Sanctuary Cities

With sanctuary, and sanctuary-adjacent, policies now in existence worldwide, scholarship on these policies has now expanded beyond the United States and North America. In the United States, these policies prohibit the collection of immigration-related information and limit cooperation of local law enforcement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with the purpose of allowing local undocumented populations to access resources and benefits without fear of deportation. While this is how sanctuary is understood in the United States, the meaning of sanctuary, and content of the policies, varies internationally based on national and regional contexts. In the United Kingdom, sanctuary is primarily meant to facilitate the incorporation of asylee and refugee populations, instead of undocumented, or irregular, immigrants. In Mexico, sanctuary is applied to returned populations who find themselves displaced and without resources to restart their lives after removal from the United States. What all these policies have in common is that they seek to allow displaced and marginalized populations some level of incorporation into the local community. Sanctuary as a municipal strategy has its roots in the United States, with the Los Angeles Police Department passing Special Order Number 40 in 1979, which was the first to forbid officers from inquiring into the immigration status of residents. The number of sanctuary localities rapidly expanded in the 1980s, as the faith-based Sanctuary Movement began to offer refuge in synagogues and churches to Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers, who feared they would face persecution or death if they were deported. As the movement captured national attention, cities across the United States began declaring themselves to be cites of refuge for Central Americans and sanctuary cities were born. Since then, sanctuary policies have spread internationally, while being adapted for different contexts and needs. When the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies article on “Sanctuary Cities” was originally written in 2020, the work on these policies and movements outside of the United States was limited. Today, there is a growing body of research exploring sanctuary in the rest of North America, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the religious, comparative, and normative concerns researchers should consider when assessing sanctuary policies and movements.