In Los Angeles, where nearly half of the city’s residents are Latino, Mayor Eric Garcetti has vowed to do everything he can to fight widespread deportations of unauthorized immigrants.
In New York, with a large and diverse Latino population, Mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged not to cooperate with immigration agents, while Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has declared that it “will always be a sanctuary city.”
Across the nation, officials in sanctuary cities are gearing up to oppose US president-elect Donald Trump if he follows through on a campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally. They are promising to maintain their policies of limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents.
In doing so, municipal officials risk losing millions of dollars in federal assistance for their cities. Trump has vowed to block all federal funding for cities where local law enforcement agencies do not cooperate with immigration and customs enforcement agents.
As Trump prepares to take office, Democratic bastions, including Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, have reaffirmed plans to defy the administration and act as a kind of bulwark against mass deportations.
“I like to compare this to conscientious objector status,” Oakland, California, Mayor Libby Schaaf said. “We are not going to use our resources to enforce what we believe are unjust immigration laws.”
Supporters of tougher immigration policies expect a swift response.
Federation for American Immigration Reform president Dan Stein predicted “a very aggressive, no-holds-barred support for using the full power of the federal government to discourage this kind of interference.”
“These local politicians take it upon themselves to allow people who have been here for a long time to stay here and receive services,” Stein said. “The Trump administration is basically saying: ‘If you want to accommodate, don’t expect the rest of us to pay for your services.’”
Some say Trump could go further than simply pulling federal funding, perhaps fighting such policies in court or even prosecuting city leaders.
“This is uncharted territory in some ways, to see if they’re just playing chicken, or see if they will relent,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports reduced immigration.
Cities have “gotten away with this for a long time, because the federal government has never attempted to crack down on them,” Vaughan said.
The fight could also signal a twist in the struggle over the power of the federal government, as this time liberal cities — rather than conservative states — resist what they see as federal intervention.
Cities “may not have the power to give people rights, but they have a lot of power of resistance, and that’s what they’re displaying right now,” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at the New York University School of Law.
More than 500 US counties and cities have some kind of policy limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, according to an estimate from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an advocacy and legal assistance group in San Francisco and Washington.
The latest fight is beginning to play out much like one that occurred in the mid-1980s, when groups in the nation’s big cities resisted immigration policies of the administration of then-US president Ronald Reagan. Central Americans had become the subject of fierce political jockeying and scores of churches opened their doors as sanctuaries to flout the Reagan White House.
Members of churches and synagogues are again offering their houses of worship as sanctuaries for people fearing deportation, according to groups that work with immigrants and refugees.
A faith-based network known as the “sanctuary movement” was revived in the past few years to take in those at risk of deportation by the administration of US President Barack Obama.
In Oakland, a site of resistance a generation ago, Schaaf has no doubt that the community will again marshal its resources to help unauthorized immigrants. The city is exploring ways to offer legal services to immigrants.
“We do have many undocumented immigrants, but often these are residents who came to our city as toddlers. They have grown up here and gone to our public schools,” Schaaf said. “These are not illegal aliens, they are friends’ children, people sitting next to us in our church pews and on the bus. Here it feels much more personal.”
Oakland stands to lose as much as US$140 million in federal funding.
The latest clash will be most acutely felt in California, home to an estimated 2.3 million of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants. Not only does the state allow such immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, but it also offers them in-state college tuition and allows them to hold professional licenses to work as lawyers, architects and nurses. A state law passed in 2014 limits counties’ cooperation with federal officials.
The policies came under renewed attack last year, after a young woman was shot by an immigrant with a criminal record who lived in the state illegally and had been released by the authorities in San Francisco.
How much cities can fight off deportations remains unclear. Legal experts say that city officials cannot bar immigration agents and that it is unlikely that they could declare a physical sanctuary on public property. Much of their resistance might lie in simply not cooperating.
Rick Su, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who has researched immigration and local government, said that unless Trump ratchets up the number and reach of federal immigration agents, “it is difficult to see how he can achieve the 2 to 3 million removals that he has proposed without state and local assistance in identifying and detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants.”
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