Sanctuary studies

University of New Mexico Political Science Associate Professor Loren Collingwood was born in Scotland, has an American mother and an English father and holds dual citizenship. His own family story made him inclined early to “question notions of nationalism or anything like that,” he told Source NM, a tendency his teen years in California only heightened as he became exposed to racism against Latinos.

Collingwood received his Ph.D at the University of Washington where, with Latino polling and research expert Matt A. Barreto as his advisor, he began working on projects with colleague Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, with whom he went on to co-author the influential study “Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge” (Oxford University Press, 2019).

“In graduate school, and since then, most of my network, the people I work with, are… disproportionately Latino, and many of them were from variety of different countries of origins or mixed race,” Collingwood said. “I started to identify a little bit with that crowd, in part because they would talk of their immigration experiences and it just kind of reminded me a bit of the things I’ve dealt with, although I haven’t really had to deal with it to the same degree that they are.”

Collingwood also authored “Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America: When and How Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization Works” (Oxford University Press 2020). His research areas also include immigrant detention and privatization. The following interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Source: Your 2019 research on sanctuary cities showed that cities with so-called sanctuary policies don’t have more crime as a result. What were the political conditions that prompted you to study and ask those questions?

LC: When Donald Trump first ran for office in 2015 as part of the 2016 campaign, we were really struck by the more or less anti-Mexican immigrant statements that he made. At first, we all thought it was a joke, like a lot of people did. Strategically or not, he really tapped a nerve, and it turned out a lot of people really liked what he had to say, and so we started studying that.

Around that time, there was a white woman…in the Bay Area in San Francisco, which is a sanctuary city, who was shot and killed by an undocumented immigrant who had recently been released from [jail]. That person, had they been in a non-sanctuary city, very likely would have been detained by [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and then put into detention and, potentially, removal proceedings. Suddenly, the claim was getting made that sanctuary cities were causing crime. [Gonzalez O’Brien] and I had already been talking about doing work on sanctuary cities, but we were struggling a little bit with the angle on it.

We started collecting data and trying to figure out which cities are sanctuary cities or not, and when they became sanctuary cities or didn’t. City-level data is often hard to work with — it’s not standardized in any way, so it can often take a really long time to collect that data. But we did it fairly quickly. When we started doing our comparisons, it became pretty clear, pretty soon that the idea that when a city became a sanctuary city suddenly its crime rates increased, just was not really at all true.

A New Mexico-based immigration attorney recently wrote a column for Source NM responding to Trump’s executive order calling for a crackdown on sanctuary cities and characterized it basically as a temper tantrum. What’s your take on it?

In a lot of ways, sanctuary cities have been [Trump’s] pet peeve, probably the thorn in his side this entire time. He tried to undo them in his first administration and that wasn’t successful, and so they’re just taking another crack at it and trying to just come up with various alternative means. I actually think what they’re going to try to do is they’re going to try to prosecute some elected officials and they’re probably trying to see if they can come up with a legal justification for [saying] a sanctuary city is basically the same as harboring and hiding… undocumented immigrants. But that’s just a personal opinion.

The Trump administration has already sued Colorado and Denver over their sanctuary laws. Do you think New Mexico has that sort of risk? We have a high number of sanctuary cities and counties.

New Mexico is a sanctuary state overall, and then several of our counties are and then also several of our cities. I haven’t done this kind of overlapping jurisdictions analysis, but my anecdotal sense — just because I spend a lot of time looking at this data and thinking about it — is that New Mexico is one of the safest place for undocumented immigrants, and it’s generally probably not as much on the administration’s radar. My read… is that our attention has been on the militarized border…that seems to be where we’re getting the most attention, and they haven’t been focusing as much on the interior undocumented population. But I could be wrong about that.

Do you have specific questions about New Mexico’s militarized border zone that you’re thinking about?

My biggest question with this, and with a lot of zone-type issues, which I haven’t done much of yet, but we are looking into it, is basically whether this is going to lead to racially profiling of Latino people or Latinos who speak Spanish. You have a lot of that here in New Mexico, of people who are either citizens and or are legal residents, and they could fairly easily get caught up in that dragnet.

Given the current environment of increased criminalization of undocumented immigrants, how does the work that you’ve done examining private prison lobbying inform what we’re seeing right now?

The main thing we have discovered is there’s a fairly small subset of Democratic legislators who are influenced massively by these private prison companies, whether it’s through donations or actual physical lobbying on the hill in DC or in Santa Fe…or legislators that have these facilities in their districts. Republican legislators just basically are anti-immigrant across the board and punitive. They want more money for detention, and they don’t want to let anyone go free and they want to deport everybody. I mean, literally. It used to not be that way, right? It used to be that a fairly large, sizable portion of the Republican infrastructure was supportive of legal or even guest worker immigration or maybe wasn’t so harsh on illegal immigration. So, whether those Republicans get money from the GEO Group, or whether they have facilities in their district doesn’t really matter, at least that’s what we’ve tended to see.

Democrats are more supportive of legalization [or policies] that would reduce the chances that an undocumented immigrant or an asylum seeker gets put into detention. But when these Democratic legislators do have these facilities in their districts, or they are taking money from Geo Group or Management & Training Corporation or something like that, they’re potentially going to start looking more like the Republican legislators in terms of their voting on relevant immigrant legislation. When I say relevant immigrant legislation, the classic example [were] bills in the New Mexico Legislature that have failed in the State Senate a couple years running that [would have made it] harder for private immigrant detention centers to run in the state and would have potentially put one or two of them out of business. New Mexico, although it’s a Democratic leaning state… they cannot pass a bill like that, at least in my read.

What direction is your work taking now?

[With sanctuary cities], over the last couple of years, we’re just expanding that research. We got the texts of the [sanctuary policies]… and we’ve done a bunch of network analysis where we see how sanctuary cities are copying language from other sanctuary cities, and which ones look more similar than other ones, and there’s regional effects.

And then I have another book project, with my colleague [California State University Northridge Political Science Professor] Jason Morín, and we’re looking at immigrant detention and privatized immigrant detention. [Morín] was [recently cited [in the] New York Times about it. He and I have published a couple of papers on that because there are three immigrant detention facilities in New Mexico and they’re all privately run or managed.

You know, academic research is slow going. We try to fire it out sometimes, but basically, we’re trying to create the platform that people can use…to back up policy making…and for advocacy. Even though, personally, we probably have a stake in this — just the nature of the work that we’re doing — we do our best to come at this objectively so that we can provide that evidence and the knowledge base to the people that are making the arguments one way or the other.