S4 E1 Raiding Sanctuary

Michaela Benson [MB] Hello, welcome to a new series of who do we think we are? This is where we debunk myths and misunderstandings about migration and citizenship. No hot takes, no rash analysis, just real experts in conversation working to understand this fast-changing field that shapes all our lives. I'm Michaela Benson, a sociologist working on citizenship and migration.

Nando Sigona [NS] And I'm Nando Sigona, also a sociologist focussing on international migration and forced displacement. And together, we are interested in borders, how they are constructed, not literally, but for policy and discourse, inclusion and exclusion, how they work and in what makes some people welcome in some places, while others are shut out from being free to call a place home.

MB  In this season, we're looking at the USA, meeting experts to unpack the role migration and borders play in the Make America Great Again project of Donald Trump and his backers. We'll be talking about the American dream and what remains of it today, asking whether free speech is really worthy of the name in a country where students protesting genocide risk deportation and detention. And we'll consider how immigrants' lives are shaped by uncertai, in-between legal status by what Cecilia Menjivar terms liminal legality. We're interested in events on the ground, but in looking up and back at the history, the context that frames them too.

NS Now, since Trump came back to office on a pledge of removing millions of undocumented migrants, immigration raids carried out by federal government agents known as ICE have increased across the US. Earlier in 2025, raids in Los Angeles and Southern California led, and continue to lead, as we record this, to thousands of people being marked for deportation or monitoring. Meanwhile, protesters have come out over and over to show resistance that has been, at times, violently suppressed. It has raised the question, how does Trump's vision end? What view of migration does it rest on? And how could this happen in what's meant to be a sanctuary city, Los Angeles?

MB Now, I think of sanctuary cities as places in the US and beyond that basically pledge solidarity and support in some form to people with uncertain migration status. But it's complex. To learn more about sanctuary cities in the American context, we spoke to Rachel Humphris, political sociologist at Queen Mary, University of London. She's also an anthropologist and the author of a new book, Making Sanctuary Cities, for which she did long-term fieldwork in San Francisco, Sheffield and Toronto. We started by asking Rachel something we're putting to everyone this season: What have borders and mobility meant in your life so far?

Rachel Humphris [RH] So the way I approach borders, I have to think about my own position of privilege, really. When Brexit happened, of course, we were all kind of confounded by it. But as a middle-class white woman who's grown up and lived in the UK for the majority of my life and has UK citizenship, and my family all have UK citizenship, we weren't faced with many of those existential questions, although we did try to gain Irish ancestry to see if we could get an Irish passport. And then when my daughter was born, we tried to think about whether she could get a New Zealand passport through my partner's family. But really, I don't feel like we've been oppressed by borders in the way that many people have that have been the subject of a lot of my research. And I think this was brought home most forcefully to me when I was doing research in Toronto. The Sanctuary Cities book features three sanctuary cities, San Francisco, Toronto and Sheffield. And when I was in Toronto, a social work student sort of challenged me, sort of citing, you know, the fact that I'm a British researcher working in Toronto, and how I approached that really, given the settler colonial history of our two countries, and how I was rationalising that within my own work. And so really, that made me think with very uncomfortable questions about how borders resonate, you know, not just as the subject of our research, but also, you know, for us personally, as we move across borders, what kind of histories we're implicated in when we also do that.

MB I think that's a really important point about the responsibility that migration researchers have to take for thinking about their own positionality and reflecting on what that means for the work they're doing and how they're positioned in respect to the people they're working with. But today, we're going to be talking about sanctuary cities. Before we get started, though, I wanted to kind of build a quickfire glossary to help us through this. So I've got a set of phrases that we're going to come back to today, or ideas or concepts. I'm just going to fire them at you, Rachel, so I just need a brief sentence or two response. So when we're talking about the US, I think what's different to the UK is this use of both the federal, the state, as kind of two concepts, and perhaps even the municipal. And I just wondered if you could just talk us through that very briefly.

RH Yeah, sure. So obviously, the US is a federal government, unlike the UK, which is a unitary government. So a federal government basically means that power is shared. The federal government has some powers, for example, over immigration, but any powers that are not specifically designated to the federal government, the states kind of withhold that power. So that's enshrined in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. So if it's if the federal government hasn't specifically said we want that power, states will not use their resources to do any of that work for the federal government. So it's kind of like that states still hold some power.

MB That's great. So the next one is ICE, which is a word that we'll all be familiar with from the news. But what is it?

RH So ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is really like the UK Border Force. Whereas there's a separation, so you have the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, which is like in the UK, the Home Office, and then Immigration and Customs Enforcement are like the federal police force that are on the streets, so to speak, that are separate from municipal police or state police. And so they do very different jobs. And so that's how they kind of separate both kind of federal immigration enforcement and federal police, which would be the FBI, and then like municipal-level police enforcement.

MB  And just one final one: What is meant by the term ICE detainers?

RH  So detainers are really like the mechanism that ICE uses to pick people up and put them in detention. So they are warrants, usually, they're civil. They are not usually criminal warrants. So they're not anything to do with criminality. They're civil requests to hold people, and that's quite an important distinction, which we can probably get into a bit more later.

NS  Thank you. Rachel. The term sanctuary cities is now used, not just in US, but many other countries in Europe and beyond. In US, it's something that's been going around for decades, but what we want to focus on is actually how it's used today. In some cases, it's very much used as to indicate the willingness of the city to limit their assistance to the federal immigration authorities of ICE, but also has got a more general meaning that indicates a city that has an intention to be a place of refuge for minoritised, vulnerable migrants. In your book, you don't really want to give us a definition. I mean, the book is about something else. It's about how these terms work, it's about how it's used by whom and we for what purpose. Can you tell us why you think it's so important to focus on the work the sanctuary city does?

RH I did try to set out to find a definition. Then when I tried to look for one, it kind of empirically dissolved. So people were using sanctuary cities, sometimes to describe certain kinds of work, like welcoming or non cooperation with police and other cities would also be doing exactly that kind of work, but wouldn't be calling it a sanctuary city. So actually, when you try and define what a sanctuary city is, it is never attributes. It's never a list of attributes. It's always about who is using it - the political economy, the moral economy, or the political landscape, for people to use it. So you can see that, for example, in the four mayors that were pulled up in March in Congress. That was the mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York, that in March 2025, were pulled up in front of Congress, and kind of grilled for being sanctuary cities and harboring so-called, you know, illegalised migrants that were criminals and rapists and all of the kind of horrible language that the Trump government uses. And so sanctuary city has some kind of political purpose. And it's also doing particular kinds of work for those cities in those cities. So those mayors are using it, maybe for their own political career, because it's useful for them to be in a kind of antagonistic relationship with the federal government. Whereas other cities might do exactly the same kind of work in their cities by welcoming migrants, by asking police not to cooperate with ICE, their municipal police to not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, but they won't be calling it a sanctuary city because they don't think that that's useful for them, for other reasons. And so that's why I had to focus on the work that it did, really, because I couldn't find any other way to talk about it.

MB I mean, I think that's often the way, isn't it? When we set out to do a project, on the surface, it seems like it should be straightforward, and then we start talking to people, and we find quite a different story. But in order to get at some kind of definition, perhaps it would be useful to give a sense of the trajectory through which that idea of the sanctuary city has evolved in the US. So my understanding is that for people on the left, right now, the sanctuary city signifies a place where undocumented migrants and refugees might at least be able to hope that they're safe. But on the right, it's become a word used to conjure images of lawless, rebellious zones full of outsiders and their woke defenders who pose a threat to a particular idea of America. Now my understanding is that this is a story that goes back to the 1980s to the war in El Salvador, whose government was backed by then President Ronald Reagan, leading people to come as refugees to southern states like Texas and Arizona. So why is that bit of history important for when we're talking about sanctuary cities?

RH Yeah, so the sanctuary movement was really inspired by the Reagan-backed wars in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s. Refugees coming from those countries to Texas and Arizona, and then the Reagan government was sending them back, basically contravening the Geneva Convention of non-refoulement. And so a lot of faith-based workers were providing support to these refugees. They were holding them in churches. So this idea of the sanctuary, the church space as being a sacred space, and one where there's a kind of moral code that immigration enforcement won't come in and take people. And also we're doing some kind of work using, you know, like Underground Railroad techniques to get people up and into Canada. So that was the 1980s sanctuary movement, and that spurred particular cities to enact what they called City of Refuge ordinances. And sometimes they were called sanctuary cities, but that term didn't have the same kind of valence as it does today, and it was really City of Refuge ordinances that also kind of did that work of housing those refugees that were seen as quite deserving. So it was based on this kind of deserving refugee discourse and anti-American imperialism in those countries. So that was the sanctuary city movement. Today, with sanctuary cities, it's sort of developed, and it's often conflated with terms like non-cooperation. So the idea that local law enforcement will not use their resources to help federal immigration enforcement. So here you get this kind of notion of the separation of powers that I was talking about that happens - that can happen - in a federalised nation-state, where local police forces are separate to federal kind of immigration enforcement, and they have different funding streams, basically different resources. And so they can operate differently. And so at the local level, there is this idea that police will not cooperate with immigration enforcement, mostly on the grounds of trying to maintain trust within those local communities, because police still operate within this idea of community policing, which is where people want precaritised residents - I call them precaritised residents, but we might call them undocumented migrants - want to feel able to go to the police as victims or witnesses of crime, for example. And that's kind of best for everyone. That's best for everyone in the city, including citizens, if they are subject to a crime and someone witnesses it, they would like the police to go to be able to provide that testimony without being afraid of getting picked up and deported. So they're the grounds on which non-cooperation is based. But that has only really been folded into kind of sanctuary city terminology relatively recently. And so non-cooperation policies in the US really go back to the New Deal, like the 1930s. When there was cooperation, there tended to be cooperation, between welfare agencies and the immigration enforcement, and healthcare and immigration enforcement, but it was causing all kinds of public health problems for cities. And cities and states started to experiment with non-cooperation, even from the 1930s. So this idea of non-cooperation really has an extremely separate history to the sanctuary city history, which began around the 1980s. And I think that's a really important distinction that's often conflated in the literature.

NS Thank you, Rachel. Actually, this really helps, because in a sense, we got a series of key terms: the non-cooperation, we got the refuge and we got the sanctuary. And as you point out, I mean, in the past, we have seen a lot of non-cooperation also, for example, by citizen states against, for example, Barack Obama's policies that were felt to be too liberal. So in a sense, non-cooperation can go also in exactly the opposite direction, as the case, for example, of Arizona state and what they did in terms of patrolling the borders. So what I would like to ask you now is more about when this term sanctuary emerged? My understanding is that it actually started to be associated with idea of the city of sanctuaries in San Francisco in the '90s. It's actually much more recently than you know, already in the 2000s. Can you tell us about this important moment and how it's connected also with the issue of the cultural wars under Donald Trump?

RH This term sanctuary city as we see it today, and how it's often used currently in discourse in the US, is really linked to this idea that these cities, yeah, harbour criminals and rapists and you know, people who you would not want in your city. And it's used also as a dog whistle for extremely racist policies. And that really got crystallised in a case in 2015. So there was a woman called Kate Steinle, who was 32, she was a blonde, very beautiful young woman who was accidentally shot and killed on the Pier in San Francisco by what turned out to be an undocumented migrant called Jose Garcia Zarate. And he was later acquitted of that crime. But in the meantime, this was the emergence, really, of Donald Trump starting his presidential campaign. He really sort of latched onto this idea, and Jose Garcia Zarate really became like the epitome and a paradigm for what could go wrong and what is wrong with the US, as a foundation for kind of Make America Great Again. And it was really weaponised by the right-wing press, and that became extremely effective as a dog whistle, really, that sanctuary cities could be used to really epitomise this hatred and this hateful speech. And it was extremely effective and is still really used to this day. And I think sanctuary cities have really struggled to get away from that, so much so that when I was talking to activists on the ground in San Francisco who were doing a lot of work with ICE detainer requests, for example, and trying to stop local police forces cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the 2000s. And there was a lot of work that was being done on that since Secure Communities, which was an act passed by Obama that automated undocumented migrants being sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they were picked up by local police. People who were doing that work, they described that they had a call to talk about whether to use this term sanctuary city, and they really didn't like the term. They didn't want to use it. They knew that it would cause all kinds of problems for them, but they realized that they'd lost in the court of public opinion, that the boat had sailed on the term sanctuary city, and that it was just the easiest way to talk to the public about these issues. So you get the idea that actually sanctuary city is doing a lot of work for the right, and then the left has had to - or people who might say that they are progressive, really didn't want to use the term, because they knew that it was associated with the right wing and they knew that they were playing into their hand, really, by using this term. But the boat had sailed. And so they had to,

MB I mean, that's an interesting tale, and how something that emerged out of a movement gets captured by the right for entirely different purposes, and as part of that politicisation of migration more generally that we're seeing around the world. But I'd like to stay with San Francisco for a little bit longer, because it's one of the places where you did research for your book. And earlier, we spoke about this idea of the work that sanctuary cities does as a concept. But beyond that, there's another side of it, which you've already kind of implied, which is the question of what the term hides. What is hidden by referring to something as a sanctuary city? And I think that San Francisco offers us a really clear example of what that might be.

RH So as we know, San Francisco is also the home of the tech giants and has undergone enormous development and now has a budget of $15 billion a year. So it's an enormous budget for a very small city and county. And the term sanctuary city implies a kind of progressive stance, a kind of, you know, liberal idea, this sense that it is a kind of open place and an easy place to live. And that has really allowed San Francisco to attract tech companies. So it's part of the capital of the city, and that is something that really is hidden so that elected officials in San Francisco, so the Board of Supervisors, they're called, they're the elected members, can say very easily, we support the sanctuary city. They can use it to make very declarative sort of statements, like, San Francisco is a moral compass for the world by a sanctuary city ordinance and the things that it does. And that really gives it a stage, a prominence, particularly when progressives are so against the federal government at the moment. But it attracts people. It attracts the the global talent that San Francisco wants to attract to fuel its tech industry and other industries as well. And of course, what that hides is also the eviction epidemic that is happening in San Francisco. So we all know, across globalised cities, across the housing, and evictions is a huge issue. But in San Francisco it kind of takes on, I think, a new level. Because inequalities are so enormous, because you have all of these people moving in on enormous salaries, working in the tech industry. And there is just a huge eviction of people, and they're using all kinds of means to evict people, including if you are a precartised resident or undocumented migrant, threatening to report you to ICE if you don't move out, or if you don't, you know, pay high rents. And that is really hidden, and also that has real consequences on the ground. So for example, I spoke to organisations who were helping African Americans in San Francisco, and there has been a mass exodus of African American residents in San Francisco. You may have seen the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which is an excellent movie that really discusses this issue. And they said, you know, that the Latinx or API communities in San Francisco get help because they're part of the sanctuary city, because people like talking about migrants, because it helps the city do this kind of work to attract global talent, but no one wants to talk about the African Americans that are being evicted. And that causes difficulties for intersectional solidarities on the ground between communities as well. So it has real effects in the kind of urban landscape and how people can build solidarities.

NS Thanks a lot, Rachel. Back with you in a moment after a quick word from Michaela

MB You're listening to Who Do We Think We Are?, a podcast all about migration, citizenship and borders with me, Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona, if you like what you hear, follow and rate us on the app you're using to listen. You'll be first to catch new episodes. It also helps more people to discover this show and access proper, rigorous expert analysis of current affairs on migration. Thank you for listening.

NS Welcome back. Rachel, your fieldwork was around the time of Trump's first presidency, and now on returning for his second one, he promised mass deportations. I was wondering how the role of sanctuary cities has changed between Trump one and Trump two.

RH I think in Trump one, Trump basically surrounded himself with people who were still part of the old rules of the game. So you can see that between Trump one and Trump two, in Trump two, basically the only person who's left in that kind of inner circle is Stephen Miller. So Stephen Miller is now White House Chief of Staff, but he worked in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump one, and he is really - well, he has been said to be, I didn't interview him - the mastermind behind this intensification of attacks on sanctuary cities and just anyone who is not seen to belong in America, which now includes, of course, veterans who've been detained and deported, MAGA supporters who have been detained and deported and still support Donald Trump, even though they are being detained and and are being subject to be deported, are still supporting Donald Trump. So I think the whole landscape has completely changed. There are some similarities in the same way Trump has tried to cancel federal funding to sanctuary cities that happened in Trump one, and he tried that again in Trump two. And again, it has been stopped in the courts, but we remain to see if that will hold. I think in Trump two, we are seeing these Marines on the ground, unmarked vans, ICE officers with masks, rolling into parks, going across the street and just picking people up. But I do want to say one major thing that has changed between Trump one and Trump two, which I find just absolutely appalling, is that now residents in these cities feel like they are being hunted by ICE from firsthand accounts of undocumented people, and that just like chills me to the core to imagine what it must be like.

MB As you said, Rachel, it's really chilling this idea of people living with a daily reality where they feel like they're being hunted by ICE. But I just wanted to go back to this point about the difference between kind of federal powers and city-level powers, and thinking about what responsibilities cities do or don't have to actually respond to these ICE detainer requests. I mean, it's not the obligation of cities, legal or otherwise, to actually obey those, is it?

RH No. Thanks. And it's a really important point that ICE detainer requests are civil warrants. You may have heard that in response to Trump's kind of intensification, and I should mention that the Big, Beautiful Bill that was passed gives $175 billion to ICE as well as $150 billion to also fund a police state. So we can see that these ICE detainer requests are going to become more common with the added capacity. But in a lot of sanctuary cities, they are doing know-your-rights training. And rights training is really about recognising the difference between a civil ICE detainer request and a criminal warrant. Now a criminal warrant has to be signed by a judge. It usually has to have a named person on it, and if an ICE officer has a criminal warrant, they have to be on it. But civil detainer requests that don't have anyone named on it, ICE wants to come into any building, they do not have to be honoured, because really, it's down to the laws that protect private property. And so now we get another act in the Constitution. It's the 4th Amendment. The 4th Amendment is around due process and seizures. So you are not allowed to seize property or seize people without due process. And then you can also go back to kind of the British imperial roots of why we want to protect private property and land rights, but the 4th Amendment really protects that, and that's what ICE detainer requests really rest on, so you don't have to honur these civil requests. And so that's a very important distinction. So people are being trained, for example, if you are on the reception of a shelter, you need to know what the difference is between a civil detainer and a criminal warrant. Because if it's a civil detainer, you are well within your rights to say, No, you cannot come in here. So that is an extremely important distinction, and that's also the reason why sanctuary cities fully act within the law. Because they honour the the criminal warrants, but you do not have to honour those civil detainer requests.

NS Thank you very much for clarifying this point, Rachel. And also, in a sense, what we are seeing here emerging is very much a tension between state and federal powers, which has got constitutional roots. So perhaps, rather than focussing on sanctuary, or the term sanctuary, the point is actually to stress the relevance of the city, the relational role of the cities within the architecture of the American Constitution, that maybe can also help us to understand better the moment we are living in.

RH Yeah, absolutely. And what's important, I suppose, particularly in the San Francisco case, that San Francisco is a city and a county. And the county part in this current immigration federalism landscape that we get, does get hugely complicated, but counties allow that jurisdiction to make ordinances. And so that's where the city of refuge ordinance comes from, and that allows the city to really make the kinds of protections that it does have. Absolutely, I would say that rather than thinking perhaps about the sanctuary part, we really need to look at the embedded context and the relationality between these different levels that will allow us to really work out what cities can do.

MB Thanks, Rachel, and I'm just gonna ask one final question. This has been absolutely fascinating so far, and I've learned a lot today. We've highlighted some of the challenges with this term sanctuary city over the course of our discussion today, and the journey it's taken. But if I can just push you a little bit on the kind of idea of hope. Where does hope lie in the US or beyond, and how is this concept of sanctuary traveling beyond the US?

RH For me, I found a lot of hope and extremely inspiring and inspirational people, but I think that hope really lies in the work that's being done, I think, to build intersectional solidarities. So I know you asked about beyond the US, but just to go back to San Francisco for a moment, there were these incredible community organising that was being done, that has been being done, really, for decades now. For example, bringing together Central American refugees with Mexican undocumented workers, with the API community, with ordinary residents in San Francisco, on issues around eviction, for example, and building those intersectional links. And in the organisations that have that really strong community organising. I've heard from my friends in San Francisco that unlike in other places in the US, where you have residents and precaritised migrants who are too scared to go to work, to go to the organisation, to send their children to school, with those strong community organisations, actually, the people in those meetings in San Francisco are increasing because they know they have to fight. They know they're not alone. And I think that that is extremely hopeful in this moment.

MB Thanks so much, Rachel for ending on a note of hope. I mean, I think it's really important always that even in what seem like increasingly dark times, when we're seeing the kind of mainstreaming of these far-right ideologies that politicise migration and which have detrimental impacts on people who are migratised, that we remember also the resistance, as you've said, the importance of community organising, which, of course, will have given rise to the sanctuary movement in the first place, and those intersectional solidarities and finding space to keep those alive. So thank you very much.

RH Thank you, Michaela and Nando for hosting me on this podcast, and it's been a real treat to spend this time with you. Thanks so much.

NS Thank you.

MB You were listening to Rachel Humphris in conversation with me, Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona. Thanks for joining us. You can catch our show notes and transcripts over at whodowethinkweare.org. And that includes detail on the Kate Steinle shooting that Rachel mentioned earlier, plus things like the history of the Underground Railroad in the US, as well as the Reagan era wars in Central America.

NS This season has been made as part of the research project, Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Learn more at migzen.net. We will be back with you in a month, still looking at borders, MAGA and the USA today.

MB Our producer is Alice Bloch. Sound engineer and editor Emma Halton at Brilliant Audio. Thanks also to George Kalivis for graphics and social media. Do follow and rate us on the app you're using to hear this. We're on Instagram @abtcitizenship.

NS See you back here soon. Thanks for listening. Bye.