Sanctuary city
Based on Wikipedia: Sanctuary city
In March 1982, eight churches in the American Southwest made a declaration that would put them on a collision course with the federal government. They announced they would become sanctuaries—places where Central American refugees fleeing civil wars could find shelter, regardless of what immigration authorities had to say about it.
One minister, John Fife, went further. He wrote directly to the United States Attorney General: "The Southside United Presbyterian Church will publicly violate the Immigration and Nationality Act by allowing sanctuary in its church for those from Central America."
This wasn't civil disobedience by accident. It was a dare.
What Exactly Is a Sanctuary City?
The term gets thrown around in political debates, but it has no precise legal definition. At its core, a sanctuary city is a municipality that limits or refuses cooperation with national immigration enforcement. The specifics vary wildly from place to place.
Some cities prohibit their police officers from asking people about their immigration status during routine interactions. Others refuse to hold people in jail past their scheduled release date just because federal immigration authorities want extra time to pick them up. Some have policies written into law. Others simply practice non-cooperation without formal rules.
What they share is a philosophy: local resources—police, jails, city employees—should not be deputized into federal immigration enforcement.
The 1980s Origins
The sanctuary movement didn't emerge from thin air. It grew from a humanitarian crisis.
During the 1980s, civil wars tore through Central America. In El Salvador, more than 75,000 people were killed. In Guatemala, the death toll exceeded 200,000. People fled north, seeking asylum in the United States.
The Reagan administration, however, had a problem. The governments waging these brutal campaigns—the ones people were fleeing from—were American allies in the Cold War. Acknowledging that Salvadorans and Guatemalans deserved refugee status would mean admitting that friendly regimes were persecuting their own citizens.
So the administration largely denied asylum claims from Central America while granting them more readily to people fleeing communist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Faith communities saw this as a moral crisis. Drawing on ancient religious traditions of sanctuary—the idea that houses of worship could shelter the persecuted from secular authorities—churches began hiding refugees and helping them avoid deportation.
The movement was explicitly religious in character, but it was also deeply political. These weren't just acts of charity. They were acts of resistance against what participants saw as an unjust policy.
From Churches to City Halls
The leap from religious sanctuary to municipal policy happened in 1985, when San Francisco passed its "City of Refuge" resolution. The city ordinance prohibited using city funds and resources to assist federal immigration enforcement.
This became the template. By 2018, more than 560 cities, states, and counties across America considered themselves sanctuaries of some kind.
The motivations for these policies mix the idealistic with the practical.
Supporters argue that when undocumented immigrants fear that any interaction with local government might lead to deportation, they stop reporting crimes. A woman in an abusive relationship won't call the police if she thinks she'll be deported. A witness to a robbery won't come forward. Communities become less safe, not more, when a significant portion of residents lives in constant fear of authorities.
The same logic applies to health clinics, schools, and social services. If people avoid hospitals during a pandemic because they're afraid of immigration enforcement, diseases spread to everyone. If children don't go to school, you create a generation of uneducated residents.
Critics counter that these policies undermine the rule of law. If cities can simply refuse to enforce federal laws they disagree with, what holds the country together? They also point to specific cases where people released from local custody—rather than being handed over to immigration authorities—went on to commit violent crimes.
The Case of Kathryn Steinle
No single incident shaped the sanctuary city debate more than what happened on a San Francisco pier in July 2015.
Kathryn Steinle, 32 years old, was walking with her father when she was struck by a bullet and killed. The shooter was an undocumented immigrant who had been deported five times previously. San Francisco authorities had released him from jail weeks earlier despite a request from federal immigration officials to hold him.
The case became a flashpoint. Critics of sanctuary policies had their proof that these policies endangered American lives. Supporters argued that one tragic case couldn't justify dismantling policies that served broader public safety goals.
Even Hillary Clinton, then running for president and generally supportive of sanctuary cities, initially said San Francisco had made a mistake. Her campaign walked it back the next day, affirming that she believed sanctuary policies could further public safety.
The case illustrated something important about how these debates unfold. Opponents can always point to specific victims—individuals with names and faces whose deaths might have been prevented by different policies. Supporters point to statistics and studies, which are more abstract but potentially more representative of reality.
What Does the Research Actually Show?
Several studies have examined whether sanctuary policies affect crime rates. The findings tend to frustrate those who want a simple answer.
A 2017 review in the academic journal Sociology Compass examined the available research and concluded that the few empirical studies that exist show either no relationship between sanctuary policies and crime, or a negative one—meaning sanctuary cities actually have somewhat lower crime rates.
The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, published a study that same year finding that sanctuary counties performed better than comparable non-sanctuary counties across a range of social and economic indicators.
The Washington Post reported in 2016 that decades of research shows immigrants—whether documented or undocumented—tend to have lower crime rates than native-born Americans.
But here's the complication: sanctuary policies don't exist in isolation. Cities that adopt these policies tend to be larger, more urban, more Democratic, and more economically diverse than those that don't. Untangling whether it's the sanctuary policy itself that affects outcomes, or the dozen other factors that differ between these places, is genuinely difficult.
What the research does seem to show is that sanctuary policies substantially reduce deportations of undocumented immigrants without criminal records. They have little effect on deportations of those with violent criminal histories—those people get deported either way.
The Language Wars
How we talk about this issue has itself become a battleground.
For decades, the standard term in American media was "illegal alien." Both words carry weight. "Illegal" emphasizes lawbreaking. "Alien" creates distance, suggesting someone fundamentally other.
Immigrant rights advocates pushed back, calling the terminology dehumanizing. They advocated for "undocumented immigrant" instead—language that acknowledges the person's immigration status while emphasizing their humanity and their role as someone seeking to build a life in a new country.
The shift has been dramatic. In 1996, variations of "illegal" accounted for 82 percent of the language used in news reports about unauthorized immigration. By 2013, that figure had dropped to 57 percent. "Undocumented immigrant" rose from 6 percent to 14 percent over the same period.
In 2013, the Associated Press—whose style guide influences newsrooms across the country—changed its guidance. It now recommends describing actions as illegal, not people. You can write about "illegal immigration" or someone who "entered the country illegally," but not an "illegal immigrant."
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and USA Today followed with similar guidance. The Washington Post still considers "illegal immigrant" acceptable but prohibits "illegal aliens" and "illegals."
President Joe Biden's proposed United States Citizenship Act of 2021 would have removed the word "alien" from federal immigration law entirely, replacing it with "noncitizen."
Critics of these language changes argue they're euphemisms designed to obscure lawbreaking. Supporters argue that calling a person "illegal" defines their entire identity by a single civil infraction—something we don't do with, say, people who jaywalk or speed.
The Constitutional Showdown
The legal question at the heart of the sanctuary city debate is genuinely complicated: Can the federal government force local authorities to help enforce federal law?
The Constitution grants the federal government power over immigration. No one disputes that. But it also includes the Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers not granted to the federal government to the states and the people. And the Supreme Court has ruled, in cases not specifically about immigration, that the federal government cannot "commandeer" state and local officials to carry out federal programs.
In other words, Congress can pass immigration laws. The executive branch can enforce them using federal employees. But Washington probably can't force your local police department to do the enforcing for them.
What the federal government can do is attach conditions to federal funding. Don't want to cooperate with immigration enforcement? Fine—but maybe you don't get that homeland security grant.
The Trump administration tested these boundaries aggressively. In January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that jurisdictions failing to comply with certain information-sharing requirements would be ineligible for federal grants.
The response was swift and split along predictable lines.
Thirty-three states introduced or enacted legislation requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. California went the opposite direction, passing laws that openly defied the administration's attempts to pressure sanctuary cities.
In March 2018, the Department of Justice sued California, Governor Jerry Brown, and Attorney General Xavier Becerra, claiming state laws made it impossible for federal immigration officials to do their jobs. The lawsuit called the laws unconstitutional and accused California of deliberately obstructing federal enforcement.
Courts have issued mixed rulings. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked key provisions of Trump's executive order as unconstitutional. A federal appeals court in Seattle later overturned a nationwide injunction against the administration. Different judges in different jurisdictions have reached different conclusions about different policies.
This legal uncertainty persists. The fundamental question—how much can the federal government pressure localities to cooperate with immigration enforcement—doesn't have a definitive answer.
A Different Meaning Across the Atlantic
If you hear the term "sanctuary city" in Europe, it means something quite different.
European sanctuary cities focus on supporting legal refugees and asylum seekers—people who have applied for protection through official channels and are waiting for decisions, or who have been granted refugee status. The term doesn't typically refer to protecting people from deportation or shielding those who entered illegally.
Over 80 towns and cities across the United Kingdom have adopted sanctuary policies. Glasgow and Swansea are perhaps the most prominent. These policies emphasize building community connections, raising awareness about refugee issues, and creating cultural ties between longtime residents and newcomers.
The contrast highlights how the same term can carry very different political meanings in different contexts. In America, "sanctuary city" is a flashpoint in debates about illegal immigration and federal power. In Britain, it's more closely associated with humanitarian responses to the global refugee crisis.
The Underlying Tension
Strip away the political rhetoric, and sanctuary city debates reveal a genuine tension in how we think about law and community.
One view holds that laws are laws. Immigration rules exist for reasons—managing population flows, protecting workers, maintaining security. If people break those rules, there should be consequences. Local officials who shield lawbreakers are themselves violating their duty to uphold the law. And when some jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal authorities, they shift the burden to jurisdictions that do cooperate, creating fundamental unfairness.
Another view holds that laws serve communities, not the other way around. When enforcing a law does more harm than good—when it breaks up families, drives people into the shadows, makes communities less safe overall—local officials have not just the right but the responsibility to use discretion. Every level of government makes choices about which laws to prioritize. A police department that focuses on violent crime rather than jaywalking isn't undermining the rule of law; it's exercising judgment about how to keep people safe.
Both views contain truth. Laws do matter, and selective enforcement creates legitimate concerns about fairness and consistency. But rigid enforcement without regard for consequences isn't justice either—it's just bureaucracy.
Where Things Stand
The sanctuary city debate has become one of those issues where the positions have hardened and the middle ground has eroded.
Supporters see sanctuary policies as humane, practical, and consistent with American values of welcoming immigrants. They point to research suggesting these policies don't increase crime and may strengthen local economies.
Opponents see them as lawless, dangerous, and a betrayal of citizens who expect their government to control the borders. They point to specific cases of crimes committed by people who were released rather than turned over to immigration authorities.
The legal battles continue. The political battles certainly continue. And in cities across America, local officials continue making decisions—sometimes formally, sometimes informally—about how much they'll cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
What started with eight churches in 1982 making a religious statement about sheltering refugees has become a defining fault line in American politics. The fundamental questions it raises—about federal versus local power, about law versus discretion, about who belongs in America and who decides—show no signs of being resolved anytime soon.