Sanctuary cities have been a favored target for conservatives and President Trump, describing them as policies that lead to more crime and unsafe communities. In this opinion piece, Tom K. Wong, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, Director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) and a former adviser to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders under the Obama administration, details how research conducted by himself and others contraficts those beliefs. 

Among the publications cited is UC Riverside and the Center for Social Innovation’s Loren Collingwood’s The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration. “Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib find that there is “no statistically discernible difference in violent crime, rape, or property crime rates” when comparing sanctuary cities to non-sanctuary comparable towns.”

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