Warnings from the Birth of the ‘Sanctuary’ Movement

I recently found an article that appeared in the New York Times two days before Christmas in 1985, when the “sanctuary” city movement was in its nascent stage, headlined “Aid to Aliens Said to Spur Illegal Immigration”. The warnings therein presage the battle increasingly pitting Donald Trump’s DHS against “sanctuary” states and localities — and like the civil wars in Central America that spawned them, it’s time to put sanctuary policies to rest and free ICE to go after alien criminals.

The Center’s “Sanctuary” Map

The Center defines “sanctuary jurisdictions” as:

cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

That definition accompanies our map that identifies the “cities, counties, and states” with such “laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices”.

That map has become a touchstone — or a flashpoint, depending on your point of view — for policymakers seeking to expand (or restrict) immigration enforcement, and it remains the best single resource for determining which jurisdictions actively impede ICE.

EO 14287, “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens”

In his April 28, 2025, executive order 14287, “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens”, President Trump directed the Department of Justice (DOJ), in coordination with DHS, to publish their own “list of States and local jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws (sanctuary jurisdictions)”.

In compliance with that directive, DOJ published such a list on August 5. It identifies 18 cities (including Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City), four counties (my birthplace of Baltimore County, Md., among them), and 12 states (none of which will comes as a surprise).

That most current DOJ sanctuary list is a pared down version of a much larger one with 594 separate jurisdictions that appeared, briefly, in May before being quickly pulled down and reworked.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on August 5, “several jurisdictions objected to” their inclusion on that earlier list, “including Las Vegas, Huntington Beach, Calif., and Oakland County, Mich.”

“If It Was only Going After Dangerous Criminals, There Would Be No Debate”

Their objections are notable but not surprising, because even though many local officials find political value in actively stonewalling immigration enforcement, they still want to appear concerned about criminal aliens.

Consider the following, from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who in complaining about “indiscriminate” ICE “sweeps” in the Golden State, argued that while Trump:

claims to be prioritizing those violent, dangerous criminals [,t]he numbers suggest otherwise: the vast majority of people that have been detained, and even those deported, have no serious criminal conviction history. If it was only going after dangerous criminals, there would be no debate, no discussion. I agree with that. But the fact of the matter is, the vast majority of those being detained are the same people who were deemed essential workers at the end of the first Trump Administration at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a cruel, cruel irony. [Emphasis added.]

Speaking of “cruel, cruel ironies”, Padilla should know better.

Before being appointed to the U.S. Senate to replace then-Vice President Kamala Harris, he was a state senator, president of the Los Angeles City Council — and California secretary of state when the state’s Senate Bill (SB) 54, the “California Values Act”, was passed and took effect.

According to the legislative “factsheet” for SB 54, under that act:

State and local law enforcement agencies and school police and security departments cannot engage in immigration enforcement except in narrow circumstances. With a few exceptions, no state or local resources will be used to investigate, detain, detect, report, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes. And regardless of whether state or local resources are implicated, state or local law enforcement agency will be prohibited from detaining any person for deportation without a judicial warrant.

As I have explained in the past, there’s no mechanism ICE can use to seek a “judicial warrant” for civil immigration enforcement, and in February, Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni spoke out against SB 54, complaining it “is making it harder for ICE and easier for criminals to go back into the community”.

That was a common refrain I heard when I was in San Diego in March.

If Sen. Padilla “agrees” that ICE should “go after” alien criminals and believes there’s “no debate, no discussion” about the agency doing so, he should convince California to abrogate SB 54.

My three decades of law-enforcement experience have taught me that jails are the best place to find criminals, yet under SB 54, ICE is, as the report on Sheriff Zanoni’s comments put it, the “only law enforcement agency not allowed to go into county jails in California”.

As I have argued of late, if ICE were allowed into California’s jails and prisons, the agency would be so busy identifying, processing, and taking custody of alien criminals that officers wouldn’t need (and probably wouldn’t have resources) to hit the streets looking for them instead.

But SB 54 deliberately forces ICE to go looking for those criminals in the community, and it’s there the agency also finds other aliens removable on non-criminal grounds — the aliens with “no serious criminal conviction history” Padilla refers to and claims to care about.

But the senator hasn’t spoken out against SB 54, and likely won’t. ICE enforcement is a complicated issue, and sanctimony feeds on ambiguity like a turkey vulture feasts on roadside carrion.

The Impact of the Central American Civil Wars on Immigration under Reagan

To understand how the sanctuary movement began, you must go back to the Reagan administration, when the United States was heavily involved in internecine conflicts in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and (to a lesser degree) Guatemala.

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration was backing the “Contras”, a counterrevolutionary group opposed to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government that had overthrown U.S. ally Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979.

That Sandinista victory spurred revolutionaries from the El Salvadoran Farabundo Martí National Liberation Movement (FMLN) to seek to overthrow a U.S.-supported right-wing military junta that took over that country in January 1980.

The Salvadoran civil war spurred allegations of human-rights abuses on both sides (though more on the government side) and continued until a UN-negotiated peace settlement was signed in January 1992.

Guatemala, on the other hand, had been the locus of various Castro-inspired revolutionary groups all the way back to the 1960s (that the Cold War United States government opposed), but the civil war there really heated up in the mid-1980s and continued into the Clinton administration before fizzling out.

U.S. involvement in those wars divided Americans (and triggered “Iran-Contra”, the only real “scandal” of the Reagan years), but more importantly spurred a then-unprecedented “wave” of Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan “refugees” to leave home and come the United States seeking protection under the then-new Refugee Act of 1980.

But as the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has explained:

The Reagan administration regarded policy toward Central American migrants as part of its overall strategy in the region.

. . .

Characterizing the Salvadorans and Guatemalans as “economic migrants,” the Reagan administration denied that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments had violated human rights. As a result, approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under three percent in 1984. In the same year, the approval rate for Iranians was 60 percent, 40 percent for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, and 32 percent for Poles.

In response, as MPI notes, Congress in 1990 added “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) to section 244 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to protect aliens in the United States fleeing (among other things) violent civil conflicts, a designation that’s been serially applied (and abused) by various administrations over the years.

The Reagan administration’s reluctance to grant asylum to those aliens also led to a 1991 settlement agreement in American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh (ABC settlement agreement), which granted immigration benefits to certain Guatemalan and Salvadoran nationals who claimed they were discriminated against in the asylum process.

The Sanctuary Movement “Is Going to Damage the Future of this Nation”

Most saliently, however, it launched the “sanctuary” movement, which brings me to the front page of the December 23, 1985, edition of the New York Times, and an article marked “special” to the paper, a term used to describe an “exclusive” in the pre-internet days when dead-tree media and three broadcast networks reigned supreme and unchallenged.

That article begins:

Federal officials say a spreading campaign by religious groups to designate American cities as sanctuaries for illegal aliens has stimulated a new flow of immigrants from Central America. …

The campaign to persuade cities to declare themselves sanctuaries for immigrants from Central American countries is being led by a coalition of Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders.”

In these secular times, it may be difficult to believe religious leaders ever had that much sway, but they did.

So much so that when the Times article appeared, 12 cities and towns (including Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Chicago) had all “given formal support to the sanctuary movement in one form or another”, with NYC Mayor Ed Koch “sign[ing] a memorandum instructing department heads not to report refugees to the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] unless they were suspected of criminal activity unrelated to their status as illegal aliens”.

As Mark Twain once quipped, “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends”; nowhere is that truer than in this context.

Speaking of history and repetition, the 1985 Times article quoted David Ilchert, then-district director of the INS’s San Francisco office (and my old client in that role) who explained:

They want to come to the Promised Land, they want the good life. … If they were seeking merely to escape life-threatening war or oppression … the immigrants would stop their trek as soon as they entered Mexico or another country. … These [sanctuary] resolutions are tragically sending out false hope to these people, that if you can get to this city or that city, it’s going to be safe. Well, it’s not safe.

That’s all as true now as it was then, but a more dire assessment was offered by Harold Ezell, then-INS regional director for the Western Region, who warned that if the sanctuary movement were to spread, it “is going to damage the future of this nation”.

Back to the Present

Which brings me to the present. Today, the sanctuary fever has reached such a pitch that, as the Heritage Foundation’s inestimable Hans von Spakovsky recently noted on Fox News, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is suing a Mesa County deputy sheriff “for sharing information about an illegal alien with federal authorities”.

Did I mention the deputy in question was a member of a drug task force with federal officers, or that federal statutes specifically bar states and localities from prohibiting such communications (as my colleague, George Fishman, recently explained)?

I might not go as far as the president did in EO 14278 as describing sanctuary policies as “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States”, but I heartily concur with his assessment that, “It is imperative that the Federal Government restore the enforcement of United States law.”

And I also second Harold Ezell’s 1985 conclusion that those sanctuary policies are “going to damage the future of this nation”, with the most harm inflicted on the immigrant communities in which most alien criminals live, and where they prey on and harm the innocent.

If, as Sen. Padilla contends, there’s “no debate, no discussion” about whether ICE should be allowed to go after criminal aliens, why aren’t sanctuaries like Padilla’s California letting ICE do just that? The civil wars in Central America are over, and it’s time to put the sanctuary movement they spurred to rest.