The Sanctuary Movement and the Rule of Law

In response to my earlier query, Brendan Wilson forwarded me a recent article recounting the 1980s sanctuary movement.  Included was this important set of statistics:

Characterizing the Salvadorans and Guatemalans as "economic migrants," the Reagan administration denied that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had violated human rights. As a result, approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under three percent in 1984. In the same year, the approval rate for Iranians was 60 percent, 40 percent for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, and 32 percent for Poles.

So when churches took it upon themselves to help refugees from those countries enter the United States illegally, they had a formidable argument that an otherwise reasonably just system had been corrupted by political considerations so that it no longer served its prudent and proper purpose.  Perhaps this is as close to an operative standard as we can get.  Under the law as it stands today, is there any similar argument available to support assisting the act of illegal immigration from Latin America?  E.g., would Catholic legal theory support categorical distinctions between "economic migrants" and "political migrants?"  (Exclusion of the former, I assume, is grounded in practical reality -- i.e., billions could have an economic claim for entry into the United States -- more than particularized justice -- i.e., a hungry child seems every bit as morally compelling as an oppressed political dissident.)

Rob