WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump looks to carry out his sweeping second-term immigration and border agenda, so-called sanctuary jurisdictions are once again finding themselves in the administration's crosshairs. 

Nowhere and at no other point has that been more evident than in Los Angeles this weekend, when Trump took the rare step of deploying National Guard troops inside the county amid protests over immigration raids being carried out by federal agents. 

The initial impact of the Trump administration’s intended crackdown over the weekend on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions may have been clear in Los Angeles — a sanctuary city in a state that already has a law on the books establishing the whole state as such. But other potential ramifications, as well as how and where else the fight could play out across the country, are still to be seen, as the administration is already wrestling with the first step of identifying such places. 

In the latest saga in the administration’s efforts to identify and ultimately discipline sanctuary jurisdictions, the Department of Homeland Security last week removed from its website a list of cities, counties and states that it had determined to be sanctuary jurisdictions. The public withdrawal of the list came just days after it was first published to comply with an April executive order signed by Trump that mandated its creation. 

After informing the jurisdictions that the administration has labeled them as such, the order directs the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to  pursue “all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures” to crack down on them, including pulling federal funding — an effort that faced legal roadblocks in Trump's first term in office and already has in his second as well. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News that some of the jurisdictions included on the now-retracted list had pushed back on their inclusion. Asked about the list being taken down, a Homeland Security official told Spectrum News in a statement that the list is “constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time.” 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that a new, “accurate” list of sanctuary jurisdictions will be issued soon. But the sequence speaks to the complexity of the issue, even as Trump doubles down on the effort. 

“Sanctuary jurisdictions that violate federal law, refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, and harbor criminal illegal aliens put innocent American citizens at risk,” a White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement. “President Trump believes it’s imperative that the federal government restore the enforcement of United States immigration law to protect national sovereignty and security.”

Part of the difficulty around the issue, as Jessica Vaughan, director for policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, laid out, is that the definition of what makes a sanctuary jurisdiction is not always simple or cut-and-dried. 

A DHS official told Spectrum News the factors the department looks at when making a list include whether an area has passed a law self-identifying itself as a sanctuary jurisdiction as well as more generally “noncompliance with Federal law enforcement in enforcing immigration laws, restrictions on information sharing, and legal protections for illegal aliens.” 

Vaughan, meanwhile, said she considers a sanctuary jurisdiction one that has a “deliberate policy of non-cooperation” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. But that could be in the form of laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies or other general practices. 

And even the term "sanctuary cities," as they are most commonly known, can be misleading because the label can apply to counties and states. 

Under her definition, Vaughan said she considers about a dozen states and 200 jurisdictions to have noncompliance policies that meet her standards to be considered a sanctuary jurisdiction.

Such laws do not apply to what federal authorities are allowed to do in an area, but rather they impact what local officials specifically can do. 

Vaughan said she pays particular attention to a jurisdiction’s policies when it comes to detainers. When local law enforcement arrests a person determined to be in the country illegally and eligible to be removed, federal authorities can issue a detainer, requesting the local agency to hold them for 48 hours in order for ICE to retrieve them, Vaughan explained. 

Places that have laws or policies instructing local law enforcement not to honor such detainers are considered sanctuary jurisdictions under Vaughan’s definition. But even those laws and how they are carried out, she said, can vary widely, such as by the number of hours of notice an agency may give ICE or by the type of crime committed by the person arrested. 

“You might have places around the country that say, well, we're not going to honor the detainers, but we'll give ICE notice. But it's only going to be an hour's notice,” she said. “There are gradations.”

Such gradations, she noted, facilitate the possibility for different policies and practices within a state that may already have its own sanctuary law. Vaughan said a prime example is California. 

The state’s Senate Bill 54, commonly known as its sanctuary law, signed in 2017 prohibits state and local police from investigating, interrogating, detaining, detecting or arresting individuals solely for immigration enforcement and puts certain limitations on detainers and the level of cooperation local law enforcement can have with federal immigration officials. 

“Because California has a law that says you can only honor detainers for the very most serious criminals, a lot of the sheriffs in California will honor them in the case of, say, a murderer or a rapist, but they will not for a shoplifter or something like that,” Vaughan said. “Because they have to comply with state law, but state law doesn't say you can never honor a detainer.”

On the other hand, Vaughan said some areas in the state have passed their own, stricter laws, such as San Francisco, which explicitly prohibits cooperation with all ICE detainer requests. 

The slight degree of latitude in California’s state law, as Vaughan described, means the approach to Trump’s intended immigration crackdown is playing out differently across the state. 

The city of Los Angeles passed its sanctuary ordinance, which prohibits city resources from being used for immigration enforcement or cooperation with federal immigration authorities engaged in such enforcement and bars data sharing on the topic, on the heels of Trump’s election last year. 

Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who spoke to Spectrum News before the weekend’s developments, said the move was to ensure the city’s immigration practices could not be easily undone by one single mayor. But it also had strong messaging purposes, he added. 

“We wanted to send a clear message to our community and to the federal administration that we're not going to shy away from our values," he said. "We're going to lead with them and give people a sense of security that the city of LA is for everyone."

To that end, as Trump settled back into the White House and made his immigration goals clear, the Los Angeles City Council has been looking for ways to further those protections. In March, it passed a package that included multiple proposals meant to add additional defense for immigrants in the community, such as putting more resources toward teaching residents about their rights. 

Another measure in the package, written by Soto-Martínez, requires businesses to report to the city any ICE actions taking place, which he said would help inform local officials of exactly how the federal government’s immigration enforcement is playing out. 

“We want to know exactly where ICE is at, which neighborhoods they're targeting, which businesses are they looking at,” he said, noting that, before this past weekend, local officials were relying on residents to simply let them know when they saw ICE agents in communities. 

But Gary Redman, sheriff of the red, rural California county of Amador, is not only looking to do as much as he can under the state’s sanctuary law — noting it allows him to “do quite a bit” when it comes to immigrants arrested for violent crimes — but he also vowed to defy the state’s sanctuary law if necessary.

“When it comes down to it, I'm not going to release somebody that poses a public safety risk back into the community,” he said. “I'm just not going to do it.

“What I was concerned about is sometimes we have people that are arrested for even a violent crime — something that poses a public safety risk — that will never go to court. They are allowed to bail out,” Redman said. “I’m not allowed to even do anything and I said: ‘No. Unacceptable. That is where I am going to step in and we are going to contact ICE.’” 

As a result of his public pledge, Redman said he received a letter from the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, reminding him that he has to adhere to the rules of California’s sanctuary law. 

“He made it clear that he’s watching me,” Redman said. 

In his first term in the White House, courts blocked Trump’s effort to cut federal funding for some areas over sanctuary policies, an outcome Soto-Martínez expressed confidence would be reached again amid the president’s renewed attempts. 

Redman, however, said success at stripping funding would send a powerful message to his state, even if it means his county loses out on money. 

“I would rather lose some of that and have California actually realize what they’re doing is so wrong on so many levels,” he said.