Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., convened a hearing Tuesday to put sanctuary cities on trial, but the case ran into a fundamental problem: No one could agree on what a sanctuary city is or how many there are in the U.S.
Graham introduced a bill last month that would “end sanctuary city policies forever” by punishing state and local officials who don’t comply with Department of Homeland Security detainer requests for immigrants. He called Tuesday’s hearing in the midst of a DHS shutdown over Democrats’ demands that the agency place restrictions on federal immigration enforcement officers’ behavior. For the fourth time on Thursday, senators voted down a bill to fund DHS.
“To my Democratic colleagues, we'd love to join with you in a rational way to do some things to make ICE more professional,” Graham said during the Budget Committee hearing. “But what you need to do in return is work with us to eliminate one of the biggest magnets to future illegal immigration, which is sanctuary city policy.”
Graham said during the hearing that more than 200 cities and 12 states have adopted sanctuary policies and that these policies have been responsible for the release of 10,000 criminals who were later arrested for additional crimes. He did not cite a source for those figures.
What is a sanctuary city?
In June, the Justice Department posted, then quietly removed, a list of more than 500 cities and counties it had pegged as sanctuary jurisdictions after mayors, sheriffs and several cities pushed back. Its current list of sanctuary jurisdictions, last updated Aug. 5, 2025, includes 18 cities, 13 states and four counties.
The DOJ defines sanctuary cities as “jurisdictions that materially impede enforcement of federal immigration statutes and regulations,” Chad Wolf, former acting U.S. DHS secretary and chair of homeland security and immigration for the America First Policy Institute, said. By that definition, there are about 22 sanctuary jurisdictions across the U.S., he said.
The term sanctuary “does not appear in immigration law,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, said in written testimony to the committee. But it “is generally understood to mean a state or local policy that seeks to shield illegal immigrants from the reach of supposedly unfair or overzealous immigration enforcement,” she said. Vaughan counts about 100 cities and 13 states that have adopted sanctuary policies.
“The word ‘sanctuary’ is a bit of a misnomer,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. “Sanctuary states and cities are not places that are a safe haven where immigrants cannot be detained or deported. It refers to the decision that local police will serve as local police and not be commandeered to be assistant ICE agents.”
Is crime higher in sanctuary cities?
Merkley’s witness, David Bier, the Selz Foundation chair in immigration policy for the Cato Institute, cited a dozen studies showing that immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens.
“The administration’s crackdown on sanctuary cities is not catching many criminals,” Bier said in written testimony. “In each case where DHS has conducted an enforcement surge operation in a sanctuary city, nearly all the increase in arrests came from individuals without criminal convictions.”
The federal government’s focus on “indiscriminate enforcement” of immigration laws “undermines trust and cooperation with municipalities,” Bier said. Instead, he said, ICE should concentrate on arresting “serious offenders so that localities could be confident about ICE’s intentions when working with local officers.”
But Loudoun County, Virginia, Sheriff Michael Chapman testified that he believes his department’s cooperation with ICE has contributed to the county having “one of the lowest crime rates in the entire country.”
Loudoun County last year signed on to the 287(g) Warrant Service Officer Program, which deputizes state and local law enforcement officers to execute administrative immigration warrants within their own jails, enabling the department to hold people arrested for criminal violations for an additional 48 hours so ICE can pick them up. “Anybody that’s been arrested by us and turned over to ICE is not a problem,” Chapman said. “They’re out of our hands.”
Furthermore, Chapman said, cooperating with ICE eliminates the need for federal agents to conduct street operations, and Loudoun County hasn’t “experienced any of the tragic consequences that we saw in Minneapolis.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked why local police chiefs would want to work with “an agency whose law enforcement behavior is so wildly irresponsible and unprofessional.”
“I think a lot of sensible decisions are being made by local police chiefs about whether they want to cooperate with an organization that behaves in unreasonable and unprofessional ways,” Whitehouse said.
