Trump is attacking sanctuary cities. Will Democrats defend them?

President Donald Trump is again targeting a familiar foe: blue cities and states with “sanctuary” policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

During his first term, Trump tried to withhold federal public safety grants from states and localities that refused to allow local law enforcement to share information with federal immigration agents or hand over immigrants in their custody. The policy was struck down in federal court and was set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. But the justices never decided the case before Trump left office, leaving the door open for him to try again in his second term.

Now the fight is back: Trump issued an executive order in January to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities and counties under US immigration law. The Department of Justice issued a subsequent memo implementing that order. 

But there’s a key difference: Last time, Democrats were unified in their defense of sanctuary policies, seeing it as a winning issue. What’s different this time is the lack of uniform opposition from Democratic leadership in some of those cities and states as the party struggles to chart a path forward on immigration. 

So far, the courts are siding with local officials. In April, a federal judge again struck down both the executive order and the DOJ directive as unconstitutional, ruling that they violated protections for the separation of powers, Congress’s spending powers, and due process, as well as sought to unlawfully coerce local officials into enforcing federal immigration law. 

The court battle, however, likely isn’t over. That’s because Trump issued a new executive order last week directing his government to suspend federal grants to sanctuary cities and states.

This time, he used a more extensive legal toolkit. In addition to invoking federal immigration law and his constitutional authority to protect the US from “invasion,” he accuses sanctuary cities and states of crimes — including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and harboring illegal aliens — as a basis to take away their funding. 

A representative from California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, which has been at the forefront of the lawsuits related to sanctuary policies, told Vox that they were reviewing the legality of the order and did not rule out the possibility of a court challenge.

“The Trump Administration is attempting to create a culture of fear by trumpeting executive orders and inhumane policies that target our immigrant communities,” they said. “California is not hiding the fact that we have chosen to focus our resources on public safety instead of immigration enforcement.” 

But it’s not clear that everyone in blue states is ready to resist.

Defending sanctuary policies presents a messaging challenge for Democrats. Trump’s immigration policies helped propel him to victory in 2024 and remain one of the more popular elements of his agenda, even if support for them has slipped a bit recently. And some Democratic leaders aren’t defending sanctuary policies as vehemently as they once did. 

The legal fight over sanctuary policies 

Trump’s legal battle over sanctuary cities in his first term ended without a conclusion: The case was still before the Supreme Court when he left office, and then President Joe Biden asked the justices to dismiss it, refusing to defend his predecessor’s efforts to slash funding.  But now Trump is trying to revive that legal battle. 

Naureen Shah, director of government affairs for the ACLU’s Equality Division, argued that his latest executive order has “no legal basis,” framing it as “another example of President Trump’s relentless campaign to attack the integrity of our legal system and separation of powers by targeting judges, lawyers, and other officials who refuse to comply with his extreme agenda.”

Shah said that cities and states have the right to determine how to employ their own resources. That includes 17,000 local law enforcement agencies across the country that the Trump administration is trying to deputize to carry out the president’s deportation agenda. 

And the Democratic Mayors Association has argued that embracing Trump’s latest executive order is not the best use of their resources. “His latest executive order is a dangerous overreach targeting sanctuary cities and does nothing to address the real challenges of our broken immigration system,” Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb said in a statement on behalf of the association.

No lawsuit has been filed against the new executive order yet. But with millions on the line, it’s likely to come soon. Trump is expected to appeal any ruling in favor of sanctuary cities, potentially taking it all the way to the Supreme Court yet again. 

Not all Democrats are vigorously defending sanctuary policies

The national debate over sanctuary policies comes at a precarious moment for Democrats on immigration. 

For a while, immigration was buoying Trump’s approval ratings. Surveys have also suggested that sanctuary policies specifically are divisive, with 77 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats saying in a February NPR-Ipsos poll that they approve of efforts to defund sanctuary cities and states.

However, concerns about Trump’s deportations of undocumented immigrants to El Salvador — including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the government admits was deported in error — seem to have recently put a dent in Trump’s poll numbers. 

The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released on April 25 found that 53 percent of Americans overall now disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, up from 48 percent in February. That may mean that the public approval of sanctuary policies is also shifting. 

That has put Democrats in a difficult position, as they face internal disagreements on how to handle the immigration issue. Some have been subdued in their defense of sanctuary policies. 

It started on the 2024 campaign trail, when vulnerable Democrats, including former Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana, came out against sanctuary policies. Both lost their seats.

The phenomenon has continued after Trump assumed office. California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who called himself a “poster child for sanctuary policy” during his 2017 campaign — has refrained from even using the word “sanctuary” publicly. He has also promised to veto (for a second time) legislation that would provide new “sanctuary” protections to immigrants in state custody. 

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has advocated for due process in Abrego Garcia’s case and has said that he would protect Marylanders in the face of Trump’s immigration policies. But he hasn’t ruled out cooperating with US Immigration Customs and Enforcement, saying in January that local cities and counties need to “follow the Constitution” while declining to elaborate on what that meant. 

“We are going to make sure that our local jurisdictions are going to follow the Constitution,” Moore said. “We are cooperating to ensure that we are getting violent offenders off of our streets and out of our neighborhoods, frankly, regardless of where they come from.”

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has objected to the term “sanctuary,” telling CalMatters that it’s been “politicized by both ends of the ideological spectrum.” San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has also avoided using the term “sanctuary” and refused to sign a nonbinding resolution reaffirming the city’s sanctuary protections, saying it was his policy to “not to comment or act on urging resolutions.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has signaled an openness to working with the Trump administration to arrest certain immigrants connected to “violent migrant gangs.” Though his case is unique given the controversies that have haunted his administration, and he is running for reelection as an independent.

Adams met with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan earlier this year and issued an executive order to reopen US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ICE’s office on Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail, a move that the city council has sought to block. 

The New York City comptroller has also demanded that Adams recuse himself from all matters related to the city’s sanctuary policies, including any response to Trump’s latest executive order that could see the city stripped of federal grants. Earlier this year, Adams was accused of making a “quid pro quo” deal with the Trump administration to cooperate on immigration enforcement in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping criminal charges against him; Adams has denied those allegations.

The Adams administration has been “muted, if not muzzled, in its response to the very clear and explicit threats to our City’s federal funding and New Yorkers’ civil liberties,” Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in a letter to Adams on April 29.

A representative for Adams’ office contested that the mayor has taken steps to advocate for New Yorkers when the federal government threatened the city’s FEMA funding, an offshore wind project, and congestion pricing plan, saying that Lander’s demands were “desperate and detached from reality.”

While Adams isn’t representative of the typical Democrat, the debate in New York reflects a larger one within the party: How should they talk about immigration in the face of a public that remains skeptical of it, but also increasingly concerned about Trump’s approach to enforcement? 

The tensions over sanctuary policies suggest that Democrats haven’t yet reached a resolution.