It’s about what California cops can do
In October 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, commonly referred to as the state’s sanctuary law. That law bars state and local police from investigating, interrogating, or arresting people for immigration enforcement purposes and limits — but does not entirely prohibit — police cooperation with federal immigration officials.
Kevin De Leon, the former state Senate leader who authored the law, told NPR in 2017 that the point of the law was to make clear that the feds cannot enlist local police “as a cog in the Trump deportation machine.”
The “sanctuary” movement goes back to the 1980s when Central American refugees fled civil war and immigrated to the U.S. When they were denied asylum, they sought protection from deportation in churches and other places of worship.
Today, the sanctuary law does not actually refer to a place or territory where immigrants can seek protection. Living in California alone does not shield someone from deportation.
Instead, the law clarifies what state and local law enforcement in California can and cannot do with regard to immigration. For example, the law says that local police cannot detain or keep someone in custody more than 48 hours past their release date just for immigration officials to pick them up.
The law does not restrict what the federal government can do in the state. To be clear, that means U.S Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) can still arrest and deport undocumented people living in California and other sanctuary jurisdictions.
“The federal government has a lane that they are entitled to move in, they can enforce immigration law,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said last week during a press conference in San Diego. But “They can’t conscript or force the city or the county or the state law enforcement entities to do their job for them.”
Who isn’t protected by sanctuary law
President Trump and his allies have repeatedly argued that sanctuary laws shield dangerous criminals. They have, at times, pointed to specific crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to argue the sanctuary law puts the greater public at risk. In 2019, for example, Trump pointed to the slaying of a police officer in Stanislaus County to criticize the sanctuary law and demand more funding for border protection.
But that’s not the whole story. The law says police can tell immigration authorities about an inmate’s upcoming release if that person has been convicted of a serious crime or felony, such as: murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery and arson, among many others.
And as some sheriffs have noted, there is nothing that stops immigration officials from using jail websites and fingerprints databases to identify people of interest.
It is up to ICE to pick up individuals on their release. Between 2018 and 2023, California jails transferred more than 4,000 individuals to immigration authorities. At the same time, ICE doesn’t always show up when someone is released from jail or prison. For example, ICE picked up about 80% of undocumented immigrants released from state prisons between 2017 and 2020, according to a 2022 Senate legislative analysis.
“It is an absurdity to be talking about SB 54 as preventing bad, noncitizens with serious criminal convictions from being turned over to (the Department of Homeland Security), it doesn’t do that,” said Niels Frenzen, a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law and codirector of the school’s immigration clinic. “But those facts are just not part of the political debate.”
Immigrants who are protected by the sanctuary state law are usually those who are arrested for less serious offenses, such as traffic violations and driving without a license or insurance, Frenzen said.
Courts upheld California’s sanctuary state law
After California enacted its Values Act, Trump’s Justice Department took the state to court, arguing that the state law “interferes with federal immigration authorities’ ability to carry out their responsibilities under federal law.”
Some immigration attorneys, however, have pointed out that the state law seemed to have little impact on ICE’s ability to do its job.
For example, the Justice Department, in its 2018 lawsuit, said that in 2017, ICE apprehended 20,201 unlawfully present people in California, which represented about 14% of all ICE arrests made that year.
ICE was on track to exceed that number in the following year. In the first two months of 2018, after the sanctuary law took effect, it arrested 8,588 people in California, or about 14% of all arrests nationwide, according to a filing in the lawsuit by Trump’s Justice Department.
In 2019, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the California Values Act did not impede enforcement of federal immigration law. When the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to review the case, it refused to do so, leaving the law as is.
In a separate fight, California sued the Trump administration for its policy to withhold federal law enforcement grants from jurisdictions with sanctuary policies. A federal judge sided with California.
Studies show no effect on crime
Critics of the law have long claimed that the sanctuary state law harms public safety. The Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford, for example, has linked the law to the fentanyl epidemic, noting that a spike in fentanyl-related deaths started happening around 2018, soon after the sanctuary policy went into effect. Whether causation or coincidence, there isn’t much in the way of official research that proves this.
