U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest a man from Venezuela in Miami in February after a wire fraud conviction. As the Trump administration attacks local sanctuary policies, some states and local governments continue to do what little they can to protect some immigrants from deportation. (Courtesy of Miami ICE Enforcement & Removal Operations office)

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests.

Some states and counties are nonetheless defending their sanctuary policies as a way to slow arrests, especially for purely immigration-related offenses, and to assure residents that local leaders are not taking part in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Localities in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.” California is also preparing to defend its state policies limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, based on a 2017 law that withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

The laws under scrutiny generally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policies either prevent local officials from holding prisoners for immigration arrests or, alternatively, from notifying immigration authorities what time prisoners will be released, so federal agents can arrest them on immigration charges that could lead to deportation. There are generally exceptions for some serious crimes.

Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle — all high-profile sanctuary locations — are among the cities that have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.

ICE can always find other ways to arrest a person, but it’s harder without local cooperation.

“You’re adding to the time and expense and resources ICE needs,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

She noted a 2018 report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggesting that deportations fell in California after a 2013 law limited cooperation with ICE for minor and immigration crimes, though they later rose again.

“There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects,” the report concluded.

Most deportation arrests happen when ICE agents get fingerprint records from jails, whether run by city governments or independently elected sheriffs as they are in many counties, and identify people subject to court deportation orders. All jails regardless of sanctuary policy send the fingerprints for federal background checks during the booking process.

Still, federal officials complain that sanctuary policies can force them to arrest people on the street where it’s more dangerous and time-consuming than a transfer of custody inside a jail.

That happened recently in heavily Democratic Tompkins County in upstate New York, where the county and the city of Ithaca reaffirmed their sanctuary policies after criticism by the Trump administration.

A man who had been held in the county’s jail since 2023 was released on a judge’s order in late January, before ICE agents could arrive to arrest him for deportation. Several agencies, including state police, later arrested him in a parking lot in a show of force, according to local press accounts.

The 27-year-old man, a citizen of Mexico, had been identified for deportation in early January because he had returned to the United States after being deported seven times in 2016. He pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer and a jail guard and was sentenced to time served.

After the ICE arrest, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove criticized the county, writing in a Jan. 30 statement: “We will use every tool at our disposal to prevent sanctuary city policies from impeding and obstructing lawful federal operations designed to make America safe again.”

Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson, in a statement to Stateline, called Bove’s statement “false and offensive.” Josephson wrote that the sheriff, Derek Osborne, had notified ICE about the prisoner’s release and that federal agents “had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”

Many sanctuary policies are mostly symbolic, meant to assure residents that the city isn’t taking part in federal immigration enforcement. Many policies say city employees will not ask about immigration status when people seek services.

Some sanctuary policies can help indirectly fight deportations by providing legal help and advice for immigrants on how to respond to questions from federal agents, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a supervisory policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“There have been some steps forward in creating an immigration public defender system, but it’s not available at the federal level yet,” Ibañez Whitlock said. That can make it tricky when an immigration prisoner is moved to another state for detention, and they could lose their legal representation, she said.

Sanctuary policies also aim to improve public safety by assuring immigrants it’s safe for them to report and help investigate crimes. Often the policies forbid asking questions about immigration status for people seeking services.

“For us it’s simple. We are striving to create a culture of trust and security within our communities so that our residents know that they can come to the county when they are in need or when they can be of help,” said Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County, California, during a news conference announcing the San Francisco lawsuit this month.

“That includes feeling safe coming to local law enforcement to report crimes or to participate in investigations without fearing that they or their loved ones face deportation,” LoPresti added.

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signs two immigration bills into law. Florida is among several states taking action to support President Donald Trump’s efforts on deportations. (Jackie Llanos/Florida Phoenix)

Conservative cities and states across the country have taken to President Donald Trump’s deportation plans and are increasing cooperation with federal authorities — even seeking new laws against illegal immigration that would be enforced by local and state police.

Florida’s legislature held a special session last week and passed legislation creating a state-level immigration enforcement operation. Tennessee’s new law creates a similar office and makes it a felony for public officials to back sanctuary policies.

Iowa and Oklahoma passed state deportation laws that have been blocked by courts. Six Colorado counties are suing the state over its sanctuary policies, and Indiana is suing one of its counties over immigration enforcement.

The New Hampshire House overwhelmingly passed legislation that would prohibit sanctuary cities, though that bill has a competing version in the state Senate. And last week, Georgia’s Senate passed a bill that would allow local government employees and officials in sanctuary cities to be held civilly liable for any crimes committed by immigrants without permanent legal status.

In Louisiana, Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill last week filed a motion in U.S. District Court in New Orleans to force the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office to abandon its sanctuary approach.

Despite Trump’s pledge to deport millions of people living in the United States illegally, the key targets so far have been the roughly 750,000 people who already have open deportation orders signed by a judge, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

Suburban Nassau County on Long Island, New York, is one locality planning closer cooperation with immigration authorities. The county voted Republican in last year’s presidential race for the first time since 1988.

The county has agreed to allow 10 detectives to help arrest wanted immigrants with criminal convictions and to hold them for up to 72 hours, in exchange for reimbursement from ICE, County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, said in a statement.

The partnership gives Nassau County more leeway to hold people on suspicion of immigration violations than it would have if it were acting independently, he wrote, because of state guidance questioning the legality of jailing someone after their release by a court.

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests. Some states and counties are nonetheless…

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests. Some states and counties are nonetheless…

In this 2024 photo, Calvin Gorman, 50, left, walks near Gallup, N.M., on the way from his job in Gallup to his home in Fort Defiance, Ariz., part of the Navajo Nation. American Indians in Western and Midwestern states had the lowest life expectancy of any group in the country in 2021. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)

There’s growing evidence that some American demographic groups need more help than others to live longer, healthier lives.

American Indians in Western and Midwestern states have the shortest life expectancy as of 2021, 63.6 years. That’s more than 20 years shorter than Asian Americans nationwide, who can expect to live to 84, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

White residents live shorter lives in Appalachia and some Southern states, as do Black residents in highly segregated cities and in the rural South, the study found.

The data illustrates how Americans’ life expectancy differs based not only on race, but also on geography.

“Not everybody in this country is doing exactly the same even within a racial group, because it also depends on where they live,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, an author of the study and the chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington.

“Eliminating these disparities will require investing in equitable health care, education, and employment, and confronting factors that fuel inequalities, such as systemic racism,” the report, which was published in November, concluded.

Yet the United States is seeing a surge of action this month to pull back on public awareness and stem investments in those areas.

In President Donald Trump’s first two weeks, he has stripped race and ethnicity health information from public websites, blocked public communication by federal health agencies, paused federal research and grant expenditures, and ordered a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the board, all of which can draw attention — and funding — to the needs of specific demographic groups.

The administration has removed information about clinical trial diversity from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration website, and has paused health agencies’ communications with the public and with medical providers, including advisories on communicable diseases, such as the flu, that disproportionately affect underserved communities.

The new administration’s policies are headed the wrong way, said Dr. Donald Warne, a physician and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. “With the stroke of a pen, they’re gonna make it worse.”

One of Trump’s actions on his first day in office was to dismantle equity programs, including reversing a 2021 Biden executive order promoting more federal support for Indigenous education, including tribal colleges and universities.

Trump puts DEI staff on paid leave, guts environmental justice offices across government

The problems Indigenous people face are inextricably linked to “toxic stress” and “just pure racism,” Warne said. “Less access to healthy foods, just chronic stress from racism and marginalization, historical trauma — all of these things lead to poor health outcomes.”

The South Dakota county where Warne grew up as a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe (the county is named after the tribe) has one of the lowest life expectancies in the country, 60.1 years as of 2024, according to localized estimates from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, an initiative of the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute.

‘10 Americas’

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation study parceled the country into what it called “10 Americas,” each with different 2021 life expectancies.

Black Americans were represented by three groups; those in the rural and low-income South had the worst life expectancies (68 years) compared with those living in highly segregated cities (71.5) and other areas (72.3).

Asian Americans nationwide have the longest life expectancy at 84, yet can also suffer from stereotypes and locality based problems that prevent them from getting the best care, said Lan Ðoàn, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Section for Health Equity at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners push back on attempts to demonize their work

Considering Asian Americans as a single entity masks health differences, such as the high incidence of heart disease among South Asians and Filipino Americans, she said, and discourages the necessary study of individual groups.

“It perpetuates the ‘model minority’ myth where Asian people are healthier, wealthier and more successful than other racial groups,” Ðoàn said.

That’s another reason for alarm over the new administration’s attitude about health equity, said Dr. Mary Fleming, an OB-GYN and director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Leadership Development to Advance Equity in Health Care program.

“With DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion programs) under attack, it hinders our ability to name a thing, a thing,” Fleming said. “Racism is still a major contributor to inequitable health outcomes, and without naming it and addressing it, it will make it more difficult to uproot it.”

Among white people and Hispanics, lifespans differ by region, according to the “10 Americas” in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation study. Latinos live shorter lives in the Southwest (76) than elsewhere (79.4), and white people live longer (77.2) if they’re not in Appalachia or the lower Mississippi Valley (71.1), or in rural areas and low-income Northern states (76.7).

An earlier Stateline story reported that policy, poverty, rural isolation and bad habits are shortening lives in West Virginia compared with New York. Even though the states had very similar life expectancies in 1990, West Virginia is projected to be at the bottom of the rankings by 2050, while New York is projected to be at the top.

Hyperlocal health problems

More research at a very local level is needed to find the policies and practices needed to start bridging longevity gaps, said Mokdad, the study author.

Since poverty seems to dictate so much of life expectancy, it’s fruitful to look at places where lifespans have grown in recent decades despite high poverty, Mokdad said. For example, lifespans have increased in the Bronx, New York, and Monongalia County, West Virginia, despite high poverty. By contrast, they have dipped in relatively high-income areas such as Clark County, Indiana, and Henry County, Georgia.

Clark County, on the Kentucky border, has a mix of urban and rural health issues that belie the relatively high income of some residents near Louisville, said Dr. Eric Yazel, health officer for the county and an emergency care physician.

Part of the county is also very rural, in a part of Indiana where there was an HIV outbreak among intravenous drug users in 2014.

“In a single county we see public health issues that are both rural and urban,” Yazel said. “As with a lot of areas along the Ohio River Valley, we were hit hard by the opioid epidemic and now have seen a resurgence of methamphetamine, which likely contributed to the [life expectancy] decreases.”

Nationally, a spike in overdoses has begun to ease in recent years, but only among white people. Overdose death rates among Black and Native people have grown.

Indigenous people also were the hardest hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, with expected lifespans dropping almost seven years between 2019 and 2021.

Calvin Gorman, 50, said several friends his age in Arizona’s Navajo Nation died needlessly in the pandemic. He blames it on alcohol and pandemic isolation.

“They said to just stay inside. Just stay inside. Some of them took some bottles into the house and they never came out again. I heard they died in there,” said Gorman, who commutes on foot and by hitchhiking from his home in Fort Defiance, Arizona, to a job at a gas station in Gallup, New Mexico.

Warne, the Oglala Lakota physician from South Dakota, said alcohol and substance use may have been one factor in Native deaths during the pandemic, as people “self-medicated” to deal with stress. But overall, he said, the main drivers of early deaths in Native communities are high rates of infant mortality, road accidents and suicides.

Warne now lives and practices medicine in North Dakota.

“There’s a huge challenge for people who grow up in these settings, but many of us do move forward,” Warne said. “A lot of us wind up working in other places instead of in our home, because there just aren’t the opportunities. We should be looking at economic development as a public health intervention.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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People participate in a Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City. Multiracial cultures such as Puerto Rican and Dominican may pose problems for new proposed Census Bureau survey formats that ask about race and Hispanic status separately. (Stephanie Keith | Getty Images)

The U.S. Census Bureau and a growing number of states are starting to gather more detailed information about Americans’ race and ethnicity, a change some advocates of the process say will allow people to choose identities that more closely reflect how they see themselves.

Crunching and sorting through those specific details — known as data disaggregation — will help illuminate disparities in areas such as housing and health outcomes that could be hidden within large racial and ethnic categories. But some experts say the details also might make it harder for Black people from multiracial countries to identify themselves.

Racial data gleaned from the census is important because local, state, tribal and federal governments use it to guide certain civil rights policies and “in planning and funding government programs that provide funds or services for specific groups,” according to the Census Bureau.

The form will have checkboxes for main categories — current census groupings include “Asian,” “Black,” “African American” and “White,” among others — followed by more specific checkboxes. Under Asian, for example, might be Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese. And then there will be an empty box for people to write in more specific subgroups.

Collecting more detail by allowing free-form answers, for example, will make it possible for people to identify themselves as part of more racial and ethnic subgroups — such as “Sardinian” (an autonomous region within Italy) instead of simply “Italian” — and include alternative names for certain groups, such as writing “Schitsu’umsh,” the ancient language for “Coeur D’Alene Tribe.”

And the Census Bureau will for the first time include Middle Eastern/North African as a separate racial/ethnic category for respondents with that heritage. Until now, Middle Eastern people who did not choose a race were treated as a subcategory under “white,” based on a 1944 court ruling intended to protect Arab immigrants from racist laws banning U.S. citizenship for nonwhite immigrants.

Under new federal guidelines approved in March, the bureau also will give people the option to check no race at all if they identify as Hispanic or Middle Eastern/North African.

The Census Bureau already has decided to use more open-ended questions in both the 2027 American Community Survey and the nation’s 2030 census. But the agency is seeking public comment on the way write-in responses will be categorized.

The bureau wants to hear how people are likely to identify themselves, said Merarys Ríos-Vargas, chief of the bureau’s Ethnicity and Ancestry Branch, Population Division, in a recent webinar. The agency also is interested in whether there are missing or incorrect entries in its proposed list of possible responses.

‘It’s about people’s lives’

Nancy López, a University of New Mexico sociology professor, said she and other experts in Black Hispanic culture think the census should have a “visual race” or “street race” question, so people can communicate how others see them as well as how they identify themselves. The answer might be “Black” or a yet-unrecognized racial category such as “brown.”

“A separate question on race as a visual status helps illuminate the kind of things we are interested in — discrimination in housing, discrimination in employment, discrimination in education and accessing health care in public spaces,” said López, who is the daughter of Dominican immigrants and a co-founder of the university’s Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice.

“It’s about people’s lives, it’s about the future, it’s about children, it’s about access to opportunities and it’s about fairness,” she added, noting that even if the federal government doesn’t add such questions to surveys and the decennial census, state and universities can still do it on their own as they collect data for health care, student enrollment and other topics.

The NALEO Educational Fund, an organization representing Latino elected and appointed officials, supports the decision to make a race choice optional for Hispanics.

“Many Latinos did not see themselves in any of the categories for their racial identity,” said Rosalind Gold, NALEO’s chief public policy officer. “There’s a large number of Latinos who feel that identifying as Latino is both their racial and ethnic identity.”

Gold said NALEO understands the concern some have that failing to require a race designation will obscure racial information on Black Hispanics. But her group argues that the census can get what it needs by educating the public on how to respond and by including prompts on the questionnaires to guide race choices.

Black Hispanic people often see themselves as having a single racial and ethnic identity, according to several experts in Hispanic identity who spoke at a Census Bureau National Advisory Committee meeting Nov. 7.

“They conceptualize themselves as belonging to one [group],” said Nicholas Vargas, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, speaking at the committee meeting.

“They check ‘Black’ and they check ‘Dominican’ — and don’t want to be counted as two or more,” he said.

In response, Rachel Marks, an adviser for the Census Bureau on race and ethnicity, said the bureau will consider that issue and other “feedback on how people want to be represented” before making a final decision on survey details.

The bureau may recognize a term, Afro-Latino, that could be used to indicate both Black race and Hispanic ethnicity, according to a proposed code list from the agency, as well as “Blaxican” for Black Mexican and “Blasian“ for Black Asian.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil rights groups, called the more detailed questions “a step forward” but also suggested more guidance on the forms to ensure people are categorized the way they want to be. In its comment on the changes, the group noted that in 2020, some people who wrote in “British” under the Black checkbox were categorized as partly white even if they didn’t mean that.

The group also said it is “concerned about a conflation of the concepts of race and ethnicity,” and it asked for more research to make sure people understand how to respond.

State actions

Some states are acting on their own to gather more detailed data about identity.

New Jersey is among the latest states to pass a law requiring more detailed race and ethnic data collection for state records such as health data and school enrollment.

A similar bill in Michigan would require state agencies that gather information to offer “multiracial” and “Middle Eastern or North African” as choices; the bill remains in committee.

And advocates in Oregon, which already has a law requiring detailed ethnic data collection, are asking the state for more details on Asian subgroups who face education challenges.

A December 2023 report by The Leadership Conference Education Fund identified 13 other states with laws requiring more detailed state data on ethnic and racial groups, including laws passed last year in Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and Nevada.

The states of California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington already had such laws, the group found.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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