When Donald Trump fired Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday, she said sanctuary cities had made her job hard.
“Sanctuary cities do give us a challenge because it makes it difficult at times for law enforcement to do their work,” she told local police executives from across the country at a conference in Nashville. “And we see that many times when a city cooperates with the federal government, cooperates with our federal officers, that it is safer.”
Since re-taking office last year, Trump has targeted sanctuary jurisdictions – where local laws aim to limit the deportations of undocumented immigrants – saying they are “death traps” that “breed crime”.
He plans to halt federal payments to sanctuary jurisdictions. He has already implemented an unyielding immigration crackdown, stationing thousands of federal agents in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago and Washington DC – all areas where sanctuary policies are law.
Despite Trump’s and Noem’s insistence, studies have found no correlation between sanctuary policies and increased crime rates. Since the sanctuary movement began in the 1980s to protect and aid Central American refugees, more than 300 US states, cities and towns have implemented sanctuary policies, including restricting local police from sharing information with federal agents. As a result, researchers have found positive outcomes across sanctuary jurisdictions, including reduced domestic violence against Hispanic women, higher labor-force participation and less reliance on public assistance.
The policies that undergird sanctuary jurisdictions today aren’t enough to protect immigrants – local police in sanctuary cities still routinely assist federal immigration enforcement, legal experts said. But the sanctuary movement has been successful at highlighting the failings of the US immigration system and how civil disobedience can save immigrant lives, social movement experts said.
“The fact that [Trump] is targeting sanctuary efforts shows how meaningful these actions are and have always been,” said Susan Coutin, a professor of criminology, law and society and anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the US Sanctuary Movement. “They wouldn’t be targeted if they weren’t having an impact that spans decades.”
Religious leaders and the sanctuary movement
The sanctuary movement first sprang up in the US in the 1980s, as civil wars raged in Central America and thousands of people fled north.
The US government had been engaging in proxy wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua as part of a cold war strategy to combat Soviet influence. In El Salvador, where the US contributed $6bn in military funding throughout the 1980s, the rightwing authoritarian government killed more than 75,000 civilians and left millions displaced in a 12-year civil war.
The US and Salvadorian governments denied the crime for decades, but the impact of the state’s violence was clear: In 1980, the US census reported that there were 94,000 Salvadorians living in the country, but that number catapulted to 465,000 by 1990 as they fled political upheaval and economic decline.
Yet the Reagan administration denied asylum to the vast majority of these Salvadorians and other Central Americans who journeyed to the US’s southern border. So religious leaders, believing they were facing a moral crisis, stepped in, sometimes smuggling refugees across the border. This gave birth to the sanctuary movement that is still growing today.
When congregations of various faiths – Christian, Jewish, Quaker, Unitarian, Buddhist and more – declared themselves “sanctuaries” in the 1980s, they invoked old religious traditions of protecting the stranger. The leaders also modeled their efforts on the 19th-century Underground Railroad, in which abolitionists helped enslaved people escape slavery.
Churches offered housing, food and legal support to families, while some provided “public sanctuary” by openly sheltering individuals in church buildings to draw media attention to the US’s restrictive asylum policy, which discriminated against immigrants from Central America. Other leaders chose to privately help families avoid detention and deportation. At the movement’s early peak in 1986, an estimated 300 churches had backed the movement, directly housing and assisting some 1,500 people from Central America.
As the church-based effort gained visibility, cities and states began to take action. In the 1980s, several municipalities declared themselves “cities of refuge”, issuing statements that criticized federal foreign and immigration policy and affirmed support for newcomers from Central America. Major cities, including San Francisco; Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; and Washington DC passed sanctuary resolutions in the 1980s. So did smaller ones like Somerville, Massachusetts, and Urbana, Illinois. New Mexico went further by declaring itself a sanctuary state in 1986. These local declarations included policy measures such as limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. City policies restricted information sharing or instructed local police not to enforce federal immigration law.
The Reagan administration mounted a forceful response. Federal authorities infiltrated sanctuary congregations and prosecuted leaders. In the most famous case, the Arizona sanctuary trial, 11 religious leaders and activists were charged with conspiracy and “alien smuggling”. The conviction of eight of them put the sanctuary movement in the national spotlight and prompted new congregations to join.
The case also created a chilling effect, Coutin said, that led to a decline in the movement toward the end of the 1980s. Yet, the movement secured clear victories. After a coalition of 80 religious and advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for discriminating against Salvadorian and Guatemalan asylum seekers, the government settled, granting new immigration protections to hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The resulting 1990 Immigration Act created the temporary protected status, which gave legal status to designated foreign nationals fleeing armed conflict, environmental disasters or other “extraordinary” conditions, and which was first granted to Salvadorians.
Lessons for dealing with ICE today
Social movement experts said that there are echoes of the early sanctuary movement in today’s immigration debates.
As Trump sends federal agents into sanctuary cities, religious leaders are putting their bodies on the line, as they did in the 80s. As Trump campaigned against sanctuary cities during his first term, his rhetoric and aggressive enforcement operations prompted local governments to strengthen protections. In 2017, California became the most populous sanctuary state when it adopted the California Values Act to limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents.
“Like in the past, the problematic nature of immigration enforcement is leading to a shift in public opinion and support for sanctuary cities,” said Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, a co-author of Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge and a professor of political science at San Diego State University. “The current movement is also drawing attention to the need for comprehensive immigration reform and a safe pathway for undocumented labor.”
By creating “a more welcoming environment”, sanctuary policies can also have positive effects on Latino voter turnout, Gonzalez O’Brien said he found in his research with his co-author, University of New Mexico political scientist Loren Collingwood. Another study found that domestic homicide was lower for Hispanic women in sanctuary jurisdictions since the policies boost cooperation between immigrant communities and local law enforcement to improve public safety.
However, research also shows the shortcomings of sanctuary cities. Sanctuary policies have not significantly reduced immigration enforcement because local law enforcement still cooperates with ICE behind the scenes, said Peter Mancina, the author of On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State. When Mancina examined how law enforcement was implementing the California Values Act, he found that the state was still turning over 60% of people in local jails to ICE.
More recently, critics grew skeptical of Washington DC’s sanctuary law when the city allowed police to cooperate with ICE at traffic stops of moped delivery drivers last summer. Some Chicagoans are asking an oversight committee to investigate whether police officers assisted ICE during “Operation Midway Blitz” in 2025 in violation of the city’s sanctuary policy.
As the sanctuary movement goes forward, Mancina said, there’s room for more accountability and enforcement of policies so that they truly protect immigrant communities.
Meanwhile, some city leaders are reinforcing their sanctuary protections. When Trump sent thousands of federal troops to Minneapolis in January, the mayor emphasized the city’s sanctuary policy to not cooperate with ICE. Meanwhile, hundreds of clergy from inside and outside the city demanded that immigration agents leave the city. In one action, 250 clergy members led some 2,000 participants in a protest at the Minneapolis-St Paul international airport. Before ICE arrested about 100 of the clergy members, the faith leaders knelt down in prayer.
In a message reminiscent of the energy that animated the early days of the sanctuary movement, one reverend wrote: “So many of us are outraged by this needless, punitive trauma. But we will be meek: angry, but not violent. Assertive, but not prideful. Humble, but not doormats.”
