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sanctuary cities
'Their Complicity Is Dangerous': DC Police Chief Slammed for Submitting to Trump's ICE Raids
"The very institution that is supposed to keep district residents safe is now allowing ICE to jeopardize the safety and lives of hardworking immigrants and their families," said one local labor leader.
Aug 14, 2025
The ACLU and a local branch of one of the nation's largest labor unions were among those who condemned Thursday's order by Washington, DC's police chief authorizing greater cooperation with federal forces sent by President Donald Trump to target and arrest undocumented immigrants in the sanctuary city.
Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith issued an executive order directing MPD officers to assist federal forces including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in sharing information about people in situations including traffic stops. The directive does not apply to people already in MPD custody. The order also allows MPD to provide transportation for federal immigration agencies and people they've detained.
While Trump called the order a "great step," immigrant defenders slammed the move.
"Now our police department is going to be complicit and be reporting our own people to ICE?" DC Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) said. "We have values in this city. Coordination and cooperation means we become a part of the regime."
ACLU DC executive director Monica Hopkins said in a statement that "DC police chief's new order inviting collaboration with ICE is dangerous and unnecessary."
"Immigration enforcement is not the role of local police—and when law enforcement aligns itself with ICE, it fosters fear among DC residents, regardless of citizenship status," Hopkins continued. "Our police should serve the people of DC, not ICE's deportation machine."
"As the federal government scales up Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, including mass deportations, we see how local law enforcement face pressure to participate," she added. "Federal courts across the country have found both ICE and local agencies liable for unconstitutional detentions under ICE detainers. Police departments that choose to carry out the federal government's business risk losing the trust they need to keep communities safe."
Understanding your rights can help you stay calm and advocate for yourself if approached by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or police. 🧵
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— ACLU of the District of Columbia (@aclu-dc.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 7:30 AM
Jaime Contreras, executive vice president and Latino caucus chair of 32BJ SEIU, a local Service Employees International Union branch, said, "It should horrify everyone that DC's police chief has just laid out the welcoming mat for the Trump administration to continue its wave of terror throughout our city."
"The very institution that is supposed to keep district residents safe is now allowing ICE to jeopardize the safety and lives of hardworking immigrants and their families," Contreras continued. "Their complicity is dangerous enough but helping to enforce Trump's tactics and procedures are a violation of the values of DC residents."
"DC needs a chief who will not cave to this administration's fear tactics aimed at silencing anyone who speaks out against injustice," Contreras added. "We call for an immediate end to these rogue attacks that deny basic due process, separates families, and wrongly deports hardworking immigrants and their families."
The condemnation—and local protests—came as dozens of immigrants have been detained this week as government forces occupy and fan out across the city following Trump's deployment of National Guard troops and federalization of the MPD. The president dubiously declared a public safety emergency on Monday, invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act. Trump also said that he would ask the Republican-controlled Congress to authorize an extension of his federal takeover beyond the 30 days allowed under Section 740.
Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser—a Democrat who calls the occupying agencies "our federal partners"—has quietly sought to overturn the capital's Sanctuary Values Amendment Act of 2020, which prohibits MPD from releasing detained individuals to ICE or inquiring about their legal status. The law also limits city officials' cooperation with immigration agencies, including by restricting information sharing regarding individuals in MPD custody.
While the DC Council recently blocked Bowser's attempt to slip legislation repealing the sanctuary policy into her proposed 2026 budget, Congress has the power to modify or even overturn Washington laws under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973. In June, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed Rep. Clay Higgins' (R-La.) District of Columbia Federal Immigration Compliance Act, which would repeal Washington's sanctuary policies and compel compliance with requests from the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE. The Senate is currently considering the bill.
Trump's crackdown has also targeted Washington's unhoused population, with MPD conducting sweeps of encampments around the city.
"There's definitely a lot of chaos, fear, and confusion," Amber Harding, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, told CNN Thursday.
David Beatty, an unhoused man living in an encampment near the Kennedy Center that Trump threateningly singled out last week, was among the victims of a Thursday sweep.
Beatty told USA Today that Trump "is targeting and persecuting us," adding that "he wants to take our freedom away."
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Can We Build a World of Sanctuary Cities?
A sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. This is the first step to true collective safety.
May 08, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants—“the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized—much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on.
The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him), he’s above the law! Court rulings don’t apply to him—not when he’s busy keeping America safe from the boogeymen. To be an exalted leader, you need to keep a serious percentage of the populace in a state of simple-minded fear: The enemy are very, very bad people. They belong to gangs. They eat our pets. But I will protect you.
I’ll reopen Guantánamo. I’ll reopen Alcatraz. And the electorate can sigh with a sense of relief and safety. He’s bringing back our greatness—that is to say, our racist certainty. He’s recreating a country that real Americans can understand... one that’s like them.
Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe.
At least this is how it seems. But before I get too deeply immersed in Trump-inspired sarcasm, let me grapple with some deeper reality as well. American “greatness” has primarily been military in nature: us vs. somebody! The nation’s mainstream consciousness, be it Democratic or Republican, cannot stop playing war. At least this has been the case throughout my lifetime.
As Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out at Huffington Post, for instance, the Bush-era War on Terror helped give birth to Trump’s war on migrants: today’s terrorists, the “invaders” of the present moment. They quote J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented Gitmo detainees under Bush. He notes that Trump’s initial plan to open Gitmo was “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law. It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”
However, to Trump’s frustration, there was “too much rule of law” at Gitmo, making matters too difficult to turn the hellish site into a dumping ground for thousands of migrants. Trump’s waging war! The last thing he needs is rule of law. So his next step was to work out an agreement with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, allegedly paying El Salvador some $6 million to send American migrants to the country’s maximum-security hellhole, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. This would allow Trump’s war to continue.
As Schulberg and Blumenthal write:
On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had “invaded” the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.
Some good—or at least hopeful—news from all this is that the opposition to Trump’s war-gaming isn’t sheerly marginal. The opposition is also politically structural, such as, for instance the existence of sanctuary cities—whose governments refuse to cooperate, or allow their police departments to cooperate, with ICE, despite the risks they face for doing so.
For instance, a few days ago, the Trump administration sued Colorado and the city of Denver “for allegedly,” according to Truthout, “obstructing federal immigration enforcement. The suit objects to sanctuary policies—local initiatives to protect immigrant communities from federal deportation efforts—and argues that such policies encroach on federal authority.”
“This move follows Donald Trump’s recent executive order instructing the DOJ to penalize sanctuary cities, including threatening to withhold federal funding.”
Obviously, this is no small challenge to face. Maybe Trump will wind up succeeding with his authoritarian agenda—God help the migrants, God help all so us—and if that happens, humanitarian opposition will have to continue nonetheless, no matter how difficult things get. But opposition is also present right now. So is political belief in a higher value than waging war and defeating an “enemy.”
In response to the federal lawsuit against Denver, a statement from the mayor’s office declared that the city “will not be bullied or blackmailed, least of all by an administration that has little regard for the law and even less for the truth.”
This is not simply an “us vs. them” confrontation between the Trump-MAGA world and progressives. The confrontation is both pragmatic and spiritual: What keeps us safe? Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe. What we must embrace and learn to understand, both individually and collectively, is what I call empathic sanity: the ability to live as one, to value everyone’s full humanity.
Turns out there are more than 200 sanctuary cities in the United States. As George Cassidy Payne writes at Medium, a sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. All people are equal.
“In this context,” he writes, “sanctuary cities offer more than a geographical claim. They challenge us to look past a person’s nationality and recognize their humanity. They call us to prioritize their place of residence, viewing them as global citizens, not by their place of birth. In the sanctuary, people are treated with radical respect; here, no one has the right to harm another without their consent, nor to judge anyone based on their skin color, accent, citizenship status, or nation of origin.”
This sounds like a first step in the creation of international security.
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A May Day Letter to My Student Deportee
How the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and the wider community fought back against immigration injustice and won.
May 01, 2025
Dear “Cesar,”
This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkeley, a sanctuary city, but above all, I would like to thank you.
It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007—just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your U.S. citizenship.
This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits, and even facilitating the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.
ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example.
Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive 80-acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs, and burning eyes and lungs.
But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions, and inspired multitudes internationally. Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.
For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired. After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat. I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge: “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,” because ALL didn’t include you.
Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round-cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.
Inspired by the ironic letters of my parents’ close friend Blacklist-breaking screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, I wrote an Open Letter to an Immigration Judge:
Dear Honorable Immigration Judge,
…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our Constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent, when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker? Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens. So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?
The letter went viral. A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.
Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’ “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.
Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council. On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of our beefed up sanctuary ordinance. Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal, and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the City Council chambers. Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law. Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as board policy.
Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This January 21, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February, teachers, principals, office workers, and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,” my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual 7-year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.
So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny, but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy. And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.
As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,
Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.
Thank you, to our Rosa Parks’ Cesar Chavez.
Love,
Maestra Margot
My student’s name has been changed to protect his privacy. He responded with a very moving note of gratitude, giving me permission to publish this letter.
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