Sanctuary Cities

Part of the method of President Trump's attempts at cracking down on illegal immigration is through executive order. Aside from the two attempts at creating a ban on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries in the middle-east, one of the targets of these orders has been the idea of what are called Sanctuary Cities. Now, we tend to think of these Sanctuary Cities either as safe havens for immigrants seeking refuge where they can be free from persecution, or as lawless places where anarchy rules and American values are destroyed. In reality, neither case is true.

First, when an arrest is made - for an unrelated incident, for example speeding - the local law enforcement will undergo a process that is standard regardless of where they are. The police will fingerprint the person(s) arrested, and then run those prints by an FBI database, which is then shared with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database. It is significant to note that this is mandatory. No local or state official can simply refuse to do this, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves a Sanctuary. Next, if it comes up that an individual is currently of undocumented or illegal status in the US, ICE will send a request (called a detainer request) to the local law enforcement to keep that person for a bit longer - another 48 hours past their normal release time - so that ICE officials can then come to the location in order to handle that person themselves (ie deport them). It's important to recognize that that's a key area where the difference is made. ICE will send a request to officers, which they are not required to comply with, and so local and state lawmakers may choose to endorse not complying with the request, so that the person will simply be handled as though they had simply committed whatever irrelevant transgression they were jailed for in the first place. 

The fact that the States are not required to comply with this order is accounted for in the Tenth Amendment, from which we've drawn the conclusion that States cannot be forced to enforce Federal law. 

It's important to note that even in Sanctuary Cities people still may be deported, even when police decide not to comply with detainer requests, as ICE officials have other methods by which they can operate that do not require local police to comply with requests. 

So why is this important? What does the president's executive order say about Sanctuary Cities? Essentially, the Executive Order, which has been blocked in part by a San Francisco federal judge, attempts to allow states to withhold federal funds from these local positions when they refuse to comply. This is a significant issue in the discussion about reforming immigration in the US, as it's an issue that so far has seen only fighting between states as to what should be done. A former executive order by President Obama had done the exact opposite of the order in question, by ordering that federal money could not be withheld by the state from cities if they should refuse to comply with ICE. 

It's become clear as time has gone on that law enforcement is in need of more clear information about crime and justice in the context of all of the issue concerning racially-motivated police problems. One of the facts consistently supported by studies has found that immigrants, regardless of legal status, are less likely to commit crimes than natural-born citizens. See the following quote from this article:

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the overall percentage of immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. both increased sharply between 1990 and 2010, the violent crime rate in the U.S. during that time plummeted 45 percent and the property crime rate dropped by 42 percent. Studies have consistently found that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans and that there was no correlation between crime rates and levels of immigration.  Other studies have in fact found that crime rates are lowest in states with the highest immigration growth rates.

In addition, in areas where the police are strict about following detainer requests it is actually much more difficult for police to do their jobs due to the fact that entire sections of the population are afraid to speak with them for fear of being deported. J. Thomas Manger, President of the Major Cities Chiefs Association said in a press conference that "the bad guys know that many immigrants will not call the police." This is very important when we consider that it is near impossible for a police officer to do their job (such as in collecting information regarding a case) when people can't trust the police as a whole. Charlie Beck, Chief of Police of the LAPD said in a statement that "Five hundred thousand people who live in Los Angeles are undocumented immigrants. I need their cooperation. I need them to work with their local police stations. I need them to be witnesses to violent crime."

Very recently in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has moved to pass his own order to deny funding to cities that can be considered Sanctuary Cities, exactly as Trump's order seeks to do throughout the nation. However, this can easily put local law enforcement in a tricky spot, as their decision over whether or not to detain an illegal immigrant will boil down to what the police station believes is more important - maintaining safety in the community by keeping the public's cooperation, or keeping themselves funded.