Biography
Sister Darlene Nicgorski was a School Sister of St. Francis who became a leading organizer of the Sanctuary Movement after the 1980 murder of a priest she had worked with in Guatemala convinced her of the dangers facing the people she helped. A central defendant in the 1985–86 Tucson sanctuary trial — singled out, her supporters charged, for especially aggressive treatment by the prosecution — she was arrested after a search of her home in January 1985 and convicted on May 1, 1986 of conspiracy and alien-smuggling charges for her work aiding Central American refugees. Like her co-defendants, she was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Earl H. Carroll to probation rather than prison. Nicgorski remained an outspoken advocate for refugees and a critic of U.S. policy in Central America.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Nicgorski entered the School Sisters of St. Francis in 1966 and made final profession in 1974. After her Franciscan mentor Father Tulio Maruzzo was assassinated in Guatemala in July 1981, she came to Arizona to coordinate the national Sanctuary Movement's referral network for Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees from Phoenix. She was the most prominent Catholic woman religious in the prosecution. She left the SSSF in 1987 and worked the rest of her life as a peace and women's-rights activist; her papers are at the Claremont Colleges Library. She died Feb 28, 2017 in Pomona, California, aged 73.
