

The moral obligation was real, but bounded, and the boundary was precisely where personal accountability began. If you harbored someone, you knew who they were. You bore the risk. That kept the movement grounded in reality rather than abstraction.

Over time, “sanctuary” detached from personal conviction and civil disobedience. The sociologist Max Weber observed that charismatic moral authority follows a predictable arc once institutionalized: The movement becomes an organization, the organization becomes an apparatus, and the apparatus preserves the language of the founding vision while shedding its obligations.

What began as radical, costly action by faith communities evolved through the 1990s and 2000s into symbolic branding for progressive cities and politicians. When border crossings were lower, declaring sanctuary status carried little practical cost. That changed in 2022, when record migrant surges transformed symbolic commitments into fiscal burdens the movement’s founders never imagined managing.

Cities that had declared sanctuary when the commitment was largely symbolic suddenly faced obligations on a scale the original movement never imagined. New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and dozens of others spent billions amid mounting fiscal pressure and no clear accountability for who had made the decisions. The politicians who inherited the movement’s vocabulary navigated sanctuary differently than Olivares did. They announced policies from press conferences while the practical burdens fell on city agencies, neighborhoods, schools, and taxpayers who had no say in the decisions being made.

The contrast is not partisan — it is structural. The people holding the press conferences were not the people sleeping on the floor. Thomas Sowell put it plainly: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

What made Olivares’s judgment trustworthy was precisely that he bore the cost of being wrong in his own body. The modern apparatus removed that constraint — and then made objecting to its removal a sign of insufficient compassion.

Few arrivals were carefully evaluated individual cases. They were people processed through an overwhelmed federal system, released into sanctuary cities with notices to appear and minimal background verification, their circumstances unknown to municipalities now responsible for them indefinitely. Olivares’s framework bound him to specific people whose suffering he had witnessed. Modern sanctuary policy expanded far beyond those bounded obligations, distributing costs broadly while making accountability impossible to locate.

The founders accepted prosecution, slept in church pews, and died in the sanctuaries they refused to leave. The political class that inherited their vocabulary shifted the costs to others, then treated scrutiny of those arrangements as a failure of compassion rather than a failure of governance.

This is what happens to good ideas. Weber’s insight was that no moral movement survives institutionalization unchanged — the charisma gets routinized, the sacrifice gets bureaucratized, and what remains is the language without the cost. Sowell’s was that this is not merely unfortunate but structurally corrupting: Once decision-makers pay no price for being wrong, costs fall on those with no voice, and the entire arrangement gets insulated from accountability by the moral prestige of its origins.

The anointed inherit the vocabulary of the prophets and use it to silence the taxpayers.

The corrective, if there is one, begins with elected officials, governors, mayors, and city councils being asked publicly what they personally are willing to risk, not what they are willing to declare with other people’s money. Citizens who want honest answers to that question know what to do at the ballot box.

AMERICA TO THE BIDENS: PLEASE GO AWAY

Olivares earned the right to speak about sanctuary because he lived inside its consequences. He knew the names of the people he sheltered. He died among them. What the modern sanctuary city offers is the gesture without the risk, the declaration without the discernment, and the compassion of other people’s money spent by those who will never account for it.

That is not a moral commitment. It is a posture, and it is an insult to the man who wore Gucci shoes and gave them away.