Sanctuary cities in an age of resistance.

• Author: Leon, Joshua K.

On a rainy Saturday in mid-December, thousands of people packed Manhattan's Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for a Migrants Day march to Trump Tower. Amid the diverse throng were scores of undocumented residents, targeted for expulsion in Trump's America. Yet the message of the moment was not fear, but hope.

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"We are proud to be called a sanctuary city," New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito declared at the event, which was organized by the New York Immigration Coalition and sponsored by eighty-five groups. Her remarks and those of other speakers were galvanizing, and comforting, like the sanctuary city movement itself.

"I can feel this sense of security," Jan Bautista, a sophomore at Queens College, told me afterward. "If I were somewhere else, it would feel pretty tense and scary. With the political climate, sanctuary cities are very helpful to us. The sense of security is what we value the most from the progressive community."

An ambitious student exploring a career in finance, Bautista could imagine himself leaving New York City, but only for another sanctuary jurisdiction. He is among scores of undocumented residents whose status was left unresolved under President Obama and could turn critical under President Trump. Obama's centerpiece immigration initiative was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which lets people who migrated as children work without threat of deportation. Because of this status, an estimated 50,000 people can legally live and work in New York City. Bautista met every bullet point in the long list of criteria but one: He didn't arrive before 2007.

Bautista moved to New York City from the Philippines because he and his mother could no longer afford his rising tuition costs. Before he reached Manila, he subsisted with his family on a farm. He knew full well that going without a private education could limit his options in the Philippines for the rest of his life. He entered the United States on a temporary tourist visa to live with his cousin, a recently discharged Iraq War veteran, who looked after him while he finished his last two years at Flushing High School in Queens.

Without the benefit of DACA, Bautista turned to New York City's municipal ID program, a critical sanctuary policy in a state that bans the undocumented from obtaining driver's licenses. This ID, which anyone over age fourteen can obtain, allowed Bautista to open a bank account. Natalia Aristizabal, lead organizer with the advocacy group Make the Road New York, says the program enables the undocumented to engage in daily activities citizens take for granted. Parents can get on public school premises to see their children or attend parent-teacher conferences. And undocumented residents can now identify themselves to police, if necessary, without calling attention to their immigration status.

This effort is a small component of a much larger sanctuary city movement.

"Across the nation," The New York Times reported, "officials in sanctuary cities are gearing up to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump if he follows through on a campaign promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants." The Times story said more than 500 local governments have "some kind" of policy limiting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That number could increase.

"With every attack on sanctuary cities, they become more sophisticated and expansive," explains Peter Mancina, who wrote a dissertation on San Francisco's sanctuary history. "I don't know if Republicans anticipated the expansion of them."

After Trump's election...