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Sanctuary Practices in Perspective examines the diverse, complex, and mutating practice of providing sanctuary to asylum-seekers. The ancient tradition of church sanctuary underwent a revival in the late 1970s. Christian churches began providing physical protection to migrants living without legal status and who were facing imminent deportation in church buildings and communities: first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States, Canada, and several other European countries. These practices arose amidst a dramatic increase in the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the West, and a corresponding escalation in national and international efforts to discourage and control their arrival through myriad threats of deportation and other means. This collection of papers by prominent US, European, and Canadian scholars is the first to place contemporary sanctuary practices in international, theoretical, and historical perspective. Moving beyond isolated case studies of sanctuary activities and movements, it reveals sanctuary as a far more complex, regional, theoretically-rich, and institutionally adaptable set of practices.

This is a Political Economy study on migrants-citizens relations management in the United States of America, with special attention to the religious factor and the pendulum effect. There is a model switch, from integration policies (open doors and melting pot agenda, with expropriation of charity by Public Sector) to official persecution (state-raids and deportations, with re-privatization of charity), under a high social opportunity cost. Also, there is a split between the State and civil society (including the church), causing civil disobedience and sanctuary network across the country. The paper focuses on the development of the Sanctuary Movement, as a case of popular action against to the power elite policies and their sanctions. There was a revival of this movement during the values crisis or 2008 recession, but at the same time there was a critical division into the movement, with higher tension for the migrants.

Too often, scholarship on immigration conflates sanctuary ordinances with the non-cooperation policies, often embedded in these ordinances, which limit cooperation between local officials and federal immigration authorities. In this article, I disentangle the two by tracing the rise of non-cooperation policies in health and welfare agencies since the New Deal. Doing so challenges assumptions about the origins, targets, consequences, and significance of early sanctuary policies. It reveals that non-cooperation was federal policy between 1935 and the early 1970s, when local, state, and federal officials began to experiment with cooperation. When the consequences of such practices became clear, welfare and health officials were forced to reaffirm non-cooperation just before the sanctuary movement burst onto the scene. This research clarifies why scholars see early sanctuary ordinances as largely symbolic: because many local, state, and federal officials had largely abandoned cooperation in practice. It also challenges the widespread assumption that non-cooperation fundamentally represents local resistance to federal power. Instead, I demonstrate the key role played by the federal government in the rise of non-cooperation in health and welfare agencies. Lastly, this research reaffirms the significance of the fragmented nature of federal institutions for promoting immigrant rights.

An undocumented immigrant living in the United States for the last decade is under deportation proceedings from the federal government. A Tucson-area church, Southside Presbyterian, that has history with providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants opens their doors for the man and his family. The family says they will stay on the church property until the federal government reverses its decision to deport him.

This article examines immigration and immigrant rights through the activities of the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM). The NSM, which is led by religious activists, responds to the contradiction between the basic principles of freedom that have theoretically grounded the American political system and the practices that have allowed for the current measures taken against immigrants. This article employs narratives from NSM supporters, stories from undocumented individuals in sanctuary, and scholarly work to illustrate how the NSM works as a channel for mobilization and articulation of demands of supportive religious and political activists who seek comprehensive immigration reform, as well as providing sanctuary places for undocumented immigrants faced with deportation. The NSM in Ventura County, Los Angeles County and San Francisco, California, are used as case studies to conclude that the NSM has been effective in creating and taking advantage of political opportunities to improve public policies and immigrants’ ability to negotiate local, state and national political structures.

This article explores sanctuary in Wales, focusing on the Welsh Government’s recent declaration to become a Nation of Sanctuary (NoS), and identifying how the national scale provides an alternative locus for progressive sanctuary measures. In revealing the nation’s emergence as another crucial site of sanctuary, the work reconceptualizes the nation’s place in sanctuary policies and practices in two ways: (i) it locates sanctuary through a national scale, thus moving beyond the city/state dichotomy that has dominated explanations of sanctuary, and (ii) it shows the importance of decoupling the nation-state compound while simultaneously integrating the nation(al) into discussions on sanctuary without being bound to the state or xenophobic populism. In showing how “nations against the state” can participate in sanctuary measures, we expand the current understanding of where sanctuary can be found, and capture the various forms of national belonging and identities that exist within plurinational states, including alternative, progressive forms of civic belonging. This is particularly significant in light of the tightening of state immigration policies, greater regulation of immigrant entry at state borders, and continuation of restrictive citizenship policies witnessed in recent years, which have ignited sanctuary measures aimed at creating safe spaces beyond the reach of state measures.

Much attention has been paid to sanctuary policies and local-level immigration enforcement recently. Still, there is a dearth of scholarship on why specific policies are pursued at the local and state levels. This study examined the theoretical conditions that produce anti-sanctuary policies at the state-level and 287(g) program membership. QCA analyses revealed that demographic and political conditions, alongside increases in violent crime, were the most salient causal conditions for explaining the adoption of anti-sanctuary policies. However, these same conditions were poorly explained adopting the 287(g) program. States that experienced significant increases in their Hispanic population alongside either increases in Republican voting during presidential campaigns or increases in violent crime were conjunctive and sufficient explanations of states adopting anti-sanctuary policies. This provides support for the ethnic and racial threat hypothesis as well as evidence as to the role of politics in formulating local immigration enforcement decisions.

A new front in the war against sanctuary cities has emerged. Until recently, the fight against sanctuary cities has largely focused on the federal government’s efforts to defund states like California and cities like Chicago and New York for resisting federal immigration enforcement. Thus far, localities have mainly prevailed against this federal anti-sanctuary campaign, relying on federalism protections afforded by the Tenth Amendment’s anticommandeering and anticoercion doctrines. Recently, however, the battle lines have shifted with the proliferation of state-level laws that similarly seek to punish sanctuary cities. States across the country are directly mandating local participation, and courts thus far have upheld those state policies. These laws, like Texas’s S.B. 4, prohibit local sanctuary policies and impose severe punishments on the cities and officials that support them. This new state-versus-local terrain has doctrinal, political, and normative implications for the future of local government resistance to immigration enforcement. These implications have thus far been undertheorized in immigration-law scholarship. This Essay seeks to change that. This Essay is the first to focus on this emerging wave of state anti-sanctuary laws. In so doing, it makes three contributions. First, descriptively, the Essay documents the upsurge of anti-sanctuary laws that have appeared across the United States and explains how they differ from prior anti-sanctuary laws. Second, doctrinally, it argues that the passage of these laws nudges sanctuary cities to uncharted legal territory in immigration law—localism. Under conventional localism principles, state anti-sanctuary laws are in a position to more fully quash local sanctuary policies and effectively conscript local officials into federal immigration enforcement. However, the draconian structure of state anti-sanctuary laws provides a unique context in which to advance what we call “immigration localism” claims and protect three distinct interests that concern local governments: structural integrity, accountability, and local democracy. Third, normatively, this Essay contends that immigration localism provides a more accurate descriptive and theoretical account of how current immigration enforcement operates and promotes community engagement with immigration enforcement. Specifically, the reorientation toward localism accounts for the powerful role that cities play in immigration enforcement and decenters the federal government’s dominant role in that enforcement. To be sure, this Essay recognizes that casting a theoretical gaze toward local discretion may end up emboldening the most exclusionary impulses of localities and supporting local anti-sanctuary policies. In the long run, however, local discretion in immigration enforcement is likely to better serve the interests of noncitizens and citizens alike.

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries—often against their will—moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to \"free\" society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state.