California Is a Sanctuary State. How Much Will That Protect Immigrants From Trump's Deportation Plans?

Throughout the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised mass deportations as part of his immigration policy, a strategy he says will include declaring a national emergency and deploying the U.S. military. While these promises have received significant media attention, immigration analysts say that Trump is actually more likely to lean on local police and sheriffs.

Since the Nov. 5 election, California officials have vowed to push back against the Trump administration. “I can promise to the undocumented community in California that I and my team have been thinking about you for months and the harm that might come from a Trump administration 2.0,” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco two days after the election. “We have planned for you. We have prepared for you.”

Multiple cities in California, including San Francisco, Oakland and San José, have in place what are commonly called “sanctuary laws”: policies designed to protect immigrants from deportation by limiting law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And other cities are bolstering local protections in anticipation of Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. In Los Angeles, city officials unanimously passed a sanctuary ordinance on Nov. 19, and in the Bay Area, Redwood City is currently debating a similar move. 

As the clock ticks down to a second Trump term, what do we know about existing sanctuary laws in cities like San Francisco, along with policies at the state level? And what are some ways these policies do — and do not — protect immigrants from deportation?

What is a sanctuary policy?

There’s no single definition of a “sanctuary law,” but most policies require that state and local law enforcement resources not be used for immigration enforcement. Courts have upheld the legal premise of many of these laws, pointing out that immigration law is an area of federal responsibility, and local governments don’t get to control how it’s enforced. 

Nevertheless, successive administrations have worked to recruit local authorities to assist ICE in identifying and detaining immigrants who the federal agency considers “deportable.” Collaboration could include information-sharing, agreements that give agents access to prisons and jails, and a program that deputizes police and sheriffs to function as immigration agents.

“ICE, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, has tried to coerce, pressure and encourage local law enforcement to become their ‘force multipliers,’ because there are many more police, sheriff and probation officers than there are ICE agents,” says Angela Chan, who leads immigrant advocacy efforts at the San Francisco Public Defender’s office and helped draft the sanctuary laws for both San Francisco and California.

Why have sanctuary policies?

The sanctuary movement began in the 1980s, with church activists protecting undocumented Salvadorans and Guatemalans escaping civil wars at a time when the U.S. was denying their asylum claims and backing the repressive governments they had fled.

In response, Berkeley adopted a sanctuary resolution in 1971, the first city in the country to do so, and it’d be almost two decades later that San Francisco enacted its sanctuary ordinance in 1989 after years of organizing led by the city’s Central American communities.

Since then, dozens of Democratic-led cities and more than a dozen states have followed with their own sanctuary policies, emphasizing that public safety depends on trust. At the state level, California has passed a trio of sanctuary laws — the TRUST Act in 2013, the TRUTH Act in 2016 and the California Values Act in 2017 — that govern how law enforcement can interact with ICE.

Immigrants, the bills’ backers argue, need to feel safe going to the police to report crimes and speak up as witnesses, just like everyone else. But the nearly 12 million unauthorized immigrants and their family members, who live in communities across the country, could be unlikely to cooperate with police if they fear they’ll be reported to ICE.

It’s worth noting that most unauthorized immigrants have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. But under current immigration laws, an overwhelming majority don’t have any way to legalize their status, so they’re stuck in limbo.

What does California’s sanctuary law do?

When the California Values Act (SB 54) took effect in 2018, the first Trump administration was working on ramping up deportations nationwide.

The law says that state and local resources in California shall not be used to “investigate, interrogate, detain, detect, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes” or transfer people to ICE custody without a judge’s warrant.

There are, however, some major exceptions: SB 54 permits law enforcement to notify ICE about immigrants with any of a long list of serious convictions on their records. 

In addition, the law makes another big exception for state prisons. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) automatically flags immigrants in custody for ICE and turns them over after they complete their sentences. Even longtime legal residents with green cards are transferred, because they can be deportable based on their criminal record.

At a press conference in late November, Attorney General Bonta affirmed that law enforcement in California would continue to enforce criminal laws. However, he says he would uphold SB 54’s restrictions that prevent state officials from participating in civil immigration enforcement, even if the incoming Trump administration pressures the state.

“The federal administration is welcome to do their job, but they cannot commandeer or conscript law enforcement in California to do their job for them,” he says. “cooperation under SB 54 on civil immigration enforcement will not be forthcoming because it would violate the law if it were.”

Don’t sanctuary laws prevent ICE from operating in California?

Not exactly. State laws restrict what state and local authorities can do. However, ICE is a federal agency with agents based throughout California. In addition to taking custody of immigrants handed over by prisons, they can and do track down people they believe are deportable.

Under President Joe Biden, ICE was guided by enforcement priorities that focused on removing immigrants who posed a threat to national security, a threat to public safety or a threat to border security. The policy, based on an Obama-era directive, emphasized that agents would use their discretion in a way that would protect the civil rights of immigrants, even those who could be deported. In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of these enforcement guidelines.

Since the Nov. 5 election, however, President-elect Trump has said he would toss out the priorities of the previous administration and that any immigrant here illegally would be subject to deportation. However, experts say the next administration will also have to set priorities because they won’t be able to remove 11 or 12 million people at once. Trump’s pick for the new role of “border czar,” Thomas Homan, who’s spent a career in immigration enforcement, has indicated he would focus first on immigrants with criminal histories.

An analysis by the conservative American Action Forum estimated it would cost $400 billion to $600 billion to remove 11.2 million people, and it would take two decades, leaving a significant dent in the U.S. workforce.

Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, says she expects that “significant” deportations are coming, along with a pervasive message that immigrants are unwelcome. 

“There may not be mass deportations depending on how one defines that,” she says. “But there will surely be a significant climate of fear and hostility toward people that are in the country recently or people that are seen to be ‘invaders.’”

Do local authorities ever work with ICE? 

A number of more conservative cities and counties in California have come out in opposition of the California Values Act since it took effect in 2018, but they are bound by it and prevented, in most cases, from giving ICE access to county jails or information on the whereabouts of undocumented immigrants.

However, some local law enforcement leaders do find ways around state and local sanctuary laws. That’s true right now, even in progressive San Francisco.

Over the past year, as part of a multi-agency crackdown on fentanyl dealing in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the San Francisco district attorney’s office has been building cases against suspected dealers, many of them young Honduran immigrants, then handing them off to the U.S. Attorney and dropping the local charges.

Faced with much stiffer federal penalties for drug crimes, defendants typically plead guilty, allowing federal authorities to hand them over to ICE for deportation, something San Francisco officials can’t do under sanctuary policies.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says she supports the city’s sanctuary law and abides by it. But she’s unapologetic.

“The spirit of Sanctuary City is not to embolden criminal behavior,” she told KQED earlier this year. “It is not to embolden selling people death.” 

While Trump has cast undocumented immigrants as brutal criminals “attacking” and “invading” the U.S., research has repeatedly shown that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — are less likely than other people to commit crimes.

What are California and local governments doing ahead of Trump’s second term?

California has been successful before in withstanding legal challenges from the Trump administration against the state’s sanctuary laws. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a Trump administration challenge to SB 54, allowing the law to stand. 

In addition to limiting what local and state law enforcement can do, SB 54 says public schools, libraries, hospitals, courthouses and other public facilities are supposed to have policies that define how they will limit interaction with ICE. And the state Attorney General’s office is required to offer model policies they can use.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s Angela Chan says now is the time, ahead of a second Trump term, for those local entities to take a look at their policies, clarify them and make sure staff members understand them.

“They should do an honest assessment of the many ways they might inadvertently — or purposely — assist ICE,” she says. “They should especially look at their data privacy policies and see how the data they collect from their residents is used and shared with other agencies. If you share data with one federal agency, it can make it very difficult to prevent — especially under a Trump administration — that federal agency from sharing it with another.”