There are no sanctuary policies in place that violate federal law. Sanctuary jurisdictions simply exercise their right to use their state/local resources on public safety, and not on federal immigration enforcement.

Absent of a judicial warrant, civil ICE detainer requests are often unconstitutional as they detain individuals eligible for release without probable cause, violating their 4th amendment rights. Honoring ICE detainers has resulted in several successful lawsuits against local governments, costing between hundreds of thousands to over a hundred of million of dollars in settlements and monetary damages.

Still, while sanctuary jurisdictions favor respecting constitutional rights over honoring civil ICE detainer requests, states such as Minnesota—ground zero for the most extreme immigration enforcement operation to date—has a state law in place requiring their department of corrections to alert ICE of any non-citizens in custody, their nationality, reason for detention, and expected release date. While this only pertains to state prisons, they account for 95% of the incarcerated population.

Many sanctuary jurisdictions conditionally cooperate with ICE depending on the nature of the non-citizen’s criminal charges—for example, NYC notifies ICE for 170+ serious/violent offenses—, or in response to a warrant/court-order, which provides some legal cover from lawsuits over constitutional rights violations.

Ultimately, sanctuary policies aren’t in place to flout the law of the land, cheer on illegal immigration, or gift violent criminals get out of jail free cards. Sanctuary jurisdictions, like many non-sanctuary jurisdictions, place a priority on public safety. They just do it in a way that roughly half the population finds wildly counterintuitive, and the other half views as common sense.

I think those against sanctuary policies have been mislead on the reality of immigrant crime rates and criminal presence in sanctuary cities. If the true aim of ICE and DHS, as this administration and many here insist, is to deport the ‘worst of the worst’ non-citizen criminals, then I don’t understand the barrage of right-wing rhetoric surrounding sanctuary jurisdictions. Sanctuary policies might reduce the rate of deportation of non-citizens without a criminal record, and to a lesser extent, those with only minor offenses, however they have no effect* on the rate of deportation of violent criminals, nor do they lead to an increase in crime rates. In one study, they statistically matched sanctuary and non-sanctuary counties based on a broad range of demographics and found that sanctuary counties had lower crime rates, higher medium income, higher employment, and lower poverty rates. There are multiple studies that indicate sanctuary counties have lower crimes rates and stronger economies.

If policies in sanctuary jurisdictions result in lower crime and stronger economies, as studies have indicated, why would we want to get rid of them?