How Sanctuary Became a Brand, From a 1979 Police Order to City Hall

Every brand needs an origin story, and the origin story of "sanctuary" is a memo. It was not written by a philosopher or a bishop. It was a special order, issued on a Tuesday by a big-city police chief, instructing his officers about something that had nothing to do with banners, slogans or city seals.

That is the funny part, and the instructive part. A narrow rule about police work grew, over forty years, into a political identity that cities now put on their websites, their letterhead and their press releases. How did a procedure become a brand? Follow the dates with me. It is a story with real religious conviction in it, real legal drama and a lot of marketing, and the three do not always sit comfortably together.

First, what the word means, and does not

Let me define the term, because the word does more work than the policies behind it. "Sanctuary city" has no definition in federal law. You will not find it in the Immigration and Nationality Act. It is a label, used by supporters and critics alike, for a range of local and state policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Those policies vary enormously. Some forbid police to ask about immigration status. Some refuse to honor requests to hold people in jail for federal agents. Some limit information sharing. Some do all three. Some do almost nothing but declare themselves welcoming.

That vagueness is the key to the story. A label with no fixed meaning can expand, and this one did.

1979: Special Order 40

The first domino was a police order in Los Angeles. On November 27, 1979, Police Chief Daryl Gates issued Special Order 40, which directed Los Angeles Police Department officers not to initiate police action with the objective of discovering a person's immigration status, and not to arrest or book people for illegal entry.

Read the intent carefully, because it is a practical one. The LAPD's concern, as the policy was generally explained, was that if immigrant residents were afraid to talk to the police, they would not report crimes or serve as witnesses, and crime would go unsolved. This is the same "community trust" rationale that supporters still give today. It is a policing argument, and it is not a stupid one. A detective who cannot get a witness to talk is a detective who cannot make a case.

Notice what the order was not. It was not a declaration that the city would defy federal law. It did not purport to bar federal agents from doing their work. It said that city police would not spend their own time on an enforcement function that belonged to someone else. A conservative who believes in the division of labor between local and federal governments can recognize a respectable principle in that. The trouble comes later, when the principle gets stretched.

The 1980s: the church movement

At about the same time, a different thing was happening, and it was not about policing at all. In the early 1980s, civil wars in Central America, especially in El Salvador and Guatemala, drove large numbers of people north. The American government's position in those years was that most of them were economic migrants and not refugees, and the great majority of asylum claims from those countries were denied.

A group of American churches and activists disagreed, and acted on it. In 1981, at the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, the pastor, John Fife, and a Quaker rancher named Jim Corbett began helping Central American migrants who had crossed the border, and the following year the church publicly declared itself a "sanctuary." The choice of the word was deliberate and was religious. It drew on a very old tradition, in the Hebrew Bible's cities of refuge and in medieval church law, in which a holy place gave protection to a person fleeing pursuit. The movement spread to hundreds of congregations across the country.

This is the point at which conservatives, in particular religious conservatives, should pause and think rather than reach for a slogan. The people who started the sanctuary movement acted from conscience and at real personal risk. They were not cynical marketers. They believed they were obeying a higher law, and in doing so they were openly breaking the federal law, as they knew perfectly well. That is the tradition of civil disobedience, and its moral weight comes from a willingness to accept the legal consequences.

And the consequences came. In the mid-1980s the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent informants into church meetings, an operation that became known as Operation Sojourner. In 1985 a federal grand jury in Arizona indicted a group of sanctuary workers, including clergy and volunteers, on charges of smuggling and conspiracy. The trial in Tucson in 1985 and 1986 ended with several convictions, and the defendants received suspended or probationary sentences. They had broken the law, said so, and took the punishment. Many Americans, including many conservatives, came away from the episode with a complicated respect for the people involved and a clear view of the law.

Here is the distinction I would draw, and it matters for everything that follows. A church that hides a person and accepts prosecution is engaged in civil disobedience. A city government that adopts a policy and expects immunity is doing something else. A mayor is not a martyr. A city council that decides which federal laws it will assist is not the same as a pastor who decides to break one and accept the verdict. The movement had a cost; the municipal version, as we will see, has mostly had a brand.

1989: San Francisco makes it official

The next major step moved sanctuary from the church into City Hall. In 1989 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance declaring San Francisco a "City and County of Refuge." The measure barred city employees from using city resources to assist federal immigration enforcement unless required by law or by the terms of a federal or state program, and it limited the use of city funds for that purpose. Similar measures followed in other cities through the 1990s.

Note the step that has been taken. Special Order 40 was a police department's operating rule. The church movement was an act of conscience. San Francisco's ordinance was a municipal statute, a formal declaration by a legislative body, in the vocabulary of the church movement but with the authority of a city government. The word "sanctuary" had moved from the altar to the council chamber.

1996 and after: Congress answers, and the fight begins

Congress did not ignore this. In 1996 it passed two laws that touched the question. Section 434 of the welfare law of that year, now at 8 U.S.C. 1644, and Section 642 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, now at 8 U.S.C. 1373, bar state and local governments from restricting their employees from communicating with federal immigration authorities about a person's immigration status. Those provisions became a central reference in later legal fights, and whether they are consistent with the anti-commandeering doctrine, discussed in our satire If Sanctuary Rules Applied to Your Unpaid Taxes, a Satirical Thought Experiment, has been argued in the courts ever since.

Over the next two decades the policies grew, and so did their variety. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, immigration enforcement expanded, and the federal government developed programs that used local jails as points of contact, such as the detainer, which is the request the federal government sends a local jail asking it to hold someone. The legal and practical meaning of that request is explained in What an ICE Detainer Actually Asks a Local Jail to Do and Why It Matters. In response, a growing number of cities, counties and eventually states adopted policies declining to honor detainers, restricting jail access for federal agents, or limiting information sharing.

In 2017 California enacted Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, a statewide law limiting how state and local law enforcement may cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The federal government sued, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019 largely refused to block the California law (affirming the denial of a preliminary injunction), reasoning in part that the Tenth Amendment protects a state's decision not to assist federal enforcement. That outcome tracked the anti-commandeering line of cases, including Printz in 1997 and Murphy v. NCAA in 2018, and conservatives who cheered those decisions when they protected states from Washington's mandates should not be surprised that the same reasoning protects blue states too.

How the label became a brand

So far this is legal history. The marketing came next, and it is worth pausing on, because it is the story I set out to tell.

The key change is in what the word was for. In 1979 it described nothing, because the policy had no name, and the order simply told officers what to do. In the 1980s the word named a moral stance taken at personal risk. By the 1990s it described a municipal policy. And by the 2010s, in many places, it had become an identity, a sign a city hung on itself to show what kind of place it was.

Think about how a brand works. A brand is a compressed promise. It tells you, before you read the details, what values to attach to the product. "Sanctuary" is perfectly suited to the job. It is a warm word. It evokes churches, refuge, mercy and the vulnerable. Nobody is against sanctuary in the abstract, the way nobody is against sunshine. And because it has no legal definition, a city can use it to mean whatever it wishes, from "we decline to hold people for ICE" to "we are a kind and welcoming community."

There is a practical effect, too, which is that a brand pushes toward more of itself. Once a city has put "sanctuary" on its seal, it faces pressure to prove it. Every new policy is measured against the label. A council member who votes against a further restriction can be accused of betraying the brand. The narrow police rule of 1979, which asked a modest question, "should an officer spend an hour on a status question in the middle of a burglary investigation?", becomes a loyalty test.

And then the opposite happens, on the other side. The label becomes a flag for critics, too, who use "sanctuary city" to describe any policy they dislike, accurate or not. Both sides have turned a policy into a banner, and a banner is a poor tool for making law.

The best argument for the policies

I promised to be fair, so let me state the case for the original policies as their best defenders would. One: local police depend on public cooperation, and fear of deportation can silence witnesses and victims, including victims of crime who are themselves in the country unlawfully. Two: immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, funded by federal money, and local governments are under no obligation to spend their budgets and jail space on it. Three: the Tenth Amendment and the anti-commandeering cases protect that choice. Four: forcing local officers to act as immigration agents can erode community trust in them and expose localities to legal liability.

Those are not trivial points, and the third is the law. A conservative who cares about federalism should say so without flinching. The Founders' own framing of who decides on membership is in One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws.

The answer

Here is where I think the argument goes wrong, in numbered steps, and this is a policy judgment I'm making, not a legal one.

1. A policing rule is one thing and a political identity is another. Special Order 40's logic, that an officer should not make status inquiries a routine part of every contact, can be defended on policing grounds. A city that declares itself defiant of federal enforcement as a matter of civic identity has moved from the first to the second.
2. The policies have outrun their rationale. The community-trust argument supports a rule against asking victims and witnesses about their status. It does not obviously support refusing to tell federal authorities that a person who has been arrested for a serious crime is in custody and about to be released. When a policy protects the witness and the offender equally, the rationale has been stretched past the point it supports.
3. A label cannot substitute for an accounting. A city that wants credit for a moral stance should say exactly what its policy does and does not do, so its residents can judge. "Sanctuary" tells them nothing about whether the jail honors detainers or what information passes to federal agents.
4. Uniform national law is still the Constitution's design. The Constitution gives Congress, in Article I, Section 8, the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization," and Article VI makes federal law the supreme law of the land. A country with thousands of local immigration policies is a country with no single rule. That is a legitimate reason for Congress to legislate clearly, and for voters to demand that it do so.

What is worth keeping

I'll end with the part I admire. The people who founded the sanctuary movement in the 1980s took a risk and paid a price for their convictions, and a free society should be big enough to respect that. The right answer to a sincere act of civil disobedience is a fair trial, a proportionate sentence and honest argument, and the 1980s got most of that. The wrong answer is the marketing campaign that came after, in which the courage of the original sanctuary workers is borrowed to dress up a municipal policy that costs its sponsors nothing.

If the question you want to ask your city council is what its policy actually does, you are asking the right question. Skip the word. Ask for the order.

The case in brief

1. "Sanctuary city" has no federal legal definition; it is a label for a range of local policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
2. It began as a narrow police rule, Los Angeles Special Order 40 of November 27, 1979, and as a religious movement that started at a Tucson church in 1981, whose workers were prosecuted in the mid-1980s.
3. San Francisco's 1989 ordinance moved the word into City Hall, Congress responded in 1996 with 8 U.S.C. 1373 and 1644, and California's SB 54 of 2017 survived a federal challenge in the Ninth Circuit in 2019.
4. As the policies spread, the word became an identity, a compressed moral promise that pushes toward more of itself and tells residents nothing about what a policy actually does.
5. The Tenth Amendment protects a local decision not to assist, but the Constitution's design is a uniform national rule, and voters should ask cities to state exactly what their policies do.

What you can do: look up your city's or county's actual policy on federal immigration detainers on its website or in its council minutes, and read it as a document, not a slogan.