President Donald Trump released a barrage of executive orders related to immigration on his first day in office, following up on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration and proceed with mass deportations.
The president focused part of his ire on sanctuary cities, which limit their cooperation with federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to varying degrees. Hundreds of US cities consider themselves sanctuaries, as do about a dozen states. Such policies began in the 1980s, when churches offered refuge to Central American refugees fleeing war regardless of their US legal status.
The Department of Justice issued a memo on January 22 outlining the new administration’s plans to challenge city sanctuary laws.
“Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands or requests,” said the document.
Trump told Fox News the same day that he would try to block federal funding to sanctuary cities. “We’re trying to end them, and a lot of the people in those communities don’t want them,” he said, without offering evidence.
About a dozen states and hundreds of cities across the United States have declared themselves as “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants (others have balked at using this term, preferring to call themselves “welcoming” cities).
The United States currently has around 14 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom have families in or other longstanding ties to the United States.
FRANCE 24 spoke to Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute office at New York University School of Law.
What does it mean to be a “sanctuary city” and how does it make ICE operations more difficult?
There is no legal, popular, Oxford-dictionary definition of a sanctuary city. The term quickly gained popular usage in a political context, and it depends on what your politics are: some cities like to associate as a place with sanctuary laws. If people want to attack a place as being non-cooperative, they will dub it a “sanctuary city”.
The term has its origins in the ’80s with the arrival of Central American refugees to the United States.
There is no city or state jurisdiction, that I know of, which says: “We will not at all cooperate with ICE.” No city or jurisdiction hides immigrants, or prevents ICE from approaching them. The term has come to mean the degree of cooperation between ICE and local jurisdiction.
Every city sets its own limits on when to cooperate with ICE. There could be scores of crimes, for example, and the city of New York would hand the immigrants over to ICE. Another city could have scores of crimes, but they would not hand the immigrants over to ICE.
Each jurisdiction makes its own priorities for handing over undocumented immigrations, but the line generally gets drawn on violent crime.
The possession of marijuana, making a wrong turn at a traffic light, even identity theft: all of these don’t rise to the level of needing to cooperate with deportation efforts for certain jurisdictions.
What kind of retaliation can the Trump administration take?
The Trump administration’s view is, any jurisdiction that doesn’t cooperate with federal law is violating federal pre-emptive authority. Any lack of full cooperation is a ground to penalise the state and local authorities.
That is a doctrine to be accepted. At the same time, we have a parallel doctrine: You cannot commandeer a state to do your job. This is rooted in the 10th amendment [which states that any powers not specifically delegated to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved for the states]. That’s why we are stuck.
The only way to make a cop do ICE’s work is through a consensual agreement called the 287(g) program. This is a contract in which ICE delegates specific immigration-officer duties to state and local law enforcement partners.
Yet to say local cops don’t do their job is not true. This Trump administration believes that anyone who doesn’t cooperate fully is violating federal law. It says Department of Justice officers will investigate state and local officials who resist the federal immigration crackdown.
The only way the federal government could make the state do their job is to stop funding directed to them. The Trump administration could withhold funding from states and localities which it perceives as uncooperative on immigration policies.
The president will likely run up against the federalism principle, which states that federal funds cannot be withheld for reasons of retaliation.
What happens is that some states are more than willing to comply with the federal government, while others aren’t. The result is a patchwork situation across the country. Two neighbouring counties, with two different policies for immigration – that’s not good for national unity. Also, your level of anxiety as an immigrant largely depends on which county you live in.
How has public opinion on sanctuary cities evolved since Trump’s first term?
Public opinion on immigration took a big hit during former president Joe Biden’s term. Biden’s years as president were marked by high numbers of immigrants arriving illegally to the United States. The Republicans took advantage, calling it the “Biden border crisis”, or “BBC”.
The numbers of arrivals were very high, with the conflation of wars, climate change and political instability abroad. There were migrants from places including Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Morocco and Sudan. And this happened to coincide with Biden’s administration.
The succession of Biden, who wasn’t perceived as a president who was tough on migration, by Trump, also played a role. Smuggling rings rushed to get people into the US in the interlude between the two administrations. More people came, and immigration levels came to a high-water mark in December 2023.
Two years ago, Republicans like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, started busing people into sanctuary cities, which happened to be in ‘blue’ (Democratic) states. These cities started to feel the pressure. It’s not easy to accommodate people in expensive cities like New York.
The shift went beyond the struggle to house people. There was a reaction to the spectre of national disorder and this was visible at the Democratic National Convention, when the speakers advocated for tougher border measures and policies on asylum seekers.
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