The Sanctuary Scale: Measuring Immigrant Protections in Cities of Refuge

Researchers broadly define sanctuary cities as localities with policies that limit local cooperation or participation in federal immigration enforcement, but this is often a binary definition. Existing scholarship has examined the roles that sanctuary cities play in limiting cooperation in federal immigration enforcement but has tended to rely on an inconsistent definition of what constitutes a ‘sanctuary city’. Much of the existing research also analytically treats sanctuary cities the same, regardless of the individual components of a given policy. To address these shortcomings, we draw on a content analysis of 379 municipal policies passed from 1971 to 2021, coding each policy along a seven-point scale originally developed by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC). We draw on individual city case studies to illustrate each component of the scale and then score each locality from one to seven based on a content analysis of the policy's text. We demonstrate that policies vary in the limits they place on cooperation in federal immigration enforcement and that these limits vary geographically and temporally. We find that sanctuary policies have added new components over time, as federal immigration policies and agencies have changed, with the most comprehensive policies passed after Trump won the presidency in 2016.