My, How Far [Immigration] Sanctuary Policies Have Come

Oregon’s state attorney general (the state’s top law enforcement official) has rolled out her “Sanctuary Promise Community Toolkit,” with instructions for residents on how not to cooperate with federal immigration and law enforcement personnel.

The “Toolkit” claims its authority from a 1987 Oregon law on immigration sanctuary policy. The attorney general’s office notes that the 1987 law was passed almost unanimously, contrasting that with the current partisan nature of immigration sanctuary policies.

One of the benefits of being old is I have seen a lot. I don’t always remember details, but I’m pretty good at noting and remembering patterns and themes. So, no, I do not have documentation of what I am about to recite. I am relating my “lived experience,” as the kids seem to say these days. I think I have a pretty clear recollection of the “gist” of the discussion as immigration sanctuary policies were initially developed.

I cannot speak to how immigration sanctuary policy was debated in Oregon in 1987, but I was living through a concurrent debate on the topic in southern California and watched early versions of immigration sanctuary policies develop. Early immigration sanctuary policies did have widespread public support. But those policies and their application were quite different from what those policies have become in the third decade of the 21^st century.

The immigration sanctuary policies discussed and adopted in the 1980s grew out of frustration that criminals were targeting immigrant communities and groups but, given the status of the victims, such crime was going unreported and thus unpunished. People in some communities were afraid to report crime because they or someone near to them was an illegal immigrant. People were afraid that just reporting a crime would trigger their own deportation or the deportation of someone in their family or household. Criminals exploited this fear and targeted immigrants or their families for criminal activity.

The initial immigration sanctuary policies were often somewhat informal and adopted by police departments as part of their community outreach programs. They were along the lines of: “We will not check your immigration status just because you report to us that you were the victim of a crime.” At the time, immigration sanctuary policies were simply part of campaigns to encourage residents to report crime so the police could enforce the criminal law. There were no promises that if you were arrested for a crime, or otherwise drew the scrutiny of law enforcement, your immigration status was not going to be checked, nor that if there was a problem with your immigration status you were not going to be handed over to federal immigration authorities.

The original immigration sanctuary policies were to enhance law enforcement, not to encourage official harboring of criminals. No one at the time had any thought that such policies would expand into a wholesale rejection of federal immigration law. Anyone discussing an immigration sanctuary policy in the 1980s would, I think, have been shocked to the point of disbelief if told that eventually such policies would be used by state law enforcement agencies to instruct and aid criminals in evading federal law enforcement.

Immigration sanctuary policies have gone from a tool to aid law enforcement to a tool to evade law enforcement. Quite a distance to travel in four decades.