Sanctuary Cities in an Age of Resistance

by

On a rainy Saturday in mid-December, thousands of people packed Manhattan’s Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for a Migrants Day march to Trump Tower. Amid the diverse throng were scores of undocumented residents, targeted for expulsion in Trump’s America. Yet the message of the moment was not fear, but hope.

“We are proud to be called a sanctuary city,” New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito declared at the event, which was organized by the New York Immigration Coalition and sponsored by eighty-five groups. Her remarks and those of other speakers were galvanizing, and comforting, like the sanctuary city movement itself.

“I can feel this sense of security,” Jan Bautista, a sophomore at Queens College, told me afterward. “If I were somewhere else, it would feel pretty tense and scary. With the political climate, sanctuary cities are very helpful to us. The sense of security is what we value the most from the progressive community.”

“I can feel this sense of security,” Jan Bautista, a sophomore at Queens College, told me afterward. “If I were somewhere else, it would feel pretty tense and scary. With the political climate, sanctuary cities are very helpful to us. The sense of security is what we value the most from the progressive community.”

An ambitious student exploring a career in finance, Bautista could imagine himself leaving New York City, but only for another sanctuary jurisdiction. He is among scores of undocumented residents whose status was left unresolved under President Obama and could turn critical under President Trump. Obama’s centerpiece immigration initiative was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which lets people who migrated as children work without threat of deportation. Because of this status, an estimated 50,000 people can legally live and work in New York City. Bautista met every bullet point in the long list of criteria but one: He didn’t arrive before 2007. 

Bautista moved to New York City from the Philippines because he and his mother could no longer afford his rising tuition costs. Before he reached Manila, he subsisted with his family on a farm. He knew full well that going without a private education could limit his options in the Philippines for the rest of his life. He entered the United States on a temporary tourist visa to live with his cousin, a recently discharged Iraq War veteran, who looked after him while he finished his last two years at Flushing High School in Queens.

Without the benefit of DACA, Bautista turned to New York City’s municipal ID program, a critical sanctuary policy in a state that bans the undocumented from obtaining driver’s licenses. This ID, which anyone over age fourteen can obtain, allowed Bautista to open a bank account. Natalia Aristizabal, lead organizer with the advocacy group Make the Road New York, says the program enables the undocumented to engage in daily activities citizens take for granted. Parents can get on public school premises to see their children or attend parent-teacher conferences. And undocumented residents can now identify themselves to police, if necessary, without calling attention to their immigration status.

This effort is a small component of a much larger sanctuary city movement.

“Across the nation,” The New York Times reported, “officials in sanctuary cities are gearing up to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump if he follows through on a campaign promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants.” The Times story said more than 500 local governments have “some kind” of policy limiting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That number could increase.

“With every attack on sanctuary cities, they become more sophisticated and expansive,” explains Peter Mancina, who wrote a dissertation on San Francisco’s sanctuary history. “I don’t know if Republicans anticipated the expansion of them.”

“I can feel this sense of security,” Jan Bautista, a sophomore at Queens College, told me afterward. “If I were somewhere else, it would feel pretty tense and scary. With the political climate, sanctuary cities are very helpful to us. The sense of security is what we value the most from the progressive community.”

After Trump’s election, mayors vowed to protect their immigrant communities using policies of noncooperation with ICE. “We’ll proudly stand as a sanctuary city,” declared Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. New Haven Mayor Toni Harp promised “no city official will be an agent for ICE.” New York City’s Bill de Blasio is mulling whether to delete records of undocumented residents who registered for municipal IDs, vowing not “to sacrifice a half-million people who live amongst us.”

For all the ensuing talk about sanctuary cities as siege fortresses in Trump’s assault on immigrants, there is a broad misconception of what they really are. Sanctuary cities can’t stop ICE from crashing into people’s homes or raiding workplaces. What city agencies can do is avoid reporting the immigration statuses of their residents to ICE, which is seldom required of them anyway. Local police can release their temporary detainees instead of handing them over to ICE for deportation proceedings, since immigration enforcement is well beyond their job description.

Mancina notes that sanctuary cities are hardly radical. “There is a very big difference,” he argues, “between the sanctuary movement and sanctuary cities.” Far from exemplars of civil disobedience, sanctuary cities by definition require employees to “follow the law to a T.” When the federal government issues warrants, for example, city officials must cooperate or face criminal penalties. Despite the tough talk, Mancina adds, no sanctuary city calls for summary noncooperation with ICE. What sanctuary cities do—or ought to do—is the bare minimum required by law, and nothing more.

In fact, local governments routinely stick their necks out for ICE. Since 2014, federal courts have repeatedly found that ICE violated Fourth Amendment safeguards against unlawful arrest and detention. That leaves municipal authorities potentially liable for jailing people beyond their release dates, without probable cause, at ICE’s voluntary request (what the government calls “detainers” ). In one case, a judge forced a county in Oregon to pay damages to a detainee. Last October, the Northern District Court of Illinois determined that most detainers issued by ICE’s Chicago field office were invalid on these grounds.

The rightwing anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) claims ICE has only one agent per 2,000 undocumented residents. If the goal is to expel all eleven million “people who are simply in the country illegally,” as FAIR’s Ira Mehlman put it to me, then Trump’s promised “deportation force” sounds like small beer. FAIR’s answer is to enlist 900,000 local police.

Barack Obama’s record three million deportations leaned heavily on pliant localities. His Priority Enforcement Program requires local authorities to submit the fingerprints of all arrestees to a national database, putting the undocumented at risk. Lacking the power to enforce immigration law, a handful of counties even take part in a federal program that deputizes local officials for this purpose. When ICE wants to keep migrants imprisoned as they go through deportation proceedings, it frequently relies on local governments to lease them jail space.

A recent report by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, “Searching for Sanctuary,” found widespread cooperation with ICE in the 2,556 counties it surveyed. ICE’s deportation machine relies most heavily on county jurisdictions, the report argues, potentially compromising even the most disciplined sanctuary cities. The report revealed that 97 percent of counties allow ICE to interrogate immigrants in their custody. Ninety-four percent alert ICE when immigrants are scheduled for release. Seventy-five percent are willing to hold these immigrants at ICE’s request.

Few counties have policies in place to avoid unnecessarily inquiring about immigration status. Only San Francisco County and Cook County (which includes Chicago) had rules in place to prevent all of these excesses. The other 2,554 counties could do more to stop ICE.

“Counties don’t get it at all,” said the report’s co-author, Lena Graber. “First, they don’t necessarily think about it very critically. And thousands of them don’t even pay attention to federal courts saying that what they are doing is illegal. This is partly because it is very much not in ICE’s interest to tell them. Also, there’s lots of misinformation swirling because of the politics of it, and the threats from Republicans that make it sound like not actively helping ICE with whatever they want is illegal.”

Even in the Trump era, activists can pressure localities to adopt the full array of sanctuary policies, especially in places where migrants are a political force. Doing so may well be in cities’ interests in any case. Graber sees the unfavorable court rulings as a factor in the growth of sanctuary cities, leaving them at risk of lawsuits if they maintain the status quo. Plus, immigration enforcement diverts police resources from serious crimes.

In short, says Graber, “The cost of deportations really falls on localities.”

In 2013, activist groups fought for, and got, a pilot program in New York City that provides funding for immigration defenses. After Trump’s election, Los Angeles—city and county—pledged $10 million for legal aid in deportation cases, a proactive form of sanctuary.

“It turns out that quite a few migrants facing deportation can win their case, but they have to have an attorney to defend them,” says Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights (NMCIR), one of the groups that pressured the city.

A Bloomberg era study by NMCIR with the help of the New York University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic described Northern Manhattan’s Dominican neighborhoods as “ground zero” for deportations. In a five-year span, 7,000 New York City children lost a parent this way.

“We have been targeted in the Obama presidency,” Fernandez says.

“We have been targeted in the Obama presidency.”

Obama’s emphasis on deporting criminals meant that the people NMCIR advocates for—mostly indigent legal residents—were at risk of deportation for minor convictions committed years ago. An expanding war on drugs increased deportation cases by extension, creating massive backlogs in immigration courts. According to Fernandez, one of NMCIR’s clients had her green card revoked because of a decades-old conviction stemming from being at a party where drugs were present, even though she herself wasn’t using. Now she lives under the threat of deportation from the country where she has lived since childhood.

As defendants, people in deportation cases lack attorney rights because immigration is technically civil rather than criminal law. Deportation cases are distressing, drawn out, expensive undertakings. If they are not detained, defendants who go before New York’s immigration courts win three-quarters of their cases. Without counsel, that figure drops to 13 percent. Having a lawyer increases detainees’ chances six-fold. By one 2011 count, just 40 percent of immigrants in New York’s courts had lawyers when their cases concluded.

“De Blasio has done more than any recent mayor in New York City,” Fernandez says. After Trump won, the mayor and City Council reaffirmed the city’s sanctuary commitments in writing, quickly passing a resolution intended to reassure restive communities. She says deportation forces responded to the mayor’s sanctuary policies with more home raids.

These tend to happen by surprise in the early morning. ICE officials, she says, can make arrests without saying why. Fernandez tells of one instance in which agents went to a home for recovering drug addicts looking for a longtime resident in his sixties who is now in deportation proceedings. This happened, she says, after a social worker encouraged him to apply for a green card, which requires fingerprints that go into a national database.

Trump and other Republicans have loudly threatened to choke off federal funding to sanctuary cities, with a headline figure of $650 billion at risk. One of Trump’s first acts as President was to sign an executive order to his effect. 

It’s no coincidence that deep blue Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles are in the GOP’s crosshairs. Sixty-six percent of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposed cuts come from programs for people with low and middle incomes.

“It’s a full-on federal assault on cities,” Mancina says. “They’re saying, ‘We’re going to cut infrastructure for everyone,’ whether they’re citizens or not.”

Fiscal threats against sanctuary cities are part of a longstanding austerity agenda. In the pre-Reagan years, central cities counted on federal and state governments for as much as 44 percent of their budgets. Now federal funds comprise only about 10 percent of New York City’s budget. For Los Angeles and San Francisco, this figure drops to 6 and 5 percent respectively.

In fact, it’s unlikely that Congress could enact across-the-board cuts as part of an anti-sanctuary bill without getting mired in legal challenges. They could, however, target law enforcement-related programs, potentially forcing civic leaders to shift funds away from the social contract.

In effect, cities encourage gentrification to offset eroding tax bases, cultivating luxury class residents. Leading sanctuary cities have exorbitant living costs as a result. New York’s housing shortage leaves immigrant households twice as likely to live in crowded conditions and more rent stressed. It isn’t hard to imagine them moving from a sanctuary city to far less hospitable municipalities for these reasons.

Potential funding gaps leave the door wide open for city leaders to further privatize municipal functions. Half of Los Angeles’s legal defense fund reportedly comes from private fundraising. Oakland now seeks philanthropic funding sources to which wealthy donors can attach strings. A crackdown on sanctuary cities could lead to service cuts or deepening dependence on handouts with terms set by Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

“This is going to affect all low- and moderate-income people,” Mancina says.

The real movement driving city sanctuary isn’t in any hall of power, but on streets, in homes, and in churches. It draws strength not from urban elites, who will ultimately obey unjust deportation laws, but in groups like the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City. 

This consortium of religious congregations helps an estimated 200 to 300 people per year. It informs people of their rights, accompanies them to hearings, and provides physical sanctuary. The last is particularly painful for migrants who have final deportation orders, says the group’s organizer, Ravi Ragbir, at his office in Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church. Sanctuary stays are open-ended and confining. Even then, there’s no hard and fast rule that says ICE can’t raid church-provided sanctuaries.

“If there is a civil administration, we would expect them to uphold the sanctity of the space,” Ragbir told me before Trump’s inauguration. “The façade of civility is going to go out the window very soon.”

During our interview last December, Ragbir kept an eye on his computer screen. The latest news was about how ICE had rounded up eighty-two migrants in New Jersey. The article he showed me dutifully noted ICE’s success in finding seven serious criminals. No further information was provided on the other seventy-five, who could be stuck in the Kafka-esque prison archipelago that flourished under Obama. 

Ragbir should know, having himself spent two years in detention. A legal resident from Trinidad, Ragbir narrowly avoided deportation because community activists rallied around his case. I ask about his prison conditions, and get a succinct answer: horrible. You could file grievances, he said, but guards won’t respond because you’re on the verge of deportation.

“Those conditions are going to get extremely harder,” Ragbir believes, predicting counties will fall in line as ICE seeks jails. “Everyone is terrified. They don’t know what to do. All they know is they’re afraid that [under Trump] their lives are going to be in upheaval.”

If nothing else, Trump inspires awareness, argues Salvador Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “I think some are just realizing how much hate there is, but we’ve been seeing aggressive violence against day laborers for some time,” he says, from police harassment to wage theft. He anticipates more workplace raids by an administration that sees day labor hiring as a criminal enterprise. 

Bautista risks deportation if he works to pay for his education. Being undocumented expanded his political consciousness despite a conservative military family background. He works with other young adults at the Queens-based MinKwon Center for Community Action, a co-sponsor of the Migrants Day march. MinKwon helped Bautista navigate byzantine immigration rules, and in the process brought him into the activist fold. This is how a broken system generates its own opposition, no matter who sits in the White House.

“Our power has never been in D.C.,” Sarmiento, the day laborers’ organizer, says. “This is the time to build locally for the resistance that’s coming.”