“She can’t even see her shadow”: The New Sanctuary Coalition’s response to the criminalization of immigrants in New York

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the political aspects of sanctuary, this article offers a qualitative account of responses to the criminalization and long-standing racialized exclusion of immigrants. Fieldwork findings suggest that New York City’s New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) did not screen immigrants to distinguish between the worthy/deserving and the undeserving, nor did it create a boundary between the host and the guest; rather, it actively worked toward an abolitionist movement of expanded sanctuary.

Acknowledgments

I owe gratitude to the editor and several anonymous peer reviewers who have provided indispensable advice and thoughtful critique which have immeasurably improved my research. Furthermore, for helpful comments, discussions, encouragement, and/or for simply sharing research, I wish to thank the late Benjamin Barber, Sheila Foster, Randy Lippert, Ira Katznelson, Saskia Sassen, Ester Fuchs, Rose Cuison-Villazor, Idil Atak, Nestor Davidson, Thomas Coggin, Annika Hinze, Rosemary Wakeman, Matt Block, Gesche Loft, Diego Renato Azurdia, Jane Guskin, Todd Brown, Dave Brotherton, Henry Pontell, Robert Garot, Richard Ocejo, David Green, Daniel Stageman, Father Luis Barrios, Juan Carlos Ruiz, Ravi Ragbir, Sara Gozalo, Goeff Trenchard, Nathan Yaffe, Milena Gomez, Ingrid Olivo, Tom Angotti, Robert Beauregard, John Mollenkopf, Peter Bearman, Els de Graauw, Debra Klaber, Alan Yaspan, Andre Daughtry, Grace Yukich, Gemma Solimene, Saille Murray, Nihad Bunar, Gordana Rabrenovic, Ryan Mulligan, Andrew Karmen, Serin Houston, Peter Mancina, Jennifer Ridgley, Steve Sacco, and Carol Banks, among many others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. See also, Cházaro (2016) on compelling the immigrants to disavow the “criminal” and the “illegal” populations among them and to embrace respectability (p. 651). Cházaro (2016) draws from her experience as a lawyer representing 1,200 immigrants in detention during a 56-day hunger strike in Tacoma, Washington, in 2014— “The group of hunger strikers included a mix of long-time Lawful Permanent Residents with serious criminal records, recent arrivals seeking asylum, and long-term undocumented residents whose road to detention had begun with a single DUI; They made broad-based demands, from improvements in their conditions of confinement to an end to all deportations, all without drawing distinctions between their worthiness for such changes on the basis of their respective criminal records” (pp. 662–663); See, furthermore, Yukich (2013c) on “model immigrants” (pp. 97, 99–100). See also Ngai (2004) on the discriminatory, disciplining strategies that present positive immigrant stereotypes only to pit them against low-income native-born minorities, African Americans and Puerto-Ricans (p. 268).

2. See, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “Secure Communities,” https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities.

3. The subject here is not the sanctuary city per se but the notion that the city can also be viewed as a site of sanctuary practices and crucial networks of solidarity with the undocumented, asylum seekers, and refugees (Filipcevic Cordes, 2019) which hold the potential to resist “crimmigration” policies. Note, on the one hand, that San Francisco sanctuary city policies focus on preventing local police from “stopping, questioning, or detaining any individual solely because of the individual’s national origin, foreign appearance, inability to speak English, or immigrations status” (Mancina, 2013, pp. 215–216). But, on the other hand, sub-federal immigration policies have, however, also led to the opposite outcomes, e.g., Arizona’s SB1070, along with similar policies in Alabama and Georgia (Mollenkopf & Pastor, 2016, p. 1), which allowed police to ask for proof of citizenship during routine traffic stops. Research found that SB1070 had a negative impact, resulting in racial profiling and reducing trust between the Latino community and local officials (Waslin as cited in Gonzalez et al., 2017).

4. In discussing recent examples of sanctuary in the UK, Bagelman demonstrates how criminalization is often imposed upon the asylum seeker; as one of the asylum seeker informants in her study stresses, he feels that he has been turned into a criminal even though he had never committed a crime—“one is governed on the basis that it is not a question of “if” one commits a crime, but ‘when’” (as cited in Bagelman, 2016, p. 40).

5. Given that during fieldwork, I have observed the NSC assisting all three groups of migrants (including as well permanent residents who have become deportable because of their contact with the criminal justice system), I have decided to include references to all of these groups of immigrants.

6. In contrast to the findings in Yukich (2013c) where one of the chief aims of the NSM was religious conversion where religion is accordingly not a mere resource for political activism (p. 91), this research presents a politicized landscape of sanctuary practices with implications for urban governance especially given the disconnect between the official sanctuary city designation in New York, a form of branding of a sanctuary city, and the NSM with its aims of political and social reform to aid immigrants, especially those affected by the criminal justice system (see Filipcevic Cordes, 2019).

7. Of course, this raises ethical concerns and it should be noted that participants in sanctuary practices were for the most part aware that I was a researcher of the movement.

8. Collingwood and Gonzalez O’Brien (2019) also note that nearly all of GOP presidential candidates included opposition to sanctuary cities as a part of their platforms (pp. 17, 39).

9. Cited in USA Today, January 24, 2018.

10. Furthermore, “[w]hile never explicitly invoking race, the use of images and rhetoric [in the media, especially Fox News] successfully conveyed the racial script, ‘[s]toking fears that white women will be raped and murdered by racial minorities […] like Trump, Fox News used the Steinle story to create an antisanctuary narrative of non-white violence against whites that dovetailed with broader anti-immigrant agenda’” (Lasch, 2016, pp. 180, 181).

11. More specifically, media references to crime increased from 33% to 48% … linking the policies to crime and undocumented immigrants. Human-based analysis finds “no mentions of immigrant criminality in the 1980–1989 and 1990–1999 periods. By the 2000–2009 period, criminality had begun to enter the conversation and approximately 28% of articles mentioned crime in their coverage of sanctuary cities. This would dip a little in 2010–2014, only to rise to almost 38% by the 2015–2017 period as a result of the Steinle shooting” (Gonzalez O’Brien et al., 2019, pp. 768–769).

12. More broadly, sanctuary cities in the United States can be defined as process (rather than a place, see Houston, 2019, forthcoming) whereby a local government or police department have passed a resolution, a city ordinance, an executive order, or a departmental policy expressly forbidding city or law enforcement officials from inquiring into immigration status and/or cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency (Filipcevic Cordes, 2017, p. 1).

13. Ridgley ties sanctuary policies to the notion of basic entitlements and argues that these policies diminish the fear that limits social and political participation (Ridgley, 2008, p. 73). Sanctuary cities in this view lead to better cooperation with the police on the part of the undocumented and better incorporation (see Ridgley, 2008, pp. 58–59; see also, Blanco, 2017; Villazor, 2010, p. 594; Wong, 2017; Bilke, 2009, p. 183). Yet, according to Cházaro (2016) there is a problem with the framing of this argument regarding “a need for restored trust” between the police and the undocumented which “frames them as respectable (non)citizens owed the state’s protection, not its sanction” given that, if we take into account the contexts of racial profiling of Blacks and Latinos and over-policing of these groups along with the queer and gender non-confirming immigrants of color, “the call to a return to a time of healthy relationships between police and communities may ring hollow for those who are targeted by the police whether or not ICE is collaborating with them” (p. 653).

14. The source notes further that sanctuary policies could aid incorporation and lead to lower crime rates in sanctuary jurisdictions; it states that undocumented immigrants are more likely to be the victims, rather than perpetrators, of crime (Lyons and Kittrie as cited in Gonzalez et al., 2017); this aligns with research that shows on average lower crime rates for immigrants than for native-born citizens in the U.S., research that notes that in comparison with cities that have fewer immigrants, cities with a higher percentage of immigrant population have lower crime rates (cited in Minkoff and Carr, Urban Affairs Review website, February 14, Minkoff & Carr, 2017; see also Lasch, 2016, p. 187; Wong, 2017) or the research that lists the incarceration rates native born males as 3.3% in comparison to 1.6% for young, foreign-born males (Garcia, 2016; see also Lyons et al., 2013).

15. Sharpless (2016) finds that 14% of criminal offenses by aliens are traffic offenses citing how they are for example, precluded from obtaining drivers licenses by state law then persecuted for driving without a license (pp. 727–728). Note here, however, that the focus on just minor crimes may be seen as problematic in perpetuating the deserving immigrant narrative (see also Sharpless, 2016, p. 711).

16. This space, according to Father Barrios, refers to a manner in which Amanda Guerra Morales constituted the notion of “mi casa” [my house] amidst the church sanctuary.

17. “To be eligible for sanctuary, an undocumented immigrant must be in deportation proceedings, have a good work record, and agree to undergo training to overcome fear of public exposure in order to articulate their cases at news conferences and public gatherings. They also must not have committed any crimes, and they must have US-born children to make the case that to separate them would destroy a family” (as cited in Freeland, 2010, p. 494).

18. The authors cite an NSM “pamphlet [that] recommends recruiting families with the following characteristics: … a good work record and a history of contributing to their community. It is also helpful when families can speak from the heart about their love for their children, their neighborhood, their community and this country, as well as their religious faith (New Sanctuary Movement, 2007, p. 2)” (as cited in Houston & Morse, 2017, p. 38).

19. “For instance, when a family was accompanied after ICE arrests, a group including five religious activists went down with them to the holding facility and stayed with them for five hours while ICE went through various procedures and paperwork (C. Tschirhart, 2008, personal communication). This group refused to let ICE arrest the family, and only when threatened with a press conference did ICE let them go, with the provision that they would be arrested in a week, which gave NSM activists time to work out alternatives to deportation” (Freeland, 2010, p. 499).

20. Aligned also with Daniel Denvir’s (Fair Punishment Project) proposals stated in “On the Media: Looking Beyond ‘Sanctuary Cities,’” WNYC February 24, (2017).

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Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes is a New York–based interdisciplinary urban studies scholar. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning, with second fields in Sociology and Political Science, from Columbia University. She was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College and a Research Associate to the late Dr. Benjamin Barber at Fordham University, Urban Consortium. She is currently teaching at Fordham University and John Jay College.