As President Donald Trump’s administration begins to make good on campaign promises to deport “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants and cut off funding to sanctuary cities, many are asking: Is San Antonio a sanctuary city?

Broadly speaking, sanctuary cities — as well as “sanctuary states” and “sanctuary counties” — are jurisdictions that choose not to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement laws. In many cases, they take steps to ensure they’re protecting and providing services to their residents regardless of immigration status.

There are more than 170 sanctuary states, cities or counties in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Center for Immigration Studies’ assessment of local ordinances.

Sanctuary states include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Washington. Sanctuary cities include Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia and others, primarily in blue states.

None of the sanctuary cities are in Texas, due in part to a 2017 state law that banned them.

Nevertheless, San Antonio was famously looped into that category in 2018, when the city was sued by state leaders for not cooperating with federal authorities when 12 suspected undocumented immigrants were found in the back of a trailer.

The city settled the lawsuit without admitting fault, and city leaders maintain that under the most common definition of the idea, San Antonio is not a sanctuary city — and never was.

That nuance may not matter to the Trump administration, which has indicated plans to challenge sanctuary city laws by investigating incidents where local officials do not comply with immigration-related requests for possible prosecution, according to CNN.

Since the inauguration, some cities are doubling down on not cooperating with federal immigration authorities, while others have made sure to distance themselves from the label as far as possible.

“Cities that don’t cooperate with federal authorities call themselves sanctuary cities,” San Antonio Police Department Chief William McManus told a gathering of District 8 residents on Wednesday morning. “We are definitely, 100%, not a sanctuary city.”

A changing immigration landscape

As federal officials began targeted arrests of undocumented immigrants in communities across the U.S. on Sunday, including in San Antonio, leaders at both SAPD and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office have been clear they intend to comply with their legal obligation to work with federal authorities.

For SAPD, that means U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is now coming by the department’s processing center every three hours to see whether people they’ve detained are on ICE’s list to take into federal custody.

“I believe we are in complete agreement, in sync, with the priorities of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” ICE field office director Miguel Vergara said of SAPD at a D10 meeting on Monday. That means “arresting and removing from the community everybody who poses a threat.”

SAPD also assists federal law enforcement in other more nuanced ways, which have changed with new state laws in recent years.

McManus explained to residents that Texas now requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities, which he interprets to mean that SAPD must assist federal law enforcement if asked, including performing tasks like transporting an inmate to a federal facility.

The state also prohibited cities from saying their law enforcement officers can’t inquire about someone’s immigration status after an arrest is made.

“If an officer has someone legally detained, they can legally ask for their immigration status. Used to be we didn’t do that,” McManus said of the change. “We didn’t have a rule that prohibited officers from asking, we just didn’t do it. But if they want to, when they have someone legally detained, they are, by law, able to ask.

“… If they ask, and someone says, ‘Yes I’m not here legally,’ they can call [Homeland Security Investigations],” he said. “But ordinarily, local law enforcement does not have the authority to enforce federal law.”

In the case of people being smuggled into the country, McManus said it’s SAPD’s policy to alert federal law enforcement. That happened during the 2017 incident, but San Antonio officials ultimately handed the migrants over to nonprofit aid groups after HSI didn’t respond in a timely manner, according to the city’s response to the lawsuit.

“Say we stop a trailer, we stop a van, and it’s got people in it that are apparently being trafficked or smuggled. We call HSI,” McManus said on Wednesday. “HSI responds to the scene, we turn it over to them.”

A ‘compassionate city’

In recent years, when migrants were arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in large numbers to use the asylum process, San Antonio leaders went out of their way to brand the city as “compassionate.”

San Antonio opened a Migrant Resource Center called the Centro de Bienvenida, which aids asylum seekers with a pending immigration case — and is one of the largest Mexican American cities in the country with thousands of first, second and third-generation Mexican Americans and Latinos. More than 64% of San Antonio’s population is Hispanic or Latino.

While Mayor Ron Nirenberg argues that San Antonio does not fit under the common conception of a sanctuary city, it is and will remain a “compassionate” city. 

The “sanctuary city” term is simply “political rhetoric,” Nirenberg said. “There is no common, legal definition of a sanctuary city… There are cities that will not cooperate with immigration authorities, ICE, but San Antonio is not one of those cities.”

As for the city’s aid to asylum-seeking migrants, Nirenberg said that work will continue.

“If federal law allows folks to migrate over our southern border using a legal asylum process and they end up in San Antonio, we’re going to treat them like they should, which is with some common decency and dignity,” he said.