Sanctuary City Meaning Explained The Surprising Truth About What These Cities Really Do 

A sanctuary city is a US municipality, county, or state that limits how much its local police and officials cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. There is no single legal definition written into federal law, so the term covers a wide range of policies, from quietly declining ICE detainer requests to formally banning city staff from asking about immigration status. Understanding the sanctuary city meaning matters right now, because it shapes everything from local policing to federal funding fights playing out in courtrooms across the country.

This guide breaks down the term in plain English: where it came from, how a place becomes one, what it means in California, Los Angeles, and other cities, how it differs from the newer “Second Amendment sanctuary” and “transgender sanctuary” movements, and what current law actually says about it.

Quick Definition Box

Term	Meaning
Sanctuary city	A city that limits local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement
Sanctuary state	A state that applies similar limits statewide
Non-sanctuary city	A city that fully cooperates with ICE detainer and information requests
Sanctuary jurisdiction	Umbrella term covering sanctuary cities, counties, and states together

Note: No US statute contains the phrase “sanctuary city.” The term is descriptive shorthand that journalists, advocates, and government agencies use, and its exact meaning shifts depending on who is using it.

See More: Sin City Meaning Revealed

What Does Sanctuary City Mean?

At its core, a sanctuary city limits how far local government goes in helping the federal government enforce immigration law. This usually means police will not ask crime victims, witnesses, or people they arrest about their immigration status. It also typically means local jails will not automatically hold someone extra time just because Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked them to.

The Britannica encyclopedia describes a sanctuary city as an American municipality that limits local enforcement of federal immigration laws to protect undocumented immigrants. That definition captures the basic idea, but the practical reality on the ground varies enormously from one city to the next. Such policies are established at a city, state, or county level and may be formally enforced or a de facto practice.

Groups on different sides of the debate even disagree about whether “sanctuary” is the right word at all. Some immigrant advocacy organizations prefer the term “safe cities” instead, arguing that sanctuary suggests immigrants who commit crimes are shielded, when the policies are actually much narrower than that. Meanwhile, groups pushing for stricter enforcement use the same term to argue these cities endanger public safety by blocking federal immigration authorities from locating, arresting, and prosecuting people who commit crimes. Neither camp is using a legally defined word, which is exactly why confusion around the phrase persists.

What Sanctuary City Status Does Not Mean

It’s worth clearing up a common misconception early, because it drives a lot of the political heat around this topic. In a sanctuary city, unauthorized immigrants can still be rounded up and deported by the government. Local police in a sanctuary city are not authorized to stop federal agents from operating within their borders, and there’s nothing to keep federal agents from conducting a raid at a factory or an individual residence within a sanctuary city. What changes is whether the local government spends its own personnel, jail space, or budget helping with that enforcement.

Quick Tip: If you want a one-line way to remember it, think of a sanctuary city as a city that says “we won’t do ICE’s job for it,” not a city that says “ICE cannot operate here.”

Where the Term Sanctuary City Comes From

The word “sanctuary” has religious roots that go back centuries before anyone applied it to modern immigration policy. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary traces the underlying concept of sanctuary to consecrated spaces, and the historical practice by which churches offered temporary legal protection to people fleeing punishment. In Anglo-Saxon England, churches and churchyards generally provided 40 days of immunity, and neither the sheriffs nor the army would enter to seize the outlaw, though the right of sanctuary gradually eroded and sanctuary for treason was disallowed in 1486.

The modern American sanctuary city movement traces back to church-led activism in the 1980s. The sanctuary movement in the United States finds its origins in the 1980s when Reverend John Fife announced that his church, the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, would protect refugees fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in defiance of the Reagan Administration’s tough stance on asylum for those persecuted by government forces. Dictionary.com’s word history entry places the current civic usage of the phrase in the 1980 to 1985 window, noting the concept is possibly related to “Cities of Refuge” named in the Bible in the books of Joshua, Deuteronomy, and Numbers.

By the early 2000s, the label had moved from churches to city governments. Los Angeles has treated itself as an unofficial sanctuary city since 1979, well before the term reached national headlines. As politicians, courts, and news outlets kept borrowing the phrase, it eventually stretched far beyond immigration, giving rise to gun sanctuaries, transgender sanctuaries, and abortion-related sanctuary declarations that all use the same borrowed vocabulary.

How Does a City Become a Sanctuary City?

There is no application process or federal registry a city files with. Sanctuary status is created locally, through one of a few different mechanisms, and the method a city chooses affects how legally durable the policy actually is.

1. City council ordinance: An elected city council passes a binding law that limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities, similar to how Los Angeles adopted its sanctuary ordinance.
2. Mayoral or executive directive: A mayor or police chief issues an internal policy directing city departments not to assist with immigration enforcement, without it becoming a formal law.
3. State legislation: A state legislature passes a law, such as California’s Values Act, that applies sanctuary-style limits to every city and county within the state.
4. Informal or de facto practice: Some places never formally declare sanctuary status but simply decline, as a matter of practice, to honor ICE detainer requests without a judicial warrant.

Note: Ordinances passed by a city council generally carry more legal weight than a mayor’s executive directive, because a directive can be reversed by the next mayor without any public vote or legislative process.

Los Angeles offers a clear real-world example of this progression. For decades the city relied on an informal policy, then a 2017 executive directive from then-Mayor Eric Garcetti. In December 2024, the Los Angeles City Council voted 13 to 0 to formally codify sanctuary status into law, prohibiting any city resources, property, or personnel from being used to help federal enforcement of immigration laws. That shift from directive to ordinance was explicitly designed to make the policy harder for a future mayor to simply undo.

Sanctuary City Meaning in US Immigration Policy

To understand what sanctuary status actually changes on the ground, it helps to understand the specific tool at the center of the debate: the ICE detainer request. When ICE identifies someone in local custody it believes may be deportable, it can send local police an “immigration detainer,” which is a request to be notified when a noncitizen who has been convicted of a crime is being released, so ICE can take custody of them and evaluate whether they’re subject to deportation.

Here is the part that surprises a lot of people: that request is voluntary. A 2013 federal appeals court decision concluded that local agencies are not legally required to detain undocumented immigrants when ICE requests it. Sanctuary jurisdictions are simply the places that choose not to honor that request as a matter of policy, at least for lower-level offenses.

Common Sanctuary Policies in Practice

• Declining to hold someone in jail past their release date solely because of an ICE detainer, unless it comes with a judicial warrant
• Barring local police from asking about a person’s immigration status during a routine stop or investigation
• Preventing city employees from sharing immigration status information with federal agents except in criminal matters
• Prohibiting local jails from letting ICE interview people in custody without consent
• Restricting or banning local participation in 287(g) agreements, which let local police act as deputized immigration agents
• Blocking the construction of federal immigration detention facilities within city limits

New York City’s policies illustrate how narrow these carve-outs usually are in practice. New York’s sanctuary policies only bar local law enforcement from honoring ICE detainer requests, which seek to hold undocumented immigrants for up to an additional 48 hours after they would normally be released, and local law enforcement is still permitted to honor detainer requests when ICE provides a judicial warrant. Serious crimes are treated differently almost everywhere sanctuary policies exist. Under New York City’s rules, for instance, if an individual has been convicted of a serious or violent offense, local sanctuary city laws instruct cooperation with ICE.

Quick Tip: When you hear that a city “won’t cooperate with ICE,” check whether the policy has an exception for violent or serious felonies. Nearly every sanctuary jurisdiction does, which is a detail that gets lost in a lot of political messaging on both sides.

Non-Sanctuary City Meaning

A non-sanctuary city is simply a city that has not adopted these limits and instead cooperates fully with federal immigration authorities. Local police in a non-sanctuary city will typically honor ICE detainer requests, may participate in 287(g) partnerships that deputize local officers for immigration enforcement, and generally share information about a person’s immigration status when federal agents ask.

Some states go a step further and legally require this cooperation, effectively banning sanctuary policies within their borders. These are sometimes called “anti-sanctuary states,” and they include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. In these states, a local sheriff or city council generally cannot legally decline to cooperate with ICE, even if it wanted to.

Sanctuary City vs Non-Sanctuary City: Quick Comparison

Factor	Sanctuary City	Non-Sanctuary City
ICE detainer requests	Often declined without a judicial warrant	Typically honored
Immigration status questions	Generally restricted for police and staff	Usually permitted
287(g) agreements	Usually avoided or banned	Frequently used
Federal immigration raids	Still legal and can occur	Still legal and can occur
Serious or violent crime cases	Cooperation with ICE still occurs	Cooperation with ICE occurs
Legal basis	City ordinance, state law, or informal policy	State law or absence of sanctuary policy

How Many Sanctuary Cities Are There in the US?

This is one of the most searched questions on the topic, and honestly, there is no single correct number, because different organizations count differently. Groups that favor stricter immigration enforcement tend to count broadly and generously; groups that support sanctuary policies tend to count narrowly, focusing only on jurisdictions with a clear formal policy.

Here is what current sources report, side by side:

Source	Count Reported	As Of
Center for Immigration Studies	About 13 states and roughly 100 localities	March 2026 testimony
Britannica	More than 200 sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide	2026
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)	At least 1,003 sanctuary jurisdictions	May 2025
US Department of Justice, per Executive Order 14287	13 states, 4 counties, 18 cities formally designated	August 2025
Ballotpedia	33 of the 100 largest US cities self-identified as sanctuary cities	August 2017

The discrepancy makes sense once you understand the counting methods. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter immigration enforcement, testified to Congress in March 2026 that there are 13 states and about 100 localities that have adopted sanctuary policies, and more than half of the illegal immigrant population resides in sanctuary jurisdictions, with more than one-fifth in California alone. Britannica’s broader tally counts more than 200 sanctuary jurisdictions including cities, counties, and states, with New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago as the largest sanctuary cities.

Warning: Be cautious of any single number presented as “the” official count. Because there is no legal definition of sanctuary city, every count reflects the criteria of the organization that produced it, and those criteria are often shaped by the group’s position on immigration policy.

What Are the 11 (or More) Sanctuary States?

You’ve probably seen the phrase “11 sanctuary states” floating around online. That figure is outdated and inconsistent across sources; the real number has shifted over time and depends heavily on which criteria are used. As of the Department of Justice’s official list published under Executive Order 14287 in August 2025, the federal government formally designated 13 states as sanctuary jurisdictions: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

That same list also named specific counties and cities. The counties named were Baltimore County, Maryland; Cook County, Illinois; San Diego County, California; and San Francisco County, California. The cities named were Albuquerque, Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, Denver, East Lansing, Hoboken, Jersey City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Paterson, Philadelphia, Portland, Rochester, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Advocacy groups that favor tighter enforcement often cite a larger number. FAIR, for example, reported in 2026 that 17 states and the District of Columbia currently have state-wide sanctuary laws, policies, or legal opinions in place. The gap between “13” and “17” comes down to which states count: some states have court rulings or attorney general opinions limiting cooperation rather than a formal statute, and different trackers weigh those differently.

Quick Fact: New Mexico and Rhode Island are sometimes counted and sometimes excluded from sanctuary state lists, since their protections come from legal requirements around judicial warrants rather than a sweeping state sanctuary law.

Sanctuary City Meaning in California

California carries special weight in this conversation because it was the first state to formally declare itself a sanctuary state, and it remains the jurisdiction most frequently cited in national sanctuary city debates. The state’s 2017 Values Act limits how state and local police can assist federal immigration enforcement statewide, and it has survived repeated legal challenges.

California’s legal durability comes from a specific court history. The Trump administration’s attempt to block California’s Values Act failed: the Ninth Circuit upheld the law, and the Supreme Court declined to review that ruling. That outcome has made California’s sanctuary framework something of a template for other states considering similar legislation.

Sanctuary City Meaning in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is often cited as one of the country’s oldest sanctuary cities, with roots going back to a 1979 police department policy. For most of its history, though, that status rested on an executive directive rather than a binding law. City leaders explained the reasoning behind finally codifying it: Sanctuary cities allow undocumented immigrants to interact with local government without fear of deportation, and city officials argued that residents cannot be expected to apply for a library card or report domestic violence without trust in their local government.

The new LAPD leadership publicly reinforced that stance following the 2024 ordinance. Newly appointed Chief Jim McDonnell said at his swearing-in ceremony, “We’re not in that business. We will not be doing any of the things that people are worried about recently.”

Sanctuary City Meaning in New York and Chicago

New York City has layered sanctuary policies dating back decades, built around limiting what city employees can share about immigration status. One of New York City’s sanctuary policies bars city officials from sharing information about immigrants unless it involves a criminal matter or the immigrant gives written permission. The policy has faced political pressure following high-profile crimes, though the City Council has generally defended it as narrower than critics suggest.

Chicago’s version is formally called the “Welcoming City” ordinance, and it has drawn direct legal challenges from the federal government. Chicago’s local politicians, including the mayor and the state’s governor, have continued to back the city’s sanctuary city laws under this name. A federal judge in Illinois sided with the city in 2025, ruling that Illinois’s sanctuary laws reflect the state’s decision not to participate in enforcing civil immigration law, a decision protected by the Tenth Amendment.

Second Amendment Sanctuary City Meaning

Here is where the sanctuary concept takes an entirely different turn. A “Second Amendment sanctuary” has nothing to do with immigration. Instead, it describes a city, county, or state that formally opposes enforcing certain gun control laws it considers unconstitutional.

The movement deliberately borrowed its language from the immigration sanctuary movement. Bryan Kibler, the state’s attorney in Effingham County, Illinois, is credited with first applying the term to the gun debate, telling the Associated Press in 2018, “We’re just stealing the language that sanctuary cities use.”

2A Sanctuary City Meaning in Practice

A 2A sanctuary resolution typically declares that local government will not use funds for various gun control proposals, such as gun bans, registration, enforcement of gun background checks, and red flag laws. The scale of this movement has grown quickly. One-third of all US counties have enacted Second Amendment sanctuary ordinances prohibiting law enforcement officials from enforcing state and federal gun control laws, according to a 2024 study.

It’s important to understand that most of these resolutions carry no actual force of law. These resolutions do not carry the force of law, but laws need somebody to enforce them, and many sheriffs and police officers in these counties support the community’s decision or simply aren’t willing to strictly enforce laws they disagree with. Legal analysts have echoed the point directly: “The resolution is purely a political symbolic gesture that doesn’t really have any legal weight whatsoever,” according to Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Gun Sanctuary Legal Standing vs Immigration Sanctuary

Interestingly, legal experts note that the two sanctuary movements sit on different constitutional footing. Immigration sanctuary cities push back against federal enforcement, so the anti-commandeering doctrine applies directly, while Second Amendment sanctuary counties overwhelmingly push back against state gun laws, which flips the legal relationship, since local governments do not have the same constitutional independence from their states that states have from the federal government. In other words, a city refusing to help ICE has firmer constitutional ground than a county refusing to enforce its own state’s gun laws.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has pointed out the two movements are legally intertwined at a deeper level. The seminal Printz case actually involved a federal law that commandeered state officials to carry out background checks on gun purchasers, and conservatives tempted to reject anti-commandeering protections for immigration sanctuaries should remember the same principles protect red-state gun sanctuaries like Missouri and Montana.

Transgender Sanctuary City Meaning

A transgender sanctuary city is a municipality that has formally declared it will not use local resources to help enforce another state’s laws that criminalize or restrict gender-affirming care, and will not cooperate with out-of-state investigations targeting transgender residents or their families.

The wave of transgender sanctuary declarations accelerated sharply starting in 2022 and 2023, as more states restricted gender-affirming care for minors. A sanctuary in this context refers to a legal haven where specific groups can be shielded from the laws of other states: for example, if one state makes it a felony for doctors to provide gender-affirming care, doctors in a sanctuary state or city can seek refuge from prosecution there.

Sacramento was among the first California cities to adopt the label, explaining its intent plainly in the resolution text.”In preparation of future legislation that may criminalize those providing or seeking gender-affirming care… it is important for the City of Sacramento to be proactive in reiterating our commitment to transgender rights and equal protections for transgender people by declaring ourselves a sanctuary city.”

Boston formalized similar protections in 2025. The Boston City Council adopted a resolution declaring the city a sanctuary city for transgender individuals and all members of the LGBTQIA2s+ community, passing by a 12 to 1 vote.

Note: Like most Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions, transgender sanctuary declarations are frequently symbolic rather than legally binding, especially in states where the underlying restriction is set at the state level and preempts local ordinances.

Legal scholars caution that the legal weight of these declarations depends entirely on their wording. A sanctuary resolution that only says local officials disagree about what the Constitution requires, without pledging to break federal law, is simply protected free expression, but a claim of sanctuary that pledges immunity from enforcement raises much harder constitutional questions under the Supremacy Clause. Texas has directly challenged transgender sanctuary ordinances on those grounds, with the state attorney general arguing that any local government that adopts so-called “transgender sanctuary city” ordinances permitting treatments prohibited under state law is preempted and unenforceable.

Are Sanctuary Cities Legal? The Constitutional Debate

This is the legal question that decides how much staying power sanctuary policies actually have. The answer rests almost entirely on one constitutional principle: the anti-commandeering doctrine.

The Anti-Commandeering Doctrine, Explained Simply

The Tenth Amendment reserves powers not given to the federal government for the states. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean the federal government cannot force state or local governments to enforce federal programs on its behalf. This rule came from two landmark cases.

Case	Year	Core Holding
New York v. United States	1992	Congress cannot force state legislatures to pass or enforce federal policy
Printz v. United States	1997	Congress cannot force local officials, like sheriffs, to carry out federal programs
Murphy v. NCAA	2018	Extended anti-commandeering to bar federal orders that dictate state legislative choices

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in Printz is the sentence most often quoted in sanctuary city litigation: “The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

Courts have repeatedly applied that same logic to immigration detainers. The consensus among courts is that whether states or localities must honor immigration detainers comes down to the anti-commandeering principle, which courts have cited in determining that such requests are voluntary, as established in Galarza v. Szalczyk in the Third Circuit.

What Sanctuary Cities Cannot Legally Do

The anti-commandeering doctrine protects a city’s right to decline participation, but it does not protect active obstruction or concealment. Under federal law, it remains a felony to harbor or conceal a person subject to an arrest warrant, and separately, it is a federal crime to conceal, harbor, or shield an undocumented person from detection, or to encourage illegal entry. This is the legal line sanctuary cities are careful to stay behind: declining to assist is protected, actively hiding someone from a valid warrant is not.

Recent Federal Action Against Sanctuary Cities

President Trump’s second term has brought an aggressive wave of federal action targeting sanctuary jurisdictions. One of his executive orders, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” directed the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure sanctuary jurisdictions do not receive federal funding. A subsequent order, Executive Order 14287, went further. It directed the Attorney General to publish a list of sanctuary jurisdictions and directed federal agency heads to identify federal funds, including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination in those jurisdictions.

The results in court have been mixed so far. Some rulings have favored sanctuary jurisdictions. In late July 2025, a judge in Illinois dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that sought to disrupt Chicago’s limits on cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police. Others have gone the other way, and litigation continues in multiple states, including lawsuits targeting policies in Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, and Rochester, New York, with four New Jersey cities sued in May 2025.

Do Sanctuary Cities Have Lower Crime Rates?

This is one of the most contested empirical claims in the entire debate, and the honest answer is that the research is mixed and politically contested on both sides. Wikipedia’s summary of the academic literature notes that some studies on the relationship between sanctuary status and crime have found that sanctuary policies either have no effect on crime, or that sanctuary cities have lower crime rates and stronger economies than comparable non-sanctuary cities.

Groups supporting sanctuary policies point to specific figures. The Vera Institute, an advocacy and research organization, states that on average, 35.5 fewer crimes are committed per 10,000 people in counties with sanctuary policies compared to those without them. They also argue the mechanism behind that pattern is straightforward: sanctuary policies allow immigrants to feel more comfortable acting as witnesses in criminal investigations, rather than avoiding police out of fear of deportation.

Groups opposed to sanctuary policies point to individual high-profile cases instead. One frequently cited example involves a specific violent crime. After entering the country illegally in 2022, a Venezuelan man with ties to the Tren de Aragua gang was arrested in New York, a sanctuary city, but released before federal authorities could detain him. A public radio explainer on the topic notes the deeper statistical problem with drawing firm conclusions either way: there is no definitive proof that sanctuary policies actually cause lower crime rates, since it could simply be a coincidence rather than a causal relationship.

Warning: Be skeptical of any article, on either side of this debate, that presents crime statistics from sanctuary cities as settled proof of a cause-and-effect relationship. Both the correlational data favoring sanctuary policies and the anecdotal cases against them fall short of establishing causation on their own.

Sanctuary Cities: Arguments For and Against

Arguments in Favor	Arguments Against
Builds trust so immigrants report crimes and cooperate as witnesses	Some argue it allows people with criminal records to avoid deportation
Frees local police to focus on local crime instead of federal immigration duties	Critics say it can act as a magnet for illegal immigration
Protects the Tenth Amendment right of local governments not to be commandeered	Opponents argue it strains local public services and budgets
Reduces fear that keeps immigrant families from schools, hospitals, and clinics	Some point to specific violent crimes involving released individuals
Supported by federal court precedent in multiple circuits	Federal government can and does withhold certain grants in response

Sanctuary City vs Sanctuary State vs Sanctuary County

These three terms get used almost interchangeably in casual conversation, but they operate at different levels of government and carry different legal weight.

Level	Who Creates the Policy	Scope	Example
Sanctuary city	City council or mayor	Applies only within city limits	Los Angeles, Chicago
Sanctuary county	County board or sheriff	Applies within county limits, including unincorporated areas	Cook County, Illinois
Sanctuary state	State legislature or governor	Applies statewide, overriding local variation	California, Illinois

A state-level sanctuary law generally has more staying power than a city ordinance, because it cannot be undone by a single city council vote, and it typically applies even in conservative-leaning cities and counties within an otherwise sanctuary-friendly state.

Sanctuary City Meaning Outside the United States

While this guide focuses on US usage, it’s worth briefly noting that the term means something different abroad. In Europe, “sanctuary city” refers to a municipal arrangement where, rather than resisting the enforcement of a superseding immigration law, the city commits to “building a culture of hospitality,” which can include providing goods and services to migrants and asylum seekers even when broader national law does not require it. Glasgow, Scotland is frequently cited as a leading example of this European model.

See More: Funky Town Meaning Revealed

Conculsion

The sanctuary city meaning ultimately comes down to one idea: a local government choosing where to draw the line on helping federal immigration enforcement, without any single federal law defining exactly where that line has to sit. The same borrowed vocabulary now describes gun rights resolutions, transgender protections, and immigration policy alike, which is exactly why the term causes so much confusion. Whatever position you take in the broader political debate, understanding what these policies actually do, and just as importantly, what they don’t do, is the first step toward making sense of the headlines.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the simple definition of a sanctuary city?

A sanctuary city is a US city that limits how much its police and local government cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, most often by declining ICE detainer requests without a judicial warrant.

Is being a sanctuary city illegal?

No. Federal courts, relying on the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine, have consistently held that local governments cannot be forced to assist federal immigration enforcement, though litigation over specific policies continues.

What is the difference between a sanctuary city and a non-sanctuary city?

A sanctuary city limits cooperation with ICE detainer requests and immigration status inquiries, while a non-sanctuary city typically honors those requests and may partner directly with federal immigration agents.

How many sanctuary cities are there in the US?

Estimates vary widely by source, ranging from about 100 localities according to the Center for Immigration Studies to over 200 jurisdictions according to Britannica, since there is no single official definition or registry.

What does 2nd Amendment sanctuary city mean?

It describes a city or county that has passed a resolution refusing to devote local funds or personnel to enforcing gun control laws it considers unconstitutional, unrelated to immigration.

What does transgender sanctuary city mean?

It refers to a city that has pledged not to use local resources to help enforce another state’s laws restricting gender-affirming care or targeting transgender residents.

Can federal agents still make arrests in a sanctuary city?

Yes. Sanctuary status does not block federal agents from operating, making arrests, or conducting raids within city limits; it only limits local government’s own participation.

Which states are officially considered sanctuary states?

The Department of Justice’s August 2025 list under Executive Order 14287 named 13 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Do sanctuary cities cooperate with ICE at all?

Yes, in most cases. Most sanctuary policies still allow cooperation when ICE presents a judicial warrant, and nearly all carve out exceptions for people convicted of serious or violent crimes.

Where did the term sanctuary city come from?

It originated from 1980s church-led sanctuary movements protecting Central American refugees, itself borrowed from a much older religious tradition of churches offering legal refuge.