Sanctuary policies reduce deportations without increasing crime

Abstract

The US government maintains that local sanctuary policies prevent deportations of violent criminals and increase crime. This report tests those claims by combining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation data and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime data with data on the implementation dates of sanctuary policies between 2010 and 2015. Sanctuary policies reduced deportations of people who were fingerprinted by states or counties by about one-third. Those policies also changed the composition of deportations, reducing deportations of people with no criminal convictions by half—without affecting deportations of people with violent convictions. Sanctuary policies also had no detectable effect on crime rates. These findings suggest that sanctuary policies, although effective at reducing deportations, do not threaten public safety.

The Relationship Between States’ Immigrant-Related Policies and Access to Health Care Among Children of Immigrants

“…This imprecise measure of sanctuary policies will likely result in underestimating the impact of sanctuary policies on children of non-citizen immigrants; the analysis should provide a lower bound of the impact of sanctuary policies. The policy variables are lagged by a single year for 2007–2015, as prior research indicates lagged effect of sanctuary policies on deportations [ 25 ]…”

The economics of state violence: Explaining mass deportation

“…Migrant organizing against deportation grew in scale and sophistication as deportation rates rose, resulting in changes to local law and policy that restricted the ability of the government to deport people. Sanctuary city and sanctuary state laws limited the ability of local law enforcement agencies to collaborate with ICE and Border Patrol, resulting in lower rates of deportation during the Trump administration than the Obama administration, despite the commitment of the Trump administration to increasing detention and deportation (Hausmann 2020). Deportation does make individuals and communities vulnerable to economic exploitation, but it also motivated a growing movement against state violence.…”

The Relationship Between Immigration Enforcement and Educational Attainment: The Role of Sanctuary Policies

“…The emergence of several immigration laws post-9/11 has led to the undocumented population’s criminalization through political rhetoric and media accounts that often suggest that sanctuary policies induce crime (Martínez-Schuldt & Martínez, 2019). However, research demonstrates that increases in undocumented immigration, and the introduction of sanctuary policies more specifically, are not associated with increases in crime (Hausman, 2020; Kubrin & Bartos, 2020; Light & Miller, 2018; Martínez-Schuldt & Martínez, 2019; Rumbaut, 2009). Nevertheless, increased immigration enforcement has led to mostly adverse impacts on several individual and family outcomes, such as mental health (Wang & Kaushal, 2018), access to health care (Rhodes et al, 2015; Vargas, 2015), food insecurity (Potochnick et al, 2017), and poverty (Ameudo-Dorantes et al, 2018).…”