re: For Those Who Support Sanctuary Cities, Convince Me Why It's a Good Thing

Community Policing
Attorney General Sessions has threatened to withhold community policing grants from sanctuary cities. Many city and county police department adopt what they call a “community policing” strategy that does not enforce federal immigration laws. Local law enforcement wants to maintain the trust of everyone in its community. “We don’t care about your immigration status. If you are the victim of a crime, you need to report it,” says Chief Tom Manger of the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland. “I don’t care who the president is, the federal government cannot tell us how we are going to do our job at the local level.”

Still, Chief Manger says Montgomery County is not a sanctuary jurisdiction. “If we arrest someone for a serious crime — a gang member who is committing armed robberies — and we fingerprint him and the prints go to FBI or DHS, and ICE comes back and asks us, ‘Is he in your jail, and when is he getting out?’ we tell them and ICE will be at the jail to take custody.” But Manger says they will not ask people about their immigration status. “We don’t care,” he says. “What we care about is whether they were the victim of a crime, and whether we can get them the help they need. We need them to trust us, to report crime and to work with us.”

Withholding Federal Funds
President Trump’s executive order threatens to take away funding from cities that violate 8 U.S.C. 1373, the federal law that protects communication between state and local government and ICE. This law is not actually about ICE detainers. But Trump’s executive order also says the US attorney general can designate any state or local government a sanctuary jurisdiction in order to punish it. Most often the sanctuary brand is applied to cities that don’t want to comply with ICE detainers. But ordering cities to comply might violate the US Constitution. “There is really clear Supreme Court case law that says you can’t condition federal grants on requiring people to do something that is illegal,” says Graber, “like holding people in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Already six jurisdictions have filed lawsuits charging that President Trump has overstepped his authority — San Francisco was the first, followed by Santa Clara County, California; Chelsea and Lawrence, Massachusets; Richmond, California and Seattle. The basis of all the suits is that the executive order cannot coerce local governments into using their resources to do federal work. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that this would violate the 10th Amendment. In addition, Seattle is arguing that the executive order violates the Taxing and Spending Clause by holding hostage, for immigration enforcement, funds that are not directly related to those matters. The city also says it has not done anything illegal — even if it wanted to help ICE, it could not because city agencies collect no information on undocumented immigrants.

Welcoming Cities
There is a growing list of communities that label themselves “welcoming.” This is an established network of more than 160 cities and counties guided by the principles put forward by Welcoming America a nonprofit organization begun in 2009. This network includes municipal government, business, faith-based groups and nonprofit outreach organizations that follow principles of inclusion and build communities where immigrants and refugees feel welcome and supported. As the word “sanctuary” becomes more and more controversial, says the ILRC’s Graber, “Many places that want to be somewhat welcoming to immigrants take on the “welcoming” brand, and places that are a little bit more aggressive or anti-Trump embrace the “sanctuary” brand. But they are part of the same spectrum.”