"Sanctuary" is a political word before it is a legal one. In California it refers to a specific statute with specific carve-outs, and those carve-outs are the reason the state can be denounced by the president as an obstruction to deportations while transferring thousands of people to federal custody.
Both things are true at once. Understanding why requires reading the law rather than the rhetoric around it.
What the California law actually says
The California Values Act, SB 54, passed in 2017, restricts state and local police from using their resources for civil immigration enforcement and limits Immigration and Customs Enforcement's access to jails.
It does not close the door. The statute permits cooperation when a person has been convicted of certain offenses, including felonies within the past 15 years and some serious misdemeanors within the past five. That exception was deliberate, negotiated to answer the objection that sanctuary laws would shield people convicted of violent crimes. It is also the channel through which most cooperation now flows.
The numbers behind the argument
Reporting published this weekend, carried by the Philadelphia Inquirer from the New York Times, examined practices in 18 states the administration has targeted. It found that 17 of them increased transfers to federal custody during the president's second term, with 12 more than doubling their numbers compared with the final year of the Biden administration.
The same reporting puts California's transfers since 2019 at close to 13,000 people convicted of serious felonies, handed to federal authorities under arrangements state corrections officials worked out with ICE.
There is a further constraint that sanctuary laws cannot touch. Federal law requires jurisdictions to share immigration status information with federal authorities, and fingerprints taken at booking in any local jail flow to federal databases automatically. A state can decline to hold someone for ICE. It cannot make a person invisible to the federal government.
What each side takes from this
For the administration, the figures are beside the point: the objection is to states declining to cooperate at all in cases without qualifying convictions, which is most cases.
For sanctuary advocates, the figures are the point. Their argument has always been that the laws were never designed to protect people convicted of serious crimes, and that the cooperation numbers show the policies working roughly as written, whatever the political characterization.
Immigrant rights groups make a third argument: that the exceptions are already too broad, and that a 15-year lookback sweeps in old convictions with little bearing on present risk.
The contested part
Beyond the written exceptions sit allegations of cooperation that state law does not permit. The Appeal, an advocacy news outlet, has reported allegations that jurisdictions shared data with ICE in violation of sanctuary laws, including claims that California agencies shared automated license plate reader data.
These are allegations, several surfaced through litigation rather than agency disclosure, and the departments involved have generally disputed the characterization. They have not been established as violations.
Where Los Angeles sits
Los Angeles has its own sanctuary ordinance barring city resources from supporting federal immigration enforcement, and the city has been in litigation with the federal government over it.
The practical position for an Angeleno is narrower than the political argument suggests. City policy limits what the LAPD may do. It does not govern what the Sheriff's Department does in county jails under state law, what state prisons do at release, or what federal agents do on city streets. The sanctuary label describes a set of real but partial limits, and the distance between the label and those limits is where most of this argument actually lives.
