By Alexa Skonieski
Posted February 20, 2025
Do sanctuary cities lead to more crime? While some believe cities that hold the sanctuary title have a higher crime rate because of it, research from The University of New Mexico shows otherwise. The findings from a 2017 study, published by UNM Political Science Professor Loren Collingwood, reveal no correlation between a sanctuary city and crime.
“The way to think about the research is not so much, sanctuary cities versus not sanctuary cities, that have more crime, it’s about whether a city that’s implemented a sanctuary policy, whether crime or other aspects of civil and social life change as a result of that,” Collingwood said. “Because if you say, well, sanctuary cities have more crime, maybe that’s possible, but that would have nothing to do with a sanctuary policy, maybe there was a lot of crime in the city already.”
While there is no official legal definition of a sanctuary city, overall, it provides general protection for undocumented immigrants. The main stipulation is that these cities, in their ordinances and resolutions, limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). For example, some cities reduce access to their jails, making it harder for ICE to detain and deport people in sanctuary cities. Other communities have rules that forbid local officials from inquiring into people’s immigration status or limiting the release of inmates.
“For example, if somebody is stopped, detained, and charged with a crime, but they have not been convicted of a crime, many sanctuary cities would then release the person as if they are a normal person with human rights in the United States. Whereas a city that cooperates with ICE more fully, that person could be turned over to ICE and deported,” Collingwood said.
Sanctuary cities started in the early 1980s when civil wars broke out in Central America, leading to many people leaving and landing in the United States seeking asylum. According to Collingwood, people who were at risk of being deported started hiding in churches. That’s why some cities made the entire town a sanctuary. Berkeley, Calif., was one of the first sanctuary cities in the United States. Hours later, Madison, Wis. became the next.
Since then, sanctuary cities have been popping up across the country. They grew significantly after 9/11 and 2016 during the first Trump administration. Many places with sanctuary policies doubled down and updated their policies during those times.
New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia are a few examples of sanctuary cities. Others include Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, Las Cruces, and various counties in New Mexico. Albuquerque claimed sanctuary status in 2000, and its policies were updated in 2004, 2007, and 2017.
“New Mexico is not that high of a foreign-born state actually, but there is probably a decent undocumented population around,” Collingwood said. “So, when there’s scares, like what’s going on now, people don’t want to go to the hospital, that’s not good for civil society.”
Collingwood has been researching sanctuary cities for years. His first study, The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration, was published nearly a decade ago. The paper explains that sanctuary policy does not create crime. If a sanctuary city has crime, other underlying characteristics, such as education rates or income disparities, can cause it.
Collingwood said the study compared a city with a sanctuary policy and without one, each with a similar population and other similar dynamics. He used the example of Bakersfield and Fresno, both in central California. After comparing several key factors, such as crime rate, Collingwood says there was no statistically significant difference between the sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities. They also looked at the crime rates in the years before a place became a sanctuary city and found that the data was all over the map, some cities saw more crime and others saw less. When comparing various types of crime rates in cities before and after becoming a sanctuary city, Collingwood found that sanctuary city crime rate changes were not statistically different from zero.
“If the claim is sanctuary cities cause crime, then we would have seen all of the cities’ crime rates go up and that wasn’t the case, so basically there was no evidence to conclude that sanctuary cities cause crime.”
Since this study was released, Collingwood says he’s done more work on sanctuary cities. In 2023-2024, he wanted to know their political and demographic features. His findings showed that sanctuary cities mostly consist of Democratic voters and foreign-born people.
Another observation Collingwood has made is that Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities are said to be “laying low” amid questionable grounds right now. Collingwood says that may have consequences for how the Democratic voters in those cities may feel about sanctuary policy and make voters less supportive of it. Collingwood refers to a paper he wrote on this very topic in Tucson, Ariz. There, Democratic elected officials took split stances on whether to support a local ballot initiative that would have made Tucson a sanctuary city. Ultimately, Democratic voters split their ballots 50/50, with Republicans strongly against it, therefore the ballot initiative failed.
“That’s interesting because Tucson was one of the very first sites in the U.S. for sanctuary movement politics. It’s close to the border and a college town, so fairly liberal,” he said. “I think that highlights the political dynamic for Democrats right now.”
Today, Collingwood is working with sanctuary networks and the diffusion of sanctuary policy from one state or jurisdiction to another. He says a group has been building databases on the different cities and working to classify them and their policy strength, such as how much protection they provide undocumented immigrants. Collingwood says cities that score high on this tend to be embedded and networked with many other cities, copying each other’s policies. Collingwood says cities are searching for the best policy and using other sanctuary cities as examples.
“As the political threat grows, I think sanctuary policy is going to be re-envisioned a bit and to add different components to it. I think the kind of immigrant protections that we’re going to see in areas with large foreign-born people or people who are more politically liberal, will see more protections,” Collingwood said. “So, the battle between those cities and ICE will get potentially even more protracted.”
As we look forward, Collingwood says there’s a lot of uncertainty. He believes this will play out legally in the courtroom. Collingwood referenced the first Trump administration when they tried to strip funding to these cities as punishment for not cooperating with ICE and how that did not go anywhere, adding that the idea vanished when Biden took office. While the funding threat is coming back, there’s no answer on what it could look like this time around. Collingwood believes once the legalese settles, the country will most likely see another influx of sanctuary cities.
Alexa Skonieski University of New Mexico Communication Rep.
