Best estimates say there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, an increase from 2019, but still below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007. In Philadelphia, that number is somewhere around 50,000, according to the Migration Policy Institute; that’s a small percentage of our immigrants, who make up the fastest-growing population in the city — a population that is part of what is most beautiful about Philadelphia.
In fact, immigration is part of what’s most beautiful about America. It is America. And like America, immigration is also complicated. Which is why issues of immigration don’t respond well to simple moral arguments, or simple safety arguments, or simple economic arguments.
Like the debate about “sanctuary cities.” Mayor Cherelle Parker has quietly affirmed Philadelphia’s status as a sanctuary city, though — perhaps prudently — she has not spelled out exactly what that will mean for her administration yet.
This is only week two of the second Trump administration, and we are already in a state of chaos nationwide. Here’s what we know so far about being a “sanctuary” for immigrants in Philadelphia.
What is a sanctuary city?
The phrase comes from the “Sanctuary Movement” of the 1980s, when the U.S. saw an influx of refugees fleeing violence and civil war, particularly from Central America. Over the course of a decade roughly 1 million asylum-seekers crossed the southern border into the open arms of churches all over the U.S. While sanctuary cities weren’t controversial at the time — religious congregations were even commended for their humanitarian outreach — after 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal Act, the debate about immigrants turned hotly political.
These days, the term generally applies to jurisdictions where police are instructed (formally or informally) not to cooperate with ICE when they have in custody someone whom they suspect is an undocumented immigrant. But those rules are different even among cities that have earned a reputation for being sanctuaries. The conservative think tank Center for Immigration Studies’ lists 13 states and more than 300 jurisdictions nationwide that it considers “sanctuary cities” — even if some of those have not declared themselves as such.
Philadelphia should never become an anti-immigrant police state. No reasonable person who knows the truth about immigration wants that.
The term has become either a badge of honor or a smear, depending on your perspective on the issue. In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter in 2014 took a stand against what he saw as the “overly aggressive” reach of ICE under President Obama’s Secure Communities program by signing an executive order to grant Philadelphia sanctuary status, allowing undocumented immigrants to receive government services such as 9-1-1, emergency hospital care, and the use of libraries and recreation centers without fear of questions that would lead to deportation.
Nutter reversed course in 2015, after Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson instituted the Priority Enforcement Program, which prioritized deportation proceedings for undocumented immigrants who were convicted of violent crimes, involved in gangs, or were engaged in or suspected of terrorism.
On his first day in office, Mayor Kenney signed an executive order reinstituting Philly’s sanctuary status. He held firm during Donald Trump’s first term.
Mayor Parker stayed quiet on the issue until January, when she affirmed that Philly is a sanctuary city, a sentiment repeated by City Solicitor Renee Garcia, who affirmed to City Council last week that Kenney’s order is still in place: “This is what is in place. I cannot speak today as to what changes will be made.” Garcia declined to say if immigrants here needed more protections than they would get under Kenney’s policy.
Whatever you call it, what happens to undocumented immigrants in Philadelphia police custody?
When someone is arrested — immigrant or not — their information enters a criminal database system, which can alert ICE to the immigration status of a person in custody. These are primarily people who have been charged, but not yet convicted, for the arresting offense; after conviction, they usually are sent to state facilities, outside the jurisdiction of Philadelphia.
On occasion, that information triggers a “detainer request,” a form sent from ICE asking the local agency to keep the prisoner in custody for an additional 48 hours, after they have been granted bail or would otherwise be released. This time allows ICE to investigate the particulars and decide whether to start deportation proceedings against the individual. If ICE does not take the person into custody, federal law mandates they be released after 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays.
This is where things get complicated. A “detainer request” is not the same thing as a judicial arrest warrant to start deportation proceedings. If presented with a warrant, Garcia told Council that the City will hold the undocumented person until ICE picks them up, as it would for any other law enforcement agency. The law department did not know how many such warrants ICE has issued since Kenney’s executive order.
Trump’s new Laken Riley Act requires deportation even if an undocumented immigrant is arrested but not charged, or charged but not convicted — something that seems anathema to our criminal justice principle of “innocent until proven guilty.”
In lieu of a warrant, Philadelphia officials have instructed the Prisons Department to decline a detainer request. In other words, they release the suspect as scheduled, even if ICE says it wants to hold them over for possible deportation — and even if that person has a violent felony on his record.
In essence, the City treats everyone who is arrested the same: Whether documented, undocumented, or a citizen, they are released when a judge says to do so — unless another law enforcement agency has a warrant for their arrest.
“If ICE agents are doing raids in the city of Philadelphia and if they are doing raids consistent with the law they’re not going to have a problem with me,” District Attorney Larry Krasner explained to NBC10 earlier this month.
Isn’t the City breaking the law?
Maybe? The federal government determines immigration policy. But several courts have ruled since the early 2010s that ICE detainers are unconstitutional, including a case from Lehigh County in which the Third Circuit Court of Appeals Court held the 2010 arrest and detainer of a New Jersey-born man ICE incorrectly tagged as an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic to be unconstitutional. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that municipalities are not required to keep people based on detainer requests. The county and the city of Allentown, meanwhile, paid the man $130,000 for the mistake.
This week President Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act — named for a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered last February by Jose Antonio Ibarra, who came to the U.S. without documentation in 2022, and was allowed to remain temporarily, even after he was arrested for shoplifting — which may make things even more complicated for local authorities. As The New York Times explains it:
The Laken Riley Act lists specific crimes that could cause a person without authorization to be in the United States to be detained and deported. They include burglary, larceny, theft, shoplifting, assaulting a police officer and any crime that results in death or bodily injury. The bill mandates detention for people who are arrested, charged or admit to committing such a crime, without requiring that they first be convicted.
It also gives state attorneys general the right to sue the U.S. attorney general or the secretary of homeland security if an immigrant with uncertain or contested legal status who is paroled into the country commits a crime that harms either the state or one of its residents physically or financially, if the value of the harm is more than $100.
Crucially, the bill requires deportation even if an undocumented immigrant is arrested but not charged, or charged but not convicted — something that seems anathema to our criminal justice principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” But Temple University Criminal Justice Assistant Professor Douglas Green, a former immigration officer with Homeland Security, says this is a dramatic change in primarily one way: It mandates ICE put the arrested immigrant into a detention facility, rather than release them to house arrest or on bond.
“It doesn’t mean more people can be arrested or removed from the country — the people described in the Laken Riley Act were already here illegally and subject to enforcement action,” Green says.
Why doesn’t ICE just get a warrant?
Part of the problem is immigration law itself. Sara H. Paoletti, director of the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, notes that people living here without documentation are not breaking any criminal laws — they are guilty of a civil violation.
Someone who is here without valid documents may not necessarily be deportable; according to a New York Times analysis last week, some 40 percent of undocumented immigrants have temporary permission to be here, including millions who are awaiting asylum hearings, those fleeing humanitarian crises like the war in Ukraine, and Dreamers (those brought to the country as children by their parents). Or, frankly, the person being detained might actually be a citizen (see the Lehigh County case above, or Newark, NJ, where one of the men ICE detained last week is not just a citizen — he is a veteran). In those cases ICE may never start deportation proceedings against someone being held — but wants time to investigate.
There is a well-documented backlog in federal immigration hearings. And ICE’s detention facilities are full to the point of a human rights crisis. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, some 37,000 people spend the night in immigration detention every night — for a total of 260,000 a year — an increase of 140 percent since the start of the Biden administration. Some 60 percent of them are in “mandatory detention,” and do not have a right to a bond hearing for their release, something the Supreme Court upheld in 2022. The cost for ICE detention nationally in 2024 was $3 billion. Meanwhile, the American Immigration Council estimates a one-time deportation of every undocumented immigrant would cost the United States $315 billion.
“Given the incredibly large number of people we’re talking about, we don’t have the resources to manage this,” notes Green.
“Municipalities need to be more proactive in determining their strategies for moving forward. It will be harder to impose these rules if they speak in a united voice.” — Sarah H. Paoletti, Penn Carey Law School
Trump’s new rules will require many more beds and facilities to house those ICE has rounded up. In the meantime, though, asking local facilities to hold suspects while ICE does an initial investigation and starts proceedings pushes the cost of that detention onto local governments. How you see that cost depends on how you view this issue: Well-spent to ensure a possibly dangerous undocumented person is off our local streets, or an unfair use of local funds, when federal money is supposed to cover the cost of immigration proceedings.
Complicating matters is the fact that deportation is often not as simple as driving immigrants to the border and escorting them “home.” Many countries — including China, from where, according to the nonpartisan Migrant Policy Institute, some 239,000 undocumented people hail — do not cooperate with deportation requests. Which means there isn’t even anywhere for them to go. That, too, may change in some cases, as happened this week when Colombia first refused to allow military crafts to land with its citizens back from the U.S. — and then changed course after Trump threatened excessively high tariffs.
What about sanctuary policies in schools, churches and other safe spaces?
In his first week in office, Trump declared that there are no more safe spaces for undocumented immigrants, leading to panic in schools, churches, hospitals and other communities around the country. In Philly, the School District this week reaffirmed its “commitment to creating safe, welcoming spaces for our students and families” regardless of “race, ethnicity, immigration status, national origin” and more. The District has given guidance to school officials about how to respond to ICE requests, and says it will provide training.
Will that protect students, teachers and families on school property? That’s unclear. Meanwhile, ICE raided a carwash in North Philly this week and arrested seven people it accuses of being undocumented. (It’s unclear how they knew they were there, and whether those detained have any criminal record.)
This brings up another legal issue that has rarely been enforced: A longstanding law that prohibits anyone from transporting, harboring, aiding or employing undocumented immigrants. Flyers have gone up around the region warning folks that “it is a federal crime” to do so, and instead encouraging people to “gather evidence of suspicious activity and report it to ICE.” In fact, this law was applied in at least one high-profile case during the last Trump administration, when a Massachusetts judge was arrested and charged with obstructing justice for not handing over an undocumented defendant in her courtroom. (The case was dismissed in 2022.)
Does this policy make the city more or less safe?
There are several cases of undocumented immigrants released into the community who go on to commit heinous crimes, like the murder of Laken Riley. And among the people ICE has taken off the streets are people who they contend have committed some truly heinous crimes — mass murders, a child rapist, ISIS members. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, about 3 percent of undocumented immigrants nationwide have committed felonies, nearly 300,000 of the 11 million who are here. Another 520,000 have been convicted of lesser crimes. That is a small percentage — it’s half of the proportion of felons in the overall United States population — but it is not nothing.
“The people who believe detainers are a way to improve community safety are not totally crazy,” says Aaron Chalfin, assistant professor of criminology at Penn. “People are arrested for a crime like a robbery. They go before a judge, and are arraigned, pay bail, are out of jail awaiting trial — they might commit a new crime. If there’s a detainer, on the basis of immigration policy, that person might be detained, and then removed.”
“We need immigration reform that facilitates lawful immigration and makes it an accessible thing. But if we’ve decided these are the laws we want to adhere to, it’s a sin to not enforce them for all.” — Douglas Green, Temple Law
But studies show that detainer policies like the ones President Trump is trying to enforce have no effect on overall community safety. “The literature is so clear that immigrant communities have less crime and the population of immigrants see less criminality than American citizens,” Green says.
In fact, a National Bureau of Economic Research report from last year found that immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than U.S.-born residents for the last 150 years — and that rate is declining:
Immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their U.S.-born counterparts.
City police chiefs around the country have repeatedly said the same thing, and have assured their constituents that they are not in the business of enforcing immigration laws. This is a stance that they say is important for public safety. If city law enforcement agencies start getting involved with immigration, it threatens to break the trust needed between police and citizens to solve and prevent crimes. If immigrants are worried about being deported, they are less likely to report crimes against them, tell police they’ve witnessed a crime, or call in tips on suspicious activity.
In the wake of Trump’s first order allowing the Department of Homeland Security to essentially deputize local cops to serve as immigration agents, then Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said sexual assault reports among the city’s Latino community fell 25 percent, and domestic violence 10 percent — a drop not seen among other ethnicities — no doubt owing to the fear sown by Pres. Trump’s rhetoric. This lack of trust makes communities more dangerous.
“Imagine, a young woman, imagine your daughter, your sister, your mother … not reporting a sexual assault, because they are afraid that their family will be torn apart,” Beck told the Los Angeles Times.
On the other hand, Green warns, if Philadelphia refuses to comply with a detainer request for an undocumented immigrant with a violent past, apprehending him outside of jail could pose a danger for other residents. Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan warned last week that ICE agents arresting an undocumented immigrant with a history of violence in his home, for example, might come across other undocumented people and decide to arrest them as well — putting more immigrants at risk of being deported.
Are there financial consequences to sanctuary cities refusing to comply with ICE detainer requests?
Possibly. Trump has threatened to pull federal funding from sanctuary cities, but it’s unclear how widely that can be applied. Legal experts in the first administration said the federal government only has the power to pull funding from related programs — like immigration — which is not a huge portion of the Philadelphia city budget.
This time around, Congress is expected to consider the “No Bailout For Sanctuary Cities” bill, which would prevent funds going to a sanctuary city or state that intends to use it “for the benefit (including the provision of food, shelter, healthcare services, legal services, and transportation) of aliens who are present in the United States without lawful status under the immigration laws.” A version of this law, introduced by Long Island Republican Nick Lalota passed the House in September, and is expected to come up for another vote.
“Government officials who are subject to these orders should speak up and disavow the premise under which they are being issued. If we don’t challenge the message we will lose the battle.” — Sarah H. Paoletti, Penn Carey Law School
The federal government deciding to keep all federal funding from Philadelphia — or any city — would be devastating, and it’s likely the administration would threaten to interpret the law in the broadest possible sense — taking away funding for all free school lunches, for example, to prevent undocumented students from accessing it. But that would also be difficult to pull off, as evidenced last week when Trump first froze and then unfroze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans.
In Harrisburg, meanwhile, legislators for the last couple of years have attempted to pass anti-sanctuary city bills, but so far they have not made them into law. It’s unclear whether — or maybe when is a better word — another bill will be introduced, or if it will pass.
Paoletti says cities like Philadelphia need to work together — regionally and across the country — to figure out how to address this issue. “Waiting and seeing seems to be the MO that’s happening across the board,” she says. “I think it’s wrong for city government to respond from a place of fear about funding. Municipalities need to be more proactive in determining their strategies for moving forward. It will be harder to impose these rules if they speak in a united voice, so it’s not just Chicago or Philadelphia standing on its own.”
That’s politics. What do real people think about sanctuary cities?
One answer to that question could be to look at the 2024 presidential election. Immigration was among the top issues for Americans throughout the campaign, which Trump decidedly won. And President Biden got some of his worst disapproval ratings around the issue of immigration, which ballooned in his term.
Since 2021, the United States has seen the biggest surge in immigration in history, with some 8 million people estimated to have moved here from another country. By some estimates, more than half of those people came without documentation. Meanwhile, until last year, arrests were down under President Biden, unlike under President Obama, who staunchly favored legal immigration and citizenship for those born here, but also strict limits on undocumented. Now, Green says, “for better or worse, there are a lot of people who are in this country who will self-deport. The rhetoric and threat of enforcement action will have an effect on a lot of people who are outside the law.”
The surge is partly why Americans have increasingly supported a hard line on undocumented migrants. A New York Times survey last week found that 87 percent of Americans support deporting undocumented immigrants who have criminal records; 62 percent support deporting any undocumented immigrants who arrived in the last four years; and 55 percent support deporting them all. These numbers are similar to those in an Axios Vibe survey from last April, when 51 percent of Americans supported mass deportations, including 68 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of Independents and 41 percent of Democrats. Some of that was based on misinformation, including about crime and benefits: 64 percent wrongly believed immigrants receive more in welfare and benefits than they pay in taxes, and 56 percent wrongly believed undocumented immigrants caused the spike in U.S. crime.
President Trump’s executive orders amplify this misinformation. The executive order that has led to this week’s immigration raids is called “Protecting the American People Against Invasion;” it notes that “many” undocumented immigrants are “committing vile and heinous acts,” “espionage” and “preparations for terror-related activities.” “The executive orders are written in such a way that their purpose and mission statements read like a campaign speech — in many ways they are counterfactual,” says Paoletti. “Government officials who are subject to these orders should speak up and disavow the premise under which they are being issued. If we don’t challenge the message we will lose the battle.”
It’s less clear what Americans think about sanctuary cities, specifically.
Is there a reasonable middle ground?
There could be — though the Laken Riley Act may make that moot. Philadelphia should never become an anti-immigrant police state. No reasonable person who knows the truth about immigration wants that. Undocumented residents whose only infraction is overstaying a visa, or who were picked up for running a red light, should be left alone to live and be productive in our city. They are part of what makes us vibrant and safe and economically strong and, frankly, interesting.
But that doesn’t mean the line in the sand can’t be shifted: The city could cooperate with detainer requests for anyone who has been convicted of a violent crime. This has risks, too — as mentioned earlier, the legality of holding suspects is ultimately unknown; there is the possibility of holding citizens who shouldn’t be held; there are those who worry about the erosion of trust; and it defies the American justice system, which allows people to be returned to society once they have served their time.
But do we want to take a moral stand for people who have been convicted of dealing drugs, or stalking their wives, or trading child pornography — or other heinous crimes — because ICE hasn’t yet produced a warrant? Is that fair to other immigrants, even those who are undocumented, who do no harm?
More broadly, Green at Temple says the whole issue of sanctuary cities could be made moot with — gasp! — comprehensive immigration reform. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have advocated for a two-pronged approach: A path to legalization for the thousands of undocumented immigrants whose only crime was entering the country illegally or overstaying their visas. And real consequences for employers who are hiring undocumented workers, often at outrageously exploitative wages.
Of course, various permutations of Congress have been talking about immigration reform for decades, to no avail. A path to citizenship for the 2.7 million undocumented immigrants then living here was first passed when Ronald Reagan was president, and included a crackdown on employers. Later, there was bipartisan legislation supported by George W. Bush, and pushed by the so-called Gang of Eight during President Obama’s administration. And at the tail end of Biden’s term, Presidential nominee Donald Trump pushed Republican lawmakers to vote down another bipartisan attempt at reform.
The current political situation in Washington does not make the prospect of immigration reform seem likely anytime soon. Which is a shame.
“I’m a huge advocate for making it easier for people to come lawfully to the United States,” Green says. “We need immigration reform that facilitates lawful immigration and makes it an accessible thing. But if we’ve decided these are the laws we want to adhere to, it’s a sin to not enforce them for all.”
With additional reporting from J.P. Romney.
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