Los Angeles, The Not-Quite-Sanctuary City
A messy electoral history of protections for undocumented Angelenos.
Last week, Mayor Karen Bass claimed she was “surprised” to learn Los Angeles isn’t a sanctuary city…even though three LA City Councilmembers introduced a motion, taking steps to make it one last year. Over the past 4.5 decades, LA and California have implemented a mishmash of policies that provide varying levels of protection for undocumented immigrants. After months of campaigning on mass deportation, Trump’s victory has spurred many previously complacent City leaders to take swift action. So, what holes would LA’s new ordinance plug? And what threats to sanctuary protections will LA continue to face?
First, let’s take it back to 1979. That’s the year the Dodgers lost the World Series to the New York Yankees. Annie Hall won Best Picture at the 50th Academy Awards. The Agoura-Malibu firestorm destroyed over 200 homes, and the Skid Row Stabber murdered eleven people. Okay, all of that actually happened in 1978, but 1979 was a much less memorable year for Los Angeles.
One notable 1979 moment: LAPD Chief Daryl Gates implemented Special Order 40, prohibiting cops from inquiring about immigration status or making arrests for “illegal entry.” You might know Gates as the Police Chief during Operation Hammer or when LAPD officers brutalized Rodney King. Or for some of his wildly racist statements, including this one on chokeholds: “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied the veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.”
Gates was never concerned about the rights or well-being of undocumented Angelenos. He reportedly introduced Special Order 40 for one reason. Vulnerable immigrants have a long history of fearing any interaction with police, and Gates hoped Special Order 40 would encourage them to report more crimes.
During the early months of Trump’s presidency, advocacy groups noted a significant decline in undocumented survivors reporting domestic violence and sexual assault. Five days after taking office in January 2017, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13768, which threatened to defund “sanctuary jurisdictions” by making them ineligible for federal grants. This scared many state and local Democratic leaders shitless.
Even though 1 in 10 residents of LA County is undocumented, disgraced former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti cowered away from the term “sanctuary city” even before Trump took office, claiming it was “ill-defined.” Good thing politicians aren’t paid to define laws! “We cooperate all the time with federal immigration officials when there are criminals that are in our midst and need to be deported,” Garcetti told immigrant rights groups in December 2016.
Days after Trump signed his executive order, disgraced former LA Councilmember José Huizar introduced a motion, requesting a legal opinion from the City Attorney on Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding.
After federal courts issued injunctions on Trump’s executive order, Garcetti grew enough of a spine to issue his own executive directive in March 2017, reaffirming Special Order 40 and an ICE detainer policy, which resulted from court decisions that found the LA County Sheriff’s Department unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants via unconstitutional requests from ICE. Garcetti’s directive also prohibited LA City employees from:
Cooperating with or using City resources to assist civil immigration enforcement.
Providing immigration enforcement access to any City facility not open to the general public.
Collecting information about immigration status.
In September 2017, disgraced former Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a resolution to “declare” Los Angeles “a City of Sanctuary,” continuing to avoid the more commonly used term, “sanctuary city.” Even though the resolution failed to include any new protections or even permanently enshrine existing ones, it sat in committee and wasn’t adopted until February 2019—more than two years after Trump took office.
Why was something so toothless derailed for so long? Cedillo confirmed that City officials continued to fear financial retaliation from the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the President of the California State Senate, who you probably now know as disgraced, outgoing LA Councilmember Kevin de León, introduced SB-54. This sanctuary bill would restrict state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities with some exceptions (e.g., those “convicted of a serious or violent felony”). Unfortunately, negotiations in Sacramento added amendments, allowing ICE access to jails for interviews and removing a ban on sharing information from databases with ICE.
In September 2017, the bill passed through both houses with a vote split down party lines other than three opposing Assembly Democrats. Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law the next month, making California the first state to pass a sanctuary law under the Trump administration and drastically reducing ICE transfers even with the watered-down measures.
Despite all of these efforts, Los Angeles is still not officially a “sanctuary city.” In 2023, Councilmembers Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Gil Cedillo’s successor Eunisses Hernandez introduced a motion, directing the City Attorney to draft an ordinance that would establish LA as a “sanctuary city” and codify existing protections into law at the city level. City Council approved the motion, but similar to the City’s last sanctuary effort, the City Attorney derailed its momentum, failing to send legal language for the ordinance back to Council. Isn’t it wild how easily one politician can arbitrarily kill legislation?
But like Buffy Summers, the sanctuary ordinance rose again—thanks to outcry over Trump’s victory and Mayor Karen Bass’s nominee for LAPD Police Chief, a position that had sat vacant since March.
Why did such a high-level position sit empty for so long? In 2011, USC Dean Marilyn Flynn awarded then-U.S. Rep. Karen Bass a $95,000 scholarship to attend the School of Social Work even though Bass hadn’t directly applied for it. Flynn later admitted that she hoped to obtain the Congresswoman’s assistance in passing federal legislation. Bass subsequently sponsored a bill to expand funding for social work programs at private universities, including USC.
In a far more brazen redux of this scheme, Flynn colluded with Bass ally, disgraced former LA Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas. Although the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not file charges against Bass, court filings named her dealings with USC as “critical” to their case against Ridley-Thomas.
When disgraced former LA Police Chief Michel Moore learned about these allegations, he instructed detectives to investigate Mayor Bass. Shortly after reports of this investigation became public in December 2023, Moore announced his resignation without a successor.
In October, Bass finally announced her nominee to replace Moore: former LA Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Remember the court rulings that found LA’s ICE detainers unconstitutional? McDonnell oversaw those as Sheriff. He also publicly opposed SB-54, California’s sanctuary bill.
In 2018, McDonnell was unseated by deputy gang apologist and fellow disgraced former LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who campaigned on preventing ICE from accessing jails. (The LA County Sheriff is an elected position while the LAPD Chief is appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by City Council to oversee policing in LA City.)
Witnessing McDonnell’s confirmation hearing three days after Trump’s election was chilling, especially when almost every Democrat who questioned and confirmed him ignored his track record on immigration enforcement.
“Didn’t we get rid of McDonnell?” Pastor Cue of The Church Without Walls in Skid Row asked Councilmembers during public comment. “I thought we voted him out. This is a disgrace and really a spit in our face.”
“You appointed somebody who our community has no faith in,” another speaker said. “We are going to be a community under siege. McDonnell has vowed to turn us in, in the past, and he’s going to do that again.”
Many attribute McDonnell’s stances on immigration as a major contributor to his failed re-election bid, but the former Sheriff refused to distance himself from his prior actions throughout the nomination period until the actual confirmation vote. (Read more about McDonnell’s troubling answers at his confirmation hearing here.)
Despite hundreds of concerned speakers and protests from advocacy groups, only Councilmembers Hernandez and Soto-Martinez opposed McDonnell’s appointment. Even Councilmember Raman, who earlier in the meeting reflected on her status as the only immigrant on LA City Council, voted to approve him.
Anger over Trump’s victory and McDonnell’s appointment spurred the Mayor to call for the swift resurrection of the sanctuary ordinance, lighting a fire under City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s ass. When asked why it took almost a year and a half to deliver fewer than three pages of text, the City Attorney’s Office stated, “We do not comment on attorney-client privileged communications.” The truth is Feldstein Soto is a conservative, who did not care to prioritize protections for immigrants.
City Council included the sanctuary ordinance on its agenda for this Tuesday, November 19. If you can’t show up or call in but want to show your support, you can submit written comment.
Almost everything in the ordinance is redundant to policies in Special Order 40, SB-54, Garcetti’s executive directive, and court rulings, but it would codify many of these policies into LA City law for the first time. That would prevent a mayor from potentially rescinding or a court from overturning several protections. The ordinance would also reify sanctuary policies for local police and City workers, which is important because cops frequently don’t know or don’t care to follow the law. Even with robust sanctuary protections, it would be a grave mistake to rely on cops to uphold the rights of undocumented people.
Support for this ordinance will amount to nothing more than virtue signaling if Bass and City Council fail to combat ongoing threats to sanctuary protections. In 2018, a federal court found Trump’s Executive Order unconstitutional. If Trump attempted a similar executive order, threatening federal funding for sanctuary jurisdictions in his second presidency, it would likely face significantly less resistance from the courts. As of 2021, more than a quarter of active federal judges were Trump appointees. A July SCOTUS ruling removed even more guardrails to his executive authority, and if a challenge to such an executive order made it to SCOTUS, the right-wing court would likely rule in his favor.
Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams has already called for changes to sanctuary rules. “The city rules are clear—no city resources can be used to cooperate or collaborate with ICE…I think that should be modified and I think it should be changed.” And while Adams has a personal stake in this conflict (i.e., a pardon for his crimes), many Democratic officials would certainly sacrifice protections for their undocumented constituents if their funding were threatened. We saw how hesitant LA elected officials were when faced with this threat less than a decade ago.
Governor Gavin Newsom has received unwarranted praise for his political showmanship in response to Trump’s victory, but Newsom has a history of vetoing measures that would have prevented deportations. While California’s sanctuary laws restrict ICE’s ability to detain immigrants incarcerated in state prisons, Newsom killed a 2019 bill that would have barred private security agents contracted by ICE to bring undocumented people into custody for them. In September, Newsom vetoed another bill that would have permitted undocumented students to apply for jobs on California campuses. Newsom will never protect anyone unless doing so would bolster his political aspirations.
A potentially even greater threat to sanctuary protections is the National Special Security Event (NSSE) designation. What is an NSSE designation? When the federal government decides an event is so large and so significant that it poses a national security threat, the Department of Homeland Security mandates the Secret Service to oversee cooperation between local, state, and federal agencies, including ICE.
Usually, an event is issued an NSSE designation months in advance. In January of this year, the Secretary of Homeland Security designated the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles as an NSSE four years in advance—the earliest this has ever happened. That means federal agencies already have authority to coordinate with local agencies, and we don’t know what kind of security measures local agencies have in place to protect the personal information of undocumented immigrants or any other LA resident. (Fortunately for all of us, LA City Council recently approved “LAPD Live,” a massive new surveillance program that gives cops real-time access to public and private security cameras across the City!) Under the NSSE designation, ICE could also potentially issue a legal challenge, claiming its authority supersedes local sanctuary protections.
Despite attempts to rewrite history, the 1984 Olympics were disastrous for Los Angeles. Its legacy is police militarization and expansion, mass incarceration, and displacement. The 2028 Olympics were always going to be a nightmare for vulnerable Angelenos—sex workers, street vendors, the undocumented, the housing insecure, the unhoused, and more. The Olympics were always going to create massive increases in surveillance and policing and have disastrous ecological impacts. That’s what happens every time a city hosts The Olympics.
However, Trump will almost certainly use the 2028 Olympics as a display of American nationalism. He’s already issued threats to Los Angeles, regarding the City’s handling of unhoused and undocumented people. Do not be complicit. Do not be complacent. Follow Nolympics LA’s work to learn more and join their organizing efforts.
LA County recently elected long-time Republican Nathan Hochman to unseat District Attorney George Gascón, putting undocumented and other vulnerable Angelenos at even greater risk. Empowered by the passage of Prop 36, which will drastically increase mass incarceration with new three-strikes laws and a renewed war on drugs, Hochman has vowed to maximize sentencing. More on that and other election results next time…
Additional Reading & Resources
“US states urged to find new ways to block Trump’s mass deportation plan” The Guardian
"Everyone was excited because the Olympics were coming. Now everyone is worried" Torched