Sanctuary Cities and City Citizenship for the Stateless

April 2026

In this blog, Jade Roberts (Lecturer at Melbourne Law School and Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness) argues that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are galvanizing the sanctuary city movement, and that sanctuary cities have a significant role to play in addressing statelessness.

The United States cities of Minnesota, Portland and Los Angeles have become sites of contestation between federal immigration law enforcement and local communities in recent months. The federal government’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’, which commenced in December 2025 with the purpose of apprehending and deporting irregular immigrants, has been characterised by clashes between local residents and agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) and Customs and Border Protection (‘CBP’), two federal law enforcement agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (‘DHS’). These confrontations culminated in the killing of US citizens and Minnesota residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE in January 2026. These events have shone a spotlight on sanctuary cities and the way that federal immigration policy is given effect at the local level and, I argue, they have significance for the role of sanctuary cities in responding to the issue of statelessness.

‘Sanctuary cities’ (and also ‘sanctuary states’ and ‘sanctuary counties’) are jurisdictions that limit their involvement with the enforcement of federal immigration policy. This is achieved through a range of approaches, such as refusing to share information concerning residents’ immigration status with federal officers, refusing to cooperate with detainer requests made by ICE (requests to local authorities to retain a person in police custody until ICE can assume custody), and rejecting the deputization of local law enforcement officers for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law.  Additionally, many sanctuary cities issue identity cards to all city residents, including those with an irregular migration status. These cards enable residents to receive educational services, obtain drivers’ license, open bank accounts, and access city-provided services such as language classes, food banks and local libraries.

While there is no formal definition of a sanctuary city, the number of jurisdictions adopting sanctuary approaches has been growing rapidly over the last two decades, with the number of sanctuary jurisdictions more than doubling between 2016 and 2017, the first year of the first Trump Administration.  The rising number of sanctuary cities in the early 2010s is understood to have been in response to a DHS program commencing in 2011, ‘Secure Communities’, which required local and state police officers to collect the fingerprints of every individual taken into custody so that their immigration status could be verified by ICE. This program is regarded as having fractured trust between local police and community members, with many fearing that interacting with a police officer could lead to detention and deportation.

Sanctuary cities, by contrast, aim to foster trust between local police and city residents. Cities are often destinations as well as entry points for immigrants, meaning they have large immigrant populations. A relationship of trust between city residents and the police means that all residents are comfortable to report crimes and interact with police officers, contributing to the safety of the community and reducing the likelihood that immigrants will be the targets of crime. Indeed, while critics of sanctuary policies argue they foster crime, the opposite is true. Irregular immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated than the general population, while multiple studies have shown that sanctuary polices reduce overall crime and increase community safety, while not acting as a bar to the deportation of those with violent convictions.

A similar logic explains why sanctuary cities ensure the provision of local services to all city residents, include irregular immigrants. Equal access to local services, unlocked through a city-issued identity card, can help residents feel supported, reducing anti-social behaviour and contributing to community safety. There may be efficiency gains for the city in providing public services in a mainstream way instead of segregating services according to immigration status. Indeed, city sanctuary policies have been associated with a host of positive economic indicators, including lower rates of poverty, lower rates of reliance on public assistance and higher labour force participation. Rights-based arguments also play a role. International human rights law obligations are binding on states at all levels, including at the level of local government. Additionally, some cities may be bound under national or state-level constitutions or legislation to provide services for all their residents. City authorities are generally recognised having fiduciary obligations to their residents, requiring authorities to act in their best interests. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the concept of a ‘right to the city’ is often used to express the idea that being a resident of a city gives rights to inclusion and participation in decision-making in relation to the city. These values — trust and community safety, human rights and dignity, and solidarity — are all given expression in legislation codifying sanctuary approaches as well as in public opposition to ICE and Operation Metro Surge.

Both the first and the current Trump Administrations have targeted sanctuary cities, threatening to withhold federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions; a move that was successfully challenged by San Francisco in 2017 and was recently found to be unconstitutional. While some have suggested these threats will have a chilling effect on sanctuary cities, I argue that President Trump’s approach is emboldening sanctuary jurisdictions. The demonstration of strong public opposition to Operation Metro Surge both domestically within the US and globally, particularly in the wake of the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, is likely to strengthen the resolve of existing sanctuary cities to refuse to enforce federal immigration law directives and lead other cities to adopt similar approaches. I argue that sanctuary cities have particular relevance to stateless people. There are estimated to be 218,000 people who are stateless or potentially at risk of statelessness in the United States. The United States is not a party to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and it does not have a procedure for determining statelessness status. Operation Metro Surge has increased the vulnerability of stateless people in the US to the denial of due process, long-term detention, family separation and the risk of deportation to third countries (countries to which the person has no ties). This is on top of the daily hurdles already faced by stateless people in accessing employment, education and healthcare, and ongoing uncertainty in the US regarding the protection of birthright citizenship.

In offering identity documents, some degree of legal protection and access to some public services, I contend that cities have a role to play in addressing statelessness. Sanctuary cities and other ‘cities of refuge’ have already demonstrated their ability to offer a legal status, some protection and some rights to irregular immigrants. For example, the city of Barcelona adopts an inclusive approach towards those lacking legal status, registering all city residents on a local register — even those without a resident permit —which in turn enables access to mainstream services, including healthcare, education and housing assistance, which are delivered at the municipal level. I explore the argument about the potential of ‘city citizenship’ to address the deprivations of statelessness further in my forthcoming book, Beyond the State: Approaches to Statelessness in International Law, with Cambridge University Press.

City action in addressing statelessness would be consistent with the way that cities are increasingly playing an outsized role in addressing other transnational and global issues, such as climate change, where political will and coordination at the federal level is lacking. The growing activism of cities has been explained by Benjamin R. Barber in his book, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Citiesby the fact that cities have a different viewpoint to the state: they are more concerned more with their responsibilities towards their residents and less with political point scoring. As Barber writes (p 13), cities’

'paramount aims and thus the aims of the mayors they elect to serve them are mundane, even parochial: collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies; putting up buildings and running buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties… They are at pains to promote collaboration, not exceptionalism; to succor a knowing sense of participation and pride in community rather than to institutionalize blind patriotism.'

Ultimately, while immigration policies are set at the national level, the support and cooperation of local authorities and local communities are needed to enact these policies. What will be the impact of the galvanisation of the sanctuary city movement in the US? For a potential pathway, we can look to Spain. In late January 2026, the Spanish Government agreed to allow half a million irregular immigrants living in the country apply for temporary resident permits, regularising their status in the country. A similar regularisation campaign of 600,000 irregular immigrants in Spain in 2005 was found to result in higher tax revenues and social security contributions and improved labour market outcomes. But it is worth asking whether the federal government’s decision was influenced by the sanctuary approach taken by Barcelona and other Spanish cities. The 2026 decree was a response to a ‘popular legislative initiative’: a citizen-led legislative proposal supported by more than 700,000 people, indicative of a groundswell of public support for a more inclusive approach to irregular immigrants.

Continuing to ignore the data on economic impacts and community safety in setting immigration policy is a mistake. But by not taking shifting community sentiment into account, the Trump administration is risking the loss of legitimacy of federal immigration policy at the local level, and ultimately the fracturing of approaches to immigration and citizenship. In offering alternatives to the punitive policies and harsh rhetoric delivered at the national level, and in aiming to foster inclusion and a sense of belonging, sanctuary cities offer benefits for all their residents, not only their most vulnerable ones.

_{Image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash}