The Department of Justice has a new list of “sanctuary jurisdictions” that it accuses of impeding federal immigration enforcement — and Arlington isn’t on it.
The Justice Department previously included Arlington on a much longer list of “sanctuary jurisdictions,” which included 19 Virginia counties and 13 cities in the commonwealth and hundreds of others nationwide.
The federal government quietly removed the previous list, which also included many localities that support the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies, shortly after posting it about two months ago.
“This initial list of designated Sanctuary Jurisdictions will be reviewed regularly, to include additional jurisdictions and remove jurisdictions that have remediated their policies, practices, and laws,” a new Justice Department webpage says.
There’s no clear definition of sanctuary jurisdictions, but the term is generally applied to state and local governments that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The Justice Department lists nine criteria, some of which Arlington meets.
For instance, the county limits police contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and refuses to honor ICE detainer requests without a warrant signed by a judge. However, the county lacks a statement declaring itself a sanctuary jurisdiction.
The new Department of Justice list identifies some three dozen states, cities and counties as so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, but doesn’t appear to threaten consequences beyond what the federal government is already doing.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi warned in the announcement that the department would “continue bringing litigation against sanctuary jurisdictions and work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to eradicate these harmful policies around the country.”
“Sanctuary policies impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk by design,” she said.
The new list is composed overwhelmingly of Democratic jurisdictions, including states like New York, California and Connecticut, cities like Boston and New York City and a handful of counties, including Baltimore County, Maryland, and Cook County, Illinois.
The earlier, typo-riddled list was met with pushback from across the political spectrum, with officials often saying it wasn’t clear why their jurisdictions were included.
The administration never fully explained the errors in the first announcement, which included hundreds of jurisdictions, including places that had voted overwhelmingly for Trump and at least one that had declared itself a “non-sanctuary city.” The list was published in late May on the Department of Homeland Security’s website but within three days was replaced with a “Page Not Found” error message.
Trump officials have long warned that the federal government would go after jurisdictions that resist the president’s plans for mass deportations. In April, Trump signed an executive order requiring Homeland Security and the attorney general to publish a list of jurisdictions they believe are obstructing federal immigration laws.
The administration has filed a series of lawsuits targeting state or city policies it says are interfering with immigration enforcement, including those in Los Angeles, New York City, Denver and Rochester, New York. It sued four New Jersey cities in May.
In late July, a judge in Illinois dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that sought to disrupt limits Chicago imposes on cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police.
In Connecticut, Democratic officials pushed back, arguing there’s no reference to sanctuary jurisdictions in state law. Attorney General William Tong called the description of sanctuary states in the Department of Justice announcement “a concocted fiction” of the Trump administration.
Connecticut’s Trust Act law has limited how police in the state can work with federal immigration since 2013.
