Jan 16, 2026
“Here we are again.”
So wrote Judge William H. Orrick, of the Northern District of California, in April 2025, when he blocked President Trump’s attempts to withhold funding to numerous “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. for a second time. The first was during the first Trump administration, in 2017. In his ruling, he reiterated that such a move “causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the cities and counties and the communities they serve” (1).
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Some U.S. cities, counties and states self-identify or are widely called sanctuary jurisdictions, but the term has no specific definition. According to the U.S. Congress, these jurisdictions typically limit how much state or local law enforcement can help federal immigration authorities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with civil immigration matters (2).
Now, less than a year later, Trump has once again threatened to withhold funds to sanctuary cities over his false claim that “They do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens, and it breeds fraud and crime.” He said the funding freeze begins Feb. 1.
Trump made the comments during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday (3), and followed it with a social media post Wednesday, incorrectly labelling sanctuary cities as “corrupt criminal protection centers” (4).
The news prompted responses from officials in some sanctuary jurisdictions. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker stated, “If Trump keeps threatening to illegally withhold funds from Illinois, then we'll keep fighting for what our people deserve” (5). Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also vowed to fight back, calling Trump’s move “blatantly unconstitutional and immoral” (6).
And Governor Gavin Newsom of California shared Trump’s statement with the caption, “Please pray for the President as he struggles with cognitive decline. He already forgot he tried this before — multiple times — and we sued him and won” (7).
Trump’s sanctuary cities threat comes after courts recently ruled against two other attempts to hold back funds. Last week, a district court blocked his plan to withhold more than $10 billion in family assistance and child care funds to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York (8). And this week, the Trump administration’s cancelling of more than $7 billion in clean energy grants to states Kamala Harris won in the 2024 election was ruled illegal in federal court (9).
Sanctuary cities and the misguided crime crackdown
The U.S. is home to more than 1,000 sanctuary jurisdictions, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) (10).
According to the American Immigration Council, states are “well within their legal authority,” to restrict how much state and local law enforcement officials can help with immigration enforcement, as the latter is strictly a federal purview (11).
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That said, contrary to Trump’s claims of crime in sanctuary cities — and the use of incidents like [Medicare fraud](https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/federal-prosecutors-probe-18b-minnesota-medicaid-spending-fraud-tourism) unearthed in Minnesota to bolster his case — studies show that there is no correlation between sanctuary cities and crime rates. David Hausman, a researcher at Stanford University, studied sanctuary jurisdictions and said his findings showed that “sanctuary policies really do protect immigrants, and they also don’t do any harm to public safety. In fact, the data show that sanctuary policies have no measurable effect on crime” (12).
A separate study out of the University of New Mexico came to the same conclusion. “We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime, rape, or property crime rates across the cities,” the authors wrote. “Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary” (13).
A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research has also shown that, overall immigrants to the U.S. have had lower rates of incarceration than native-born Americans for the last 150 years (14). Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice noted that immigration has a positive impact on structural factors, such as social connection and economic opportunity, that are linked to neighborhood safety (15).
“From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Stanford researcher and economist Ran Abramitzky said of the findings of the NBER study he led in 2023. He added that “Mexican and Central American immigrants with low levels of education … are significantly less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born men with similarly low levels of education” (14).
As for those that have been apprehended by ICE, as of the end of November last year, 73.6% of those in custody either had committed minor offenses such as traffic violations — hardly the crackdown on crime that the Trump Administration promised (16).
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There’s also concern that complying with harsh and violent anti-immigration tactics, such as those deployed by the Trump administration, could actually stifle the ability of authorities to fight crime in sanctuary cities by eroding the trust between local law enforcement and the communities they serve. The New York Times, for example, pointed to Eric Adams, former mayor of New York City, who defended the city’s decision to comply with sanctuary policies. “If an undocumented individual witnesses a crime,” he wrote, “but is afraid to call 911 for fear of being turned over to federal authorities, criminals will roam free” (17).
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The economic benefits of the immigrant workforce
It’s worth noting, given the Trump administration’s stated mission to tackle supposed immigrant crime in blue states, that 2024 violent crime data shows that seven of the top 10 states with the highest violent crime rates are red states. They include Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas and South Carolina — none of which have been targeted by the Trump administration in the name of fighting immigrant crime (18).
Far from engaging in rampant criminality, the immigrant population in the United States actually provides an outsized benefit to the American economy.
One study showed that undocumented immigrants paid almost $97 billion in combined taxes to all government levels in 2022, and that “For every 1 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue.” That said, the study added that those same undocumented immigrants are prevented, by law, from accessing a third of the programs their taxes fund, including Social Security and Medicare (19).
In 2024, immigrant labor force participation reached 66.5% — more than the 61.7% for native-born workers — though they were less likely to work in management roles than native-born workers and, instead, tended to be in service, construction and maintenance occupations (20). That same year, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that estimated that immigration to the U.S. could give the nation’s GDP an $8.9 trillion bump by 2034 (21).
And MIT research in 2022 found that immigrants were more likely than native-born citizens to start businesses and create jobs.
“The findings suggest that immigrants act more as ‘job creators’ than ‘job takers,’” the authors added, “and that non-U.S. born founders play outsized roles in U.S. high-growth entrepreneurship” (22).
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
United States District Court, Northern District Of California (1); U.S. Congress (2); Bloomberg News (3); Reuters (4); Governor JB Pritzker on X (5); City of Chicago (6); Governor Newsom Press Office (7); The Guardian (8); The Associated Press (9); FAIR (10); American Immigration Council (11); Stanford Immigration Policy Lab (12); Urban Affairs Review (13); NBER (14); Brennan Center (15); Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (16) New York Times (17); CSG Justice Center (18); CSG Justice Center (19); Bureau of Labor Statistics (20); Congressional Budget Office (21); MIT (22)
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Mike Crisolago is a Staff Reporter at Moneywise with more than 15 years of experience in the journalism industry as a writer, editor, content strategist and podcast host. His work has appeared in various Canadian print and digital publications including Zoomer magazine, Quill & Quire and Canadian Family, among others. He’s also served as a mentor to students in Centennial College’s journalism program.
