The Rise of Sanctuary Cities in the United States

Civil conflict embroiled El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s leading to an exodus of refugees seeking asylum in the United States. These events birthed the sanctuary movement, and later the sanctuary city movement. The second growth of sanctuary cities came in response to Bush’s Post-9/11 era immigration security crackdown. We are presently in the third phase of sanctuary city growth, with cities responding to President Donald Trump’s sanctuary city crackdown.

Although the term “sanctuary city” is a political and not legal term, in our book, “Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge”, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien and I define 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)” (p.7).

The core rationale of a sanctuary policy is to provide assurance to community members that local police will not work with ICE to deport people in the daily functioning of the city. In other words, sanctuary policies help build trust with immigrant communities so that residents feel comfortable reporting crimes to law enforcement.

However, because immigration control is the responsibility of the federal government, states and cities cannot be compelled to cooperate with immigration enforcement. By not collecting data on residents’ immigration status, cities thus have no information to give to ICE. Still, sanctuary policies cannot prevent a local ICE raid, for example, therefore a city’s sanctuary status is no guarantee that residents within the city are safe from deportation.

Different Sanctuary Eras

Initially, sanctuary cities grew out of the house of worship-based sanctuary movement whereby churches and synagogues violated federal immigration law to hide Central American refugees within their churches. Eventually, cities like Madison, WI, broadened the sanctuary movement to the city level by announcing citywide sanctuary policies. This phase of activity fit the period 1983-1989, with cities like San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago, Berkeley, Davis, Washington, and New York invoking sanctuary résolutions/ordinances in support of these Central American Refugees.

Then, from 2001-2008, a new wave of sanctuary cities cropped up in response to the Bush Administration immigration crackdowns; and programs like Secure Communities – a federal deportation program designed to increase partnership between federal, state, and local law enforcement. During this time, immigration became an extremely hot issue, with the anti-immigrant “Sensenbrenner” bill passing the U.S. House in 2005 sparking the massive 2006 immigration marches largely geared around mobilizing the growing Latino population. This time, though, sanctuary resolutions had nothing to do with Central Americans, per se, but were written with the larger undocumented community in mind.

Finally, today, we are in the third wave of sanctuary city growth in the United States. The contemporary sanctuary movement largely began with the accidental killing of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant. Then-candidate Trump nationalized the issue using it to propel him into the White House. As President, Trump initiated a lawsuit against sanctuary cities with the goal of blocking federal grants to these cities.

In response, at least 25 cities in California alone – most, like Long Beach, with large foreign-born populations – implemented new sanctuary policies. However, some cities, like Miami and Greenfield, CA, have overturned their sanctuary policies in an attempt to thwart a potential lawsuit. In 2019, even the ultra-liberal city of Tucson, AZ, rejected a sanctuary ballot proposition with 50% of Democrats rejecting Proposition 205 for fear that the state will sue the city in violation of state law.

At the state legislative level, 2017 saw a huge spike in both pro and anti-sanctuary bill introductions. Collingwood, El-Khatib and Gonzalez O’Brien (2019) show that much of this anti-sanctuary legislation is copied word for word from the right-wing super interest group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). California passed a full-on sanctuary state law in 2017 (SB-54), with Washington, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, for instance, following suit. Texas banned sanctuary cities outright, as has Iowa, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida, amongst other states.

But perhaps the most interesting development in the past few years is the local response to California’s SB-54. Much of the action is occurring in the demographically changing former Republican stronghold of Orange County. Cities like Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Fountain Valley, and Yorba Linda signed onto a lawsuit suing the state over its blanket sanctuary law. Nearby, Santa Ana, a city of 330,000 with an 80% Latino population, became a sanctuary city.

Time will tell how both the federal and state lawsuits will play out, but as the United States continues to diversify, with both Latinos and Asians growing in percentages of the population, and whites declining, we can expect policy battles across a wide range of immigration-related issues.

Loren Collingwood is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching interests include American politics, political behavior, public policy, race and ethnic politics, immigration, and political methodology.

References:

– Collingwood, Loren, Benjamin Gonzales O’Brian (2019). Sanctuary Cities: The Politic of Refuge. Oxford University Press.

– O’Brien, Benjamin Gonzalez, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib (2019). The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration, Urban Affairs Review 55(1): 3–40.