What does a sanctuary city mean? Los Angeles adopts sanctuary city ordinance
The Los Angeles City Council adopted a sanctuary city ordinance on Tuesday as President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for a mass deportation of undocumented migrants looms.
The ordinance prohibits the use of city resources, including personnel and property, from being used for immigration enforcement or to cooperate with federal immigration agents pursuing immigration enforcement.
Hundreds of cities have adopted sanctuary policies, although the strength of these policies varies, said Loren Collingwood in a phone interview with The Desert Sun. He is an associate professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and co-author of “Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge.” Collingwood estimated the number to be around 400, which he said researchers could dispute and be larger but is based on various methods of collecting these ordinances that different towns and cities pass.
The existence of sanctuary policies goes back decades. Collingwood pointed to a sanctuary movement involving churches in response to Central Americans fleeing conflict and seeking asylum in the 1980s. Before that, there was a Vietnam War sanctuary city movement in Berkeley. Sanctuary policies also saw a “mild expansion” after 9/11 with aims of protecting Muslims and Muslim Americans, he said.
“Sanctuary policies are effectively reactive, and so the biggest boom of sanctuary policies that we've seen have been in response to Trump and the Trump administration's initial immigration crackdown,” Collingwood said.
What is a sanctuary city?
There is no legal definition for a sanctuary policy, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, but at its core is the “idea that the federal government cannot compel jurisdictions to take part in immigration enforcement,” said the American Immigration Council. States, counties, and cities have adopted various policies, and the strongest policies have “some sort of enforcement mechanism that actually protects undocumented immigrants,” Collingwood said.
The strong sanctuary policies, for example, will place "extreme limits" on detainer requests, Collingwood said. That’s when Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests that local or state law enforcement maintain custody of an individual arrested for longer so that ICE can assume custody over them, according to the American Immigration Council. Some sanctuary cities will state that they won’t spend their money or resources on immigration enforcement or ask questions about someone’s immigration status, Collingwood said.
The latter, he explained, is to make sure undocumented immigrants can get the various city services they need done without fear of facing deportation.
Other sanctuary policies include preventing immigration detention centers or not allowing ICE into local jails without a warrant, said the American Immigration Council.
Paris Barraza is a trending reporter covering California news at The Desert Sun. Reach her at pbarraza@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @ParisBarraza.