A Divine Asylum

It is 11:30 a.m., but Hakaj Emrush is already opening a bottle of champagne. He is celebrating his first day of freedom after more than four months behind locked doors. "The first thing I'm going to do is breathe in fresh mountain air," he says. Emrush's offense is living in Switzerland illegally, and until this morning his jail was the parish hall of the Bellevaux-St.-Luc church in Lausanne, where he shared cramped mattresses in two doorless cubbyholes with eight other immigrants. "We lived here like prisoners, yet we committed no crime," he says. "All we wanted was to be free, to...