During a campaign rally in mid-October in Coachella, Cal., Donald Trump asked a throng of supporters if they know what a “sanctuary city” is. “That’s a place where you keep criminals, right? Who the hell wants that? The mass migration invasion has crushed wages, crashed school systems.” According to Trump, these sanctuary states and their municipal analogues, sanctuary cities, were destroying the nation. The candidate, however, had a quick fix for all of this. As he told rally-goers later that month in Madison Square Garden, a second Trump administration would “immediately ban all sanctuary cities” and bring peace back to the country.
Trump rode this anti-sanctuary message into the White House last fall. And on January 20, within hours of being sworn in, he moved to deliver on his campaign promises. Among his first set of presidential actions was the provocatively-titled executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” Section 17 of the directive, titled “Sanctuary Jurisdictions,” calls for withholding federal funds from those cities, counties, and states that “seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of Federal law enforcement operations.” The order also tasks the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security to “undertake any other lawful actions, criminal or civil, that they deem warranted” to bring municipalities that resist immigration enforcement to heel.
The threat of federal prosecution follows through on the earlier campaign promises to make an example of elected officials who refuse to comply. As now–deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller threatened in a late-December letter to hundreds of sanctuary-city and -state officials: “You and your subordinates could potentially face up to 20 years in prison” for opposing efforts to detain and deport the country’s more than eleven million undocumented residents.
These campaign threats and executive orders have pushed elected officials across the country to reassess their commitment to sanctuary policies. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has reaffirmed the city’s commitment to support undocumented community members, while the Los Angeles City Council followed suit with a 13-0 vote reiterating a long-standing policy barring local cooperation with immigration enforcement.
Other locations, however, have expressed a willingness to bring their municipal policies in line with Trump’s stance. In New York City, where officials struggled to accommodate the arrival of more than 200,000 migrants over the last two years, Mayor Eric Adams has cited simmering discontent among some residents in his justifications to push to end his city’s sanctuary laws, many of which have existed in some form or another for decades.
“You know what a sanctuary state is?” Donald Trump asked supporters during a campaign rally in mid-October. “That’s a place where you keep criminals, right?”
Trump’s political platform, grounded in xenophobic fear-mongering of all those who might be considered “others” in America, has always centered on immigration restriction. During his first term, the construction of a physical border wall between the United States and Mexico served as the symbolic center of his promise to make America great again. This time around, Trump has focused more explicitly on expelling the country’s undocumented residents via mass deportation and by eliminating sanctuary cities.
Trump has received plenty of support in his quest to attack these sites. MAGA manifestos such as Project 2025 and the Trump-sponsored Agenda 47 both outlined plans to explicitly target sanctuary municipalities. Whether Trump will follow through on his promise to deploy federal troops to carry out mass deportation campaigns in those cities that refuse to comply with federal deportation mandates, meanwhile, remains to be seen.
These schemes serve as the latest iterations of Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants in the United States. Not even one full week into his first term in office, Trump signed Executive Order 13768, entitled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” a directive that would have allowed his administration to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions. In order to meet his ultimate goal of mass deportations, the executive order also called for governors to enter into 287(g) agreements, which mandate cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration efforts.
But why have anti-sanctuary policies come to dominate Trump’s immigration proposals? And why has his newly-appointed “border czar,” Tom Homan, doubled down on the threats, urging sanctuary city leaders to “get the hell out of the way” of his deportation plans?
The most vocal and virulent critics of sanctuary cities claim that these places invite crime and shield immigrants from criminal prosecution, while the most benign supporters suggest that they are merely symbolic. But neither is true.
There exists no one-size-fits-all definition of municipal sanctuary. However, the most common feature is a non-cooperation agreement that discourages or prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration agencies. Local authorities, for example, may ignore a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain an arrested individual until an agent can take custody of them. Courts, legal scholars, and even many law enforcement agencies deem such “detainer requests” unlawful when issued solely on the basis of a person’s immigration status, absent a criminal accusation or charge. By leaving the work of enforcing federal immigration law to federal authorities, sanctuary proponents argue, non-cooperation policies allow local police and sheriffs to more efficiently allocate their time and resources to serve taxpayers. Sanctuary policies, then, offer the best path forward for community safety for all residents, regardless of their documentation status.
These non-cooperation agreements, which have their roots in 1980s activism to support Central American asylum seekers seeking safe harbor in this country, are also the most important feature sanctuary cities deploy amid threats of mass deportation. When executed well, sanctuary cities throw a wrench in Trump’s promised mass deportation machine. Unable to deputize local law enforcement to do the bidding of the federal government, Trump would simply be unable to mobilize the resources needed to enact mass deportations at the scale he and his loyalists long for. It serves as little surprise, then, that the president has moved to defund sanctuary cities, as a means of discouraging municipalities from becoming sanctuary cities. And at times, the threat of withholding federal dollars has proved effective, including in majority-Latino communities that have felt the pressure to abandon immigrant-friendly mandates. The move to dismantle the protections in these locales clears the way for future raids.
When executed well, sanctuary cities throw a wrench in Trump’s promised mass deportation machine.
During his first term, Trump implemented a raft of policies that sought to make life untenable for immigrants and asylum seekers. Those initiatives included notorious executive orders and administrative schemes such as the “zero-tolerance policy,” the widely-panned “child separation” program, and the “remain in Mexico” policy that heavily curtailed asylum opportunities for migrants. From his first full month in office—when he raised the threshold to demonstrate credible fear for those seeking refuge in this country—to the very last, Trump signed policies aimed at dismantling the U.S. asylum process. By attacking asylum, Trump hopes to deter migrants; by going after sanctuary, he hopes to deport them.
While his attacks on sanctuary—like nearly all of his comments surrounding immigration—rely on false claims, the minor issue of the truth has done little to restrain the president from ramping up his attacks on immigrant-welcoming policies. The maligning of sanctuary cities contradicts numerous empirical studies that have found no positive correlation between sanctuary-city status and violent crime. As study after study has shown, not only are immigrants less likely to commit crimes but sanctuary policies make municipalities safer, because when undocumented immigrants don’t have to worry about their immigration status being reported to federal authorities, they won’t fear reporting other crimes to authorities.
Whether these are honest criticisms or not, sanctuary-city antagonists have begun to find ways to challenge the power and messaging of these spaces. While Trump’s legal efforts were ultimately unsuccessful at defunding sanctuary municipalities—including a failed effort to thwart the 2017 California’s Values Act, which ensures that no state and local resources are used to assist federal immigration enforcement—Republican governors have been able to notch symbolic wins. In Florida, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 168 into law in 2019, a measure touted by its supporters as an “anti-sanctuary cities law.” Florida, however, was only the most prominent of the over 500 municipalities that have passed these types of anti-sanctuary resolutions of late.
Amid this growing anti-sanctuary movement, a new Public Religion Research Institute study has revealed that nearly half of the country favors mass deportation, while support among Americans for a physical border wall between the United States and Mexico continues to grow. As popular opinion continues to turn toward restrictionist immigration policies, another bid to punish or end sanctuary jurisdictions may likewise garner support from Americans. The result—forced collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration officers—would lead to irreparable harm to immigrant communities.
These shifts, and how immigrant communities and their allies respond to them, are neither inevitable nor irreversible. When Trump was first elected in 2016, immigrants and their allies pushed their city councils and county boards to enact sanctuary policies that could serve as a challenge to Trump’s promised deportation raids. This municipal organizing, coupled with growing movements for sacred resistance within houses of worship, set off a massive wave of sanctuary efforts across the nation.
Opponents of sanctuary, whether in churches and synagogues or in city streets, contend that these policies do nothing more than promote lawlessness and invite more undocumented immigration. What good are a nation’s borders, they argue, if radical activists can harbor potentially violent criminals right underneath law enforcement’s watch?
Sanctuary, however, demands that we consider what actually constitutes radical policies in this country. Dehumanizing rhetoric and threats on immigrant communities have now been paired with a further militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the shutdown of asylum procedures, and even legal challenges to birthright citizenship. These mandates—just the opening salvo in Trump’s crusade against immigrants—represent the most extreme and radical political impulses in our nation today.
But unlike Trump, who has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as “a massive invasion” intent on spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction,” supporters of sanctuary recognize these people as their neighbors and as vital members of their communities. While the sitting president promises his attacks on immigrant communities will make the country safer, sanctuary proponents know that his fearmongering and radical policies will only continue to spread fear, distrust, and chaos, just as they have already done in his first week in office alone.
Will a second Trump term spur another wave of sanctuary resistance across the country? Will sanctuary cities step up again to offer this vital protection to their undocumented residents?
Sanctuary cities, counties, and states know full well that their combined challenges served as a crucial check on Trump’s “mass deportation now” machine. The coming weeks and months, and likely years, will tell how the looming showdown plays out.