The Fraught Politics of Designating “Sanctuary Cities”: The Case of New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana witnessed an influx of undocumented Latinx workers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many of those who worked in rebuilding settled with their families in the area. As reconstruction wound down from 2010 on, rates of detainment and deportation in the city increased, although local law enforcement has since then adopted several policies making New Orleans a sanctuary city. This ambiguous status has heightened the insecurity undocumented residents of the city face in their daily lives.
“Do you want to stay here in New Orleans or move somewhere else?” I asked Adolfo, a forty-something construction worker originally from Honduras. It was July 2014, and we were sitting in the kitchen of the house that he and his wife and three children shared with his sister in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. He flashed a bright, white smile and replied in Spanish:
“Yes, for now, I’m trying to get a good job. Living here is fine, if a cop stops me he can give me a ticket, but he doesn’t call immigration, which is what happens in Arizona. If a police officer stops you and asks you for documents, immigration will send you back to your country.”
In the late 2000s, local law enforcement in Arizona had pulled Adolfo over and arrested him after he was unable to produce a driver’s license. They subsequently turned him over to the US federal law enforcement agency “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” (ICE) who then deported him back to Honduras. Upon re-entry to the US in 2010, he moved to New Orleans instead, which seemed a more migrant-friendly city than Arizona, known for its draconian immigration enforcement policy, partially under Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
As part of my research into the role undocumented Central American workers played in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I encountered many who viewed New Orleans as a relatively “safe” city. This was a striking contrast to their home countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador), where public corruption, widespread violence, climate change, and endemic poverty has made emigration the best option for survival. Many of those migrants became key actors in the rebuilding of the city in 2005, when demand was high for difficult, hazardous, and taxing work. When reconstruction ended, many were expected to leave. Instead, migrants and their advocates organized politically to maintain their rights to stay while ICE presence ramped up. Much of that advocacy led to changes in local law enforcement. In 2012 under a federal consent decree, local law enforcement was disallowed from asking “victims or witnesses to crime” about their right to be in the country. In 2013, as a result of a lawsuit, local law enforcement announced that they would not be arresting and holding migrants with civil violations for ICE.
The Sanctuary Movement
As has been previously highlighted, in the US sanctuary cities have their roots in the migration of asylum-seekers from war-torn Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. In the past two decades, urban areas have again adopted such policies in reaction to increasing rates of deportations. According to O’Brien and Collingwood’s definition of a sanctuary city as a “city or police department that has passed a resolution or ordinance expressly forbidding city or law enforcement officials from inquiring into immigration status and/or cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” New Orleans is arguably a sanctuary city.
Yet, sanctuary city status in New Orleans has not provided migrants with complete relief. As deportations steadily rose and particularly ramped up in 2012, ICE-led raids on, construction worksites, apartment complexes, and even Bible study groups plagued New Orleans and its suburbs. In my long-term ethnographic fieldwork with migrants on and off from 2011-2016, many undocumented workers recounted to me the risks they underwent as unauthorized residents. Such accounts included continued mistrust of local police officers whom many suspected of still working with ICE and driving without a US license. In an interview, one young Honduran woman, Indra, called driving the “Achilles heel” of any sans papiers migrant in the city. How does one explain the ease of Adolfo and the nervousness of Indra regarding the very same issue of driving?
These contrasting views highlight how the very concept of a sanctuary city is subject to interpretation. Rather than through status, it is more useful to measure sanctuary cities in the US along a spectrum. The degree of enforcement and cooperation with ICE depends on intersecting interests, namely federal authorities, local and state-level politics, private capital desirous of cheap labor, local racial justice, and labor organizers. And ultimately, of course, the interests of the migrants who carefully mediate what degree of danger they are willing to undertake for the opportunity to work and settle with the family. This “transnational continuum of risk,” as I call it, begins from their homeland and stretches to the area of settlement. Furthermore, this unevenness – i.e. never knowing when one might be detained in a city that supposedly is safer than others – only heightens the insecurity that undocumented residents already face when navigating unsafe worksites and unscrupulous employers.
New Orleans continues to grapple with issues surrounding enforcement and unauthorized migrants. Take the recent case of Delmer Joel Ramírez Palma. An undocumented construction worker from Honduras, he blew the whistle on an unsafe worksite where three of his colleagues – also Central American migrants – died upon the building’s collapse in October 2019. Soon after speaking out, ICE agents arrested him, and he was deported back to Honduras and away from his family and home in New Orleans. As Sarah Fouts and I pointed out in a New York Times op-ed on the case, the collusion of private capital, corrupt local politicians, and draconian law enforcement ensure that migrants live under a climate of fear, their labor is subordinated and their right to exist in the city is under constant threat of detainment and deportation, sanctuary city status or not.
Deniz Daser is an anthropologist who studies migration, labor, and citizenship under conditions of insecurity. She is a visiting research associate at Rutgers University, where she completed her Ph.D. in anthropology in 2018. Her dissertation, “Leveraging Labor in New Orleans: Worklife and Insecurity among Honduran Migrants,” is based on 18 months of ethnographic field research and archival study in post-Katrina New Orleans.
