The existence of sanctuary jurisdictions, whether state or local, is one of the main bones of contention between Left and Right. This is a fight to the political death of one side or the other. There can be no compromise with our political enemies. To understand what the fight is about, we need to know the history of the sanctuary movement. The following verbatim from Sean Davis, The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement:
The American sanctuary movement, by contrast, rewards criminality and endangers innocent citizens. Its history began in 1971 in Berkeley, California, at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests, when city officials passed a resolution declaring Berkeley a “City of Refuge” for draft dodgers. Eleven years later, Gus Schultz, a left-wing Berkeley pastor, expanded the idea by declaring his church a safe harbor for asylum seekers fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
In early 1985, the city of Berkeley passed the following resolution:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that no employee of the City of Berkeley violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering sanctuary, or by refusing established public services to the established sanctuaries.
City councilors further resolved that the “sanctuary originally offered by the churches be expanded to include the entire city and that BERKELEY become a CITY OF REFUGE[.]” San Francisco, across the bay from Berkeley, followed suit in 1989, and the sanctuary city concept quickly spread across the country to Tucson, Seattle, Duluth, and Ithaca.
The actions of those offering sanctuary at the time violated U.S. immigration law, because the asylum claims being made by Latin American refugees were in almost every case rejected during the Reagan administration. The reasoning was that if the migrants were, as they claimed, fleeing violence in their home countries, they could flee to the nearest safe country—whether Mexico to the north or Venezuela or Colombia to the south—rather than to the U.S. Because they were not seeking refuge in the nearest safe country, they were determined by the U.S. government to be economic migrants, seeking economic opportunities in our country, rather than war refugees seeking an escape from violence. As such, they did not qualify for asylum.
Fast forward to 2021, when the Biden administration threw federal immigration law out the window. In effect, under the guise of granting asylum, it federalized and supercharged the sanctuary city efforts that began in the 1980s, erasing the border and inviting anyone into the U.S. who wished to come.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimated there were more than eight million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years, with some estimates north of ten million. Migrants arrived from all over Latin America, often with the aid of drug cartel coyotes who were either paid by the job or expected services to be rendered once their charges reached the U.S. Coached by lawyers from so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to make asylum claims, they were then released into the U.S. on their own recognizance and told to appear in court years later to have their asylum claims adjudicated. The Biden administration even arranged to have many of them flown—at the American taxpayer’s expense—to cities of their choice.
Thus what had started as a narrow effort to take care of a small number of needy refugees in a single city developed, after several decades, into a sprawling global industry involving national governments, NGOs, criminal syndicates, and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars a year. Every institution involved had either a political or an economic incentive to ensure a never-ending flow of migrants into the U.S. Forget vetting. Forget filtering out criminals and drug traffickers. Forget ensuring that only those willing to assimilate into our culture should be admitted into our country. The illegal immigration-industrial complex had become a self-perpetuating machine.
Over the past year-and-a-half, the second Trump administration has reestablished secure borders—without which a country can hardly claim to be a country—and has attempted to begin deporting those who entered illegally during the previous four years. But its efforts have been met at every turn with opposition, often violent, even when it comes to deporting the most dangerous illegal immigrants. And much of this opposition is sanctioned by state and city officials enlisted in the sanctuary movement.
As of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice calculated that twelve states and the District of Columbia—nearly one-quarter of the country—had become sanctuaries for illegal immigration. In addition, many major cities outside of those states—including Albuquerque, Boston, New Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia—had been designated as sanctuary cities. The Center for Immigration Studies counts the number of sanctuary cities or counties across the country at more than 200.