WASHINGTON — Within days of taking office for the first time in January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to cut off federal funding for so-called sanctuary cities. Nine years later, he’s still trying.
“I have directed that starting immediately, there will be no more payments to sanctuary cities because they are really just sanctuaries for criminals,” Trump said in a speech to world and economic leaders in Davos, Switzerland, last month.
It’s a fight that began as a feature of his 2016 campaign, becoming synonymous with his immigration agenda. Yet, he’s been largely rebuffed by the courts each time he’s attempted to punish Democratic cities and states, causing them to dig in harder in the face of his ire. Just Thursday , six of the largest cities in Greater Boston announced fresh measures to ban federal immigration enforcement on city property and protect peaceful protesters.
Undeterred, Trump last week again pledged to cut off federal funds to jurisdictions with sanctuary policies, a broad term that means in some way limiting local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. And Republicans in Congress are pushing for laws that would prohibit sanctuary cities as a counter to Democrats’ calls to reform immigration enforcement amid a standoff over Department of Homeland Security funding over ICE actions in Minnesota.
It’s unlikely the renewed efforts will have any more success at changing policy than previous attempts over the last decade, and it’s unclear if that’s even the objective as the midterm elections near.
Politically, sanctuary policies have become an avatar for blue parts of the country, making efforts to defund them a useful political cudgel for Republicans while also elevating those policies to a symbol of broader resistance by the left to Trump. The concept of deporting criminals is largely popular with the American public, but indiscriminate immigration raids such as those the Trump administration is carrying out are also largely unpopular, fortifying both sides.
With little chance of either giving up the cause, or of the courts allowing Trump to cut funds, the back and forth of the battle seems likely to repeat itself indefinitely.
And that may be the point, some observers say.
“He keeps coming back and doing the same thing over and over again and the same lawsuit or policy that’s been blocked a million times, because every time he gets blocked, he gets to say, ‘Look at the Democrats and how insane they are,’ ” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute and a critic of Trump’s immigration policy. “He doesn’t care if it’s as effective at changing their policy, he just wants to make the point politically.”
Sanctuary policies are primarily found in left-leaning areas and in general, limit cooperation by local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement. The theory is that such policies build trust between immigrant communities and police to help with criminal investigations and that local law enforcement shouldn’t be forced to use limited resources on federal enforcement. Some jurisdictions also fear they could be liable for violating constitutional rights for holding people for solely civil enforcement.
In Boston, for example, the city’s Trust Act and a state court ruling dictate that local law enforcement cannot detain people solely on a request from federal immigration agents, known as a civil detainer, absent a criminal violation. The Police Department ignored 57 requests for civil detainers in 2025, the department reported last month.
Policies vary across the nation. Some have clear exceptions for violent or serious criminal charges. Some simply prohibit law enforcement asking people about immigration status, or won’t hold people but will communicate to ICE when a target is being released. Others are expansive, such as in Illinois where law enforcement “may not participate, support, or assist in any capacity with an immigration agent’s enforcement operations.”
Contrary to the current political rhetoric, the policies were originally in reaction to the immigration crackdown of a Democratic president, Barack Obama, who in the early parts of his administration oversaw high deportation rates. They drew their name from churches that offered immigrants “sanctuary” from deportations when federal policy prevented immigration enforcement in places of worship. (Trump has since withdrawn that prohibition, though a court ruling has restored it in some places.)
But even as Trump has sought to bust sanctuary cities, courts have repeatedly rejected his attempts to withhold funding for them, as the Constitution prohibits forcing states or cities to act as an arm of the federal government.
“He’s never had any success,” said Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who studies the issue. “They’re doing it because they want to put pressure and they want to shine a light on jurisdictions that ‘are not cooperating.’ ”
Those on the right portray such cities as offering safe haven to criminal immigrants, and highlight instances where undocumented immigrants who were at one point in criminal custody have committed heinous crimes after their release. (Studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US-born citizens and there is no association between immigration and crime.)
Jessica Vaughan, a policy expert with the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restricting immigration, called such crimes “preventable” and said that when ICE is allowed to pick up targets from jails, it alleviates the need for ICE to make the arrest in the streets.
“The end result of these policies is the release of criminal aliens who could and should be removed from the country who are instead free to remain here and who often commit other crimes,” Vaughan said. “Sanctuary policies only protect criminals. And they also make it more hazardous for ICE to do its job.”
At a White House event this past week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina railed on sanctuary policies as a draw for migrants to enter the country illegally.
“These magnets of illegal immigration have to go,” Graham said. “There is no upside to sanctuary city unless you’re a complete radical nut job.”
There is no evidence that sanctuary policies jeopardize public safety, and in fact some data from a decade ago showed the opposite.
And facts on the ground have undercut the Trump administration’s claims. In Minnesota, for example, the state cooperates with law enforcement and in January its officials said 68 of the criminals the Department of Homeland Security claimed were arrested as a result of its crackdown were in fact transferred from local custody to ICE. Local sanctuary city policies within the state, including around the Twin Cities, resulted in around 800 declined detainer requests from 2023-2025, according to CIS data. It was not reported how many requests were honored.
Critics see an effort by the administration to increase deportations in any way possible and to conduct more operations on the streets as part of its very public show of force against immigrants and blue areas. And Democrats want ICE‘s resources limited so it has to focus more on criminal immigrants, rather than go after noncitizens indiscriminately.
But supporters of sanctuary cities also see them as a symbol of opposition to Trump. Hing argued they send an important message of resistance to Trump’s hard-line agenda and what he sees as “tyranny” from the administration. Bier also sees them as a bulwark against the administration’s broader efforts to force federal policy on cities and states.
“It’s a stand-in because of the power dynamic. President Trump wants to effectively control what policies are implemented in Democratic areas,” Bier said. “If sanctuary city policy in Minneapolis is changed because ICE goes there and runs rampant through the streets, then they could do the same thing and get them to change any policy they want. So it has to be seen in the broader context of all of the demands that the administration is making.”
Graham has gotten a guarantee that his bill to ban sanctuary cities will get a vote in the Senate, but even he seemed to implicitly acknowledge it was unlikely to get enough Democratic votes to advance, and that it would instead serve more as a political marker.
“We’re going to vote, and people in November are going to get to see who they trust to keep the border secure,” Graham said.
Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.
