Unboxing Sanctuary States and Cities : Update Feb 2026

Originally published September 13, 2025 — Updated February 2026

The Problem Starts in Washington

Every debate about “sanctuary” policies has to begin with a blunt fact: if undocumented immigrants are inside the United States, that is a federal problem created at the federal level.

Congress is responsible for immigration law. The federal government is responsible for securing the borders and tracking visa overstays. And yet, for decades, Congress has failed to act. By the time someone is living in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York without legal status, the “failure” has already occurred. Cities and states didn’t let them in — Washington did.

The Federal Job vs. The Local Job

The Constitution draws a bright line. The federal government controls immigration and border enforcement. States and cities are responsible for enforcing their own laws and protecting local public safety — and are expressly forbidden from enforcing borders and immigration.

This separation is part of the Constitution called federalism. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. Local police cannot be conscripted into enforcing federal immigration law, because the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine forbids it.

The Sanctuary Idea

A “sanctuary” city or state is not a place where immigration law is suspended. These policies vary widely, from limiting cooperation with federal detainer requests to prohibiting local police from inquiring about immigration status during routine stops. But all share a common principle: local government saying, “In order to carry out our mission to maintain public safety, we cannot be seen as local immigration officers — because that undermines our core mission.”

Local law enforcement should not interfere with federal immigration enforcement, but they should not be forced to participate either.

This distinction matters. Sanctuary policies are not about shielding people from federal law. They are about ensuring local police can focus on public safety. People have to know that police will not arrest them for immigration violations — because otherwise they will hide from law enforcement and refuse to report crimes, serve as witnesses, or cooperate with investigations for fear of immigration arrest.

If undocumented residents fear that calling 911 will lead to deportation, they will stay silent. That silence protects abusers, traffickers, and gangs while making entire neighborhoods less safe. Trust, not fear, is the foundation of effective policing.

There are reasonable arguments on both sides of this approach. Some communities prioritize maximum cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, believing it serves broader public safety goals. Others prioritize community policing strategies that require immigrant trust and cooperation. But under our federal system, it’s up to each state and locality to make that strategic choice based on their specific circumstances and values.

Federalism, Flipped

Here’s the irony: the same political voices that champion “states’ rights” on guns, schools, and healthcare often demand federal supremacy when it comes to immigration enforcement. The same politicians who defend states’ refusal to enforce federal gun restrictions demand that states enforce federal immigration law. But consistent federalism would respect sanctuary policies. They are not defiance; they are federalism in action — states deciding how best to enforce state and local laws and ensure public safety.

The Bottom Line (September 2025)

Sanctuary states and cities exist because Congress has failed and Washington has stumbled. They are not perfect, but they are a rational response to a reality that local leaders did not create. Federal law is still enforceable everywhere. The question is whether local police should take on responsibilities that may actively undermine their ability to protect their communities.

Sanctuary policies answer: no. And under the Constitution, that’s a respectable — even principled — position.

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January 2026 Update: When Sanctuary Becomes Something Else

Is Anti-Commandeering Absolute?

Technically, yes — the federal government cannot force state or local officials to enforce federal law. The Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine is settled constitutional law.

But “cannot force” doesn’t mean “cannot pressure.”

In other areas of federal-state relations, Washington has found ways to get what it wants without direct mandates. The tool is money. In 1974, the federal government wanted a national 55 mph speed limit but couldn’t mandate one — that’s a state power. So Congress threatened to withhold highway funding from any state that didn’t comply. Every state fell in line. A decade later, the same playbook raised the drinking age to 21 nationwide. The Supreme Court blessed the approach in South Dakota v. Dole (1987).

This matters for sanctuary policies. The federal government may not be able to order Minneapolis to cooperate with ICE. But it can attach conditions to federal law enforcement grants, homeland security funding, transit money, and more. The more aggressively cities move to active obstruction, the easier it becomes politically to pull that trigger.

So when activists talk about sanctuary as if it’s an unassailable constitutional fortress, they’re missing something important. The walls aren’t as high as they think. And every escalation makes it more likely the feds will use the fiscal leverage they’ve always had.

From Federalism to Resistance

When you watch interviews with people in Minnesota, you often hear them talking about how unfair immigration policies are — how families are being torn apart, how people who’ve been here for years are being deported. Those may be legitimate grievances. But that’s a debate to take to Congress. Minnesota is not allowed to override federal law at the local or state level. If you don’t like the immigration laws, elect lawmakers who will change them. That’s how the system works. Using “sanctuary” as a workaround to nullify laws you disagree with isn’t federalism — it’s just not allowed.

In December 2025, Minneapolis strengthened its sanctuary ordinances — not as a response to some new policing challenge, but as a political counterpunch to the administration’s escalating enforcement operations. The city barred any use of city resources for immigration enforcement, prohibited data-sharing, and even banned police from setting up perimeters when ICE conducts operations.

That last one is worth pausing on. Setting up a perimeter isn’t “doing ICE’s job” — it’s basic public safety during any law enforcement operation. It protects bystanders, protects the agents, and keeps a tense situation from spiraling. By refusing even that, Minneapolis isn’t staying neutral. It’s actively making federal operations more dangerous and chaotic — and then complaining when the feds respond by sending thousands of agents to compensate for the lack of local cooperation. You can’t deny basic operational support and then act surprised when an army shows up.

There’s another dimension here. Local and state police have familiar faces. They’re from the community. They know the neighborhoods. When they’re involved, even tense situations have a human element that can de-escalate things. Federal agents are abstract — outsiders in tactical gear, easy to demonize. By cutting local police out entirely, sanctuary policies guarantee that every enforcement action feels like an occupation rather than policing. That’s a recipe for exactly the chaos we’ve seen.

Then came the January 2026 shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, and the confrontation escalated further. Progressive prosecutors announced they’re forming coalitions to charge federal officers. Activists are pushing laws to ban the masks agents wear.

About those masks: activists frame them as sinister, but they’re a reasonable precaution. These agents are operating in a hostile environment, and unlike local cops, they don’t go home at night to another city. They’re staying in Minneapolis hotels, eating at Minneapolis restaurants, walking Minneapolis streets — in a community where protesters are actively tracking their movements and publicizing their locations. The masks aren’t about hiding accountability; they’re about not getting harassed or worse when you’re off duty and trying to get dinner. When you’ve made federal agents into an occupying army, don’t be surprised when they take basic steps to protect themselves.

What started as a pragmatic local policy choice has become resistance theater.

What Nobody Is Explaining

If you’ve been following the Minnesota story on cable news or in the papers, you’d be forgiven for having no idea what’s actually going on. The term “sanctuary” gets thrown around constantly, but almost no one — not the reporters, not the politicians, not the talking heads — bothers to explain what it means or how the system actually works.

So let me do their job for them.

Minnesota’s state prisons have been cooperating with ICE all along. State law requires the Department of Corrections to notify ICE when a non-citizen enters custody. The DOC honors all detainers and coordinates transfers. In 2025, they handed over 84 people to ICE. The DOC commissioner is on record saying they cannot find a single instance where they failed to honor a detainer. When DHS claims Minnesota is “releasing criminals onto the streets,” the state prison system isn’t who they’re talking about — but they’re happy to let you think otherwise. (DOC Fact Sheet)

County jails are a completely separate system. They’re run by elected sheriffs, not the governor. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) and Ramsey County (St. Paul) adopted policies back in 2014 refusing to hold people on ICE detainers without a judicial warrant. (Axios) That’s where the actual conflict is. But when DHS demands that Governor Walz “order” cooperation, they’re either ignorant of how Minnesota’s system works or deliberately exploiting the confusion. The governor doesn’t control county jails.

The numbers are a mess. DHS claims 1,360 people with ICE detainers are in Minnesota custody. The DOC conducted a statewide survey and found about 300 — roughly 207 in state prisons and 94 in county jails. That’s a thousand-person gap. Some of the people on DHS’s “worst of the worst” lists were transferred to ICE years ago. Some were never in Minnesota custody at all. Some were released by ICE itself after the state handed them over. The DOC commissioner called the DHS claims “at best a fundamental misunderstanding, at minimum incompetence, at worst pure propaganda.” (PolitiFact)

Nobody distinguishes between policies. “Sanctuary” can mean a lot of things: not asking about immigration status during traffic stops, not honoring detainers for people in jail, not allowing police to set up perimeters during ICE operations, actively obstructing federal agents. These are very different policies with very different justifications. Lumping them all under one word — and then arguing about that word — guarantees that nobody understands what they’re actually debating.

And here’s the fundamental point everyone is missing: Sanctuary was never supposed to mean obstruction of federal law. It was about separation — keeping local law enforcement focused on local crimes, not deputized as immigration agents. The idea was that your city cops enforce city and state laws, and the feds enforce federal immigration law. Two separate lanes. That’s federalism. What’s happening now in Minneapolis isn’t separation. It’s active interference.

The news media could clarify all of this in about two minutes. They don’t. Whether that’s because they don’t understand it themselves, or because confusion generates better ratings than clarity, I’ll leave to you. But the result is a public that has strong opinions about “sanctuary” without any idea what it actually means in practice.

That’s not an accident. It’s useful — to both sides — for different reasons. DHS gets to paint Minnesota as lawless. Activists get to claim they’re protecting communities. And the rest of us get to argue past each other indefinitely.

The rhetoric from all sides is wildly inaccurate.

The Indefensible Extreme: Jail Releases

The original sanctuary argument rested on community trust: if immigrants fear that any police contact leads to deportation, they won’t report crimes or cooperate with investigations. That’s a reasonable concern about effective policing.

But that logic completely falls apart when it comes to jail releases.

As I noted above, Hennepin and Ramsey counties refuse to honor ICE detainers for people already in custody. The policy says: don’t hold them for ICE pickup, don’t even notify ICE of release dates, just let them walk.

This has nothing to do with community trust. The person is already in custody. They’re not calling 911 to report a crime. They’re not a witness coming forward. They’re someone the criminal justice system has already processed, and now the question is simply whether to hand them to federal authorities or release them into the community.

Consider the case that became Exhibit A for the Trump administration: a man arrested for vehicular homicide while driving drunk, killing a Minnesota woman. ICE placed a detainer. Hennepin County released him without notification. He was arrested again on a warrant. ICE placed another detainer. Released again without notification. ICE finally had to track him down on the street.

There is no public safety argument for this. The “chilling effect” rationale doesn’t apply — you can’t chill cooperation from someone who’s already been arrested. The only reason to refuse the detainer is ideological: a blanket opposition to deportation enforcement, full stop.

And here’s the telling part: only now, after Operation Metro Surge launched in December 2025 and two civilian deaths and thousands of federal agents flooding Minneapolis, is there movement. (Wikipedia: Operation Metro Surge) Attorney General Ellison has clarified that county jails “may notify ICE of release dates of criminal public safety risks.” The Hennepin County Sheriff is talking about needing “statewide policy direction.” Border Czar Homan says he’s made “great progress.”

In other words, it took the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history to get Minnesota officials to consider doing what common sense demanded all along: notifying ICE when you’re about to release someone they’re looking for. This isn’t a win for sanctuary principles. It’s an admission that the maximalist position was never defensible.

The Danger of Overreach

Remember that fiscal leverage I mentioned earlier? The more aggressively sanctuary cities move to active obstruction, the easier it becomes politically to use it. The Trump administration has already made noise about conditioning federal grants on cooperation.

And then what? You’ve lost the practical benefits of sanctuary policing and the funding. The activists get their confrontation, their moment of resistance, and the communities they claim to protect end up worse off.

The militant approach to sanctuary isn’t just politically unwise — it threatens to destroy the framework that made sanctuary policies defensible in the first place. And once that precedent is set, it doesn’t go away. For example, a Republican administration can use funding leverage to force blue states to not allow abortion, or similarly on other states’ rights issues.

Madison’s compound republic only works if everyone stays roughly within their lanes. Once it becomes a raw test of wills, the federal government has more weight to throw around. That’s not a fight sanctuary cities can win.

The Real Bottom Line

I still believe that sanctuary policies — properly understood — are a legitimate exercise of federalism. Local communities can reasonably decide that their police shouldn’t be deputized as immigration agents. That’s a defensible position about effective policing, not an act of defiance.

But what’s happening now in Minneapolis and elsewhere isn’t that. It’s a political movement using “sanctuary” as cover for something more confrontational — and in doing so, it’s discrediting the reasonable version of the policy, alienating persuadable voters, and inviting a federal response that will leave everyone worse off.

Sanctuary is not a ballot box. It’s not a veto over federal law. And it’s not a substitute for winning elections and changing policy through democratic means.

The activists misusing the concept may feel righteous. But righteousness doesn’t win when the other side holds more cards. And the people who will pay the price aren’t the activists — it’s the immigrant communities who actually benefited from the original, limited, defensible version of sanctuary that’s now being sacrificed on the altar of resistance politics.

Sanctuary has been stretched from a pragmatic policing tool into a symbolic political weapon — so bloated that it’s no longer legally or politically sustainable.