‘Sanctuary’ Policies Are at the Heart of L.A., Chicago, Portland Stand-Offs

Protests against ICE have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, with frog-suited activists and nude cyclists entering the fray as lawsuits and recriminations fly and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) threatens political prosecutions once electoral fortunes turn — the latter a twist on what beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) called “the Chicago way” in the 1987 classic, The Untouchables. At its heart, this is really a fight over “sanctuary” policies, which only provide sanctuary to the worst criminal aliens. If sanctuary jurisdictions truly believe only a small minority of immigrants are criminals, they should give ICE access to those few bad apples and they’ll almost definitely see the agency’s “at large” arrests plummet.

“Sanctuary Jurisdictions”

The Center uses the term “sanctuary jurisdictions” to refer to states and localities with laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminal aliens from ICE enforcement.

They do so by refusing ICE detainers for criminal detainees or prohibiting agencies from complying with those detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

When I began my career with the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a trial attorney in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, it was virtually unheard of for states and localities to refuse to assist federal officers in their duties — including immigration officers.

That’s because immigration arrests took dangerous criminals off the street and spared localities the costs of reincarcerating recidivists — and even if most illegal aliens aren’t criminals, criminal illegal aliens are criminals and criminals overall reoffend at sky-high rates.

In a May 2018 study, DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that of more than 400,000 state prisoners released in 2005, 44 percent were rearrested during the first year after release, an estimated 68 percent within three years, 79 percent within six years, and 83 percent within nine years.

I believe in redemption and reform, likely more than most, but I also live in the real world. You’d be a fool to ignore the recidivism stats and disregard human nature.

But sanctuary jurisdictions do both, either on the ground that cooperating with ICE will make it less likely that victims in immigrant communities will come forward or that immigration enforcement is the feds’ responsibility and therefore unworthy of state and local resources.

The Center examined the former claim in 2021 and found no evidence that it was true, while the second is the definition of short-sighted: As noted, criminals have a tendency to reoffend, meaning there will be additional local victims and more local resources must be spent to apprehend, detain, prosecute, and incarcerate repeat alien offenders who would otherwise have been deported.

“Defund the Police”

Complaints about immigration enforcement under Trump I spurred an “abolish ICE” movement; proponents of which usually centered their arguments around the contention that “immigrants are less — not more — likely to be involved in criminal activity than citizens”.

Given that legal immigrants are prescreened for criminality, and that most aliens are here legally, I hope that to be the case, but because state and local cops don’t usually ask about alienage, there is no real way to dispositively make such assertions about the criminal tendencies of those here unlawfully.

Not that it matters, because, again, criminal aliens are dispositively criminals and removing them drives the risk they’ll reoffend in this country down to close to zero.

That “abolish ICE” movement arose in the context of a larger “defund the police” wave, mostly but not exclusively on the left.

Proponents of that proposal usually argued that cops were the real issue, and/or that current policing “doesn’t lead to ‘accountability, and safety and transformative justice’ that would give people what they need to be ‘repaired, restored and healed from harm’”.

If that sounds like academic bushwa, it is, and wide majorities of Americans polled by Pew Research in October 2021 wanted police funding to either remain the same or to be increased, including respondents in Black and Hispanic communities.

Nonetheless, restricting immigration enforcement in the name of “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality” was, as I recently explained, the basis of most of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

That’s Ivy-League, sociology-department, faculty-lounge-grade bushwa, and not surprisingly, most voters rejected it last November, opting for a second helping of Donald Trump-quality immigration enforcement instead.

California, Oregon, and Illinois

But Trump did not receive a 50-state sweep in the 2024 presidential elections, and some Democrats governing jurisdictions he failed to win have decided to make opposition to ICE enforcement the hill they will die on by doubling down on their respective sanctuary statuses.

And when it comes to sanctuary policies, California’s SB 54, the so-called “California Values Act”, takes the cake.

That law prevents cops in the Golden State, “with exceptions”, from “using money or personnel to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes”, and also bars most communications between state and local cops and federal immigration officers.

When I was in San Diego in March, I heard any number of complaints about SB 54 (no one calls it “the California Values Act” with a straight face), but if you want to know why the president and his “border czar” Tom Homan chose Los Angeles as an initial target for wide-scale ICE enforcement operations, look no further than the text of that bill and L.A.’s own “sanctuary city” ordinance.

That Los Angeles operation, which netted more than 5,000 criminal alien arrests through late August, triggered massive “protests” cum riots in early June, during which both federal officers and local cops were attacked.

In response, and over the objections of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (D) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Trump called out the National Guard and the Marines, prompting the state to sue over the deployments.

ICE then launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in “Chicagoland” in early September.

Both Illinois and Chicago are on DOJ’s “Sanctuary Jurisdictions” list, the former due to its “TRUST Act” (which the state argues “helps bolster community trust and cooperation”), and the latter its “Welcoming City Ordinance” (because “Partnering with ICE would go against” its “mission to make Chicago the most immigrant friendly city in the country and turn” Chi-town “into a community of fear for immigrants”).

DHS claims the Chicago operation has resulted in 1,000-plus arrests, including suspected Tren de Aragua gang members and drug traffickers, but it too has triggered protests like the ones in L.A. in June.

Some of those private efforts to impede immigration enforcement in the Windy City have turned violent, with DHS contending ICE’s officers there have been targeted by “vehicular assaults”.

But to hear officials there tell the story, ICE is the real problem: Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has compared ICE enforcement to “Nazi Germany”, while Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) has declared city property “ICE Free Zones”.

Again, Trump called out the National Guard, Democratic officials filed lawsuits, and a U.S. district court judge imposed a temporary restraining order on troop deployments.

Then, there’s Portland, Ore.

The Beaver State proclaims it was “the first … in the nation to pass a statewide law stopping state and local police and government from helping federal authorities with immigration enforcement” (back in 1987), while the Portland City Council “officially declared” Stumptown “a sanctuary city in 2017”.

The latter is quick to note, however, that “ICE is allowed to enforce immigration law inside the city limits” and that the City of Portland “cannot interfere with their work”.

That’s likely cold comfort to the ICE officers working there, who have been dealing with ever-swelling protests outside their facility since early June, including a declared “riot” on June 14.

Things there have gotten worse (and more bizarre), and on October 2 the FBI issued the following tweet:

Trump again called out the National Guard, the city and state again sued to block deployments, and the whole issue again is bottled up in the courts.

“Laboratories of Democracy”

In his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1932 opinion in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, Justice Louis Brandeis argued that it’s “one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country”.

I’ll note that there are four subjective contentions in that single quote, but nonetheless the idea that states are “laboratories for democracy” has found favor among both federalists and statists — though rarely at the same time and usually only to support their own “novel social and economic experiments”.

Of course, immigration is the consummate federal responsibility, and a laboratory states aren’t legally allowed to enter, not only on constitutional grounds but also because, by definition, divergence from Congress’s immigration scheme poses a “risk to the rest of the country”.

Not that either constitutional restrictions or common sense has cooled the ardor of states and localities to establish their own immigration schemes — the “sanctuary policies” discussed above.

Homan contends that, “Every sanctuary city is unsafe. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals.” Even if you disagree, you’d likely still admit there’s no harm in states and localities offering ICE access to their jails and prisons to take custody of criminal aliens.

Note that Portland, for one, claims it’s a sanctuary because “the overwhelming majority of immigrants are peaceful, law-abiding people who work long hours to build a better life for themselves and their families” and because “immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. citizens”.

Even accepting both those propositions as true, doesn’t it make sense to allow ICE access to that teeny-tiny slice of the otherwise “peaceful, law-abiding” immigrant community that is committing crimes? In fact, wouldn’t it make the immigrant community barrel safer by removing the “few bad apples”?

In most cases, ICE is only making the “at-large” arrests that are inflaming certain residents of L.A., Chicago, and Portland because it can’t enter California, Illinois, or Oregon prisons.

If their other sanctuary arguments are sincere, Newsom, Pritzker, and Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) should open their jails to immigration officers — and they’d likely see ICE street enforcement plummet.

Newsom, Pritzker, and Kotek probably won’t give DHS access to the criminal aliens in their jails, however, because at this point, their objections to ICE likely have more to do with the political points they’re scoring from being seen as “standing up to Trump” than anything having to do with community safety.

There’s a not-so-fine line between “laboratories for democracy” and meth labs. Sanctuary jurisdictions are increasingly more like the latter, with state and local elected officials getting politically high on their own sanctimony.