Cracks in the Sanctuary Walls: The Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement on Trust in the Police

Secure Communities is a national immigration enforcement program that allows U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to gain access to the fingerprints of all suspects booked at local jails. Upon receiving the fingerprints, ICE can request that the jail hold a suspect until they can be transferred into ICE’s custody. From 2009 to the present day, Secure Communities has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and has garnered criticism for threatening to compromise the relationship between local law enforcement and the communities they serve. This thesis provides one of the first empirical examinations of the effects of the program on individuals’ trust in local law enforcement. I use millions of calls for service before and after the implementation of Secure Communities in Seattle, Washington as a proxy for residents’ trust in local law enforcement. Using this call for service data, I employ a difference-indifferences design to estimate the causal relationship between the implementation of the program and trust in local law enforcement. In particular, I examine whether we observe a decrease in calls for service in higher-density Hispanic areas compared to lower-density Hispanic areas postimplementation. Contrary to expectations, I find no significant effect of the programs’ implementation on rates of calls for service, in general, or on domestic violence calls, in particular. In light of these findings, I remark on the possibility that Seattle’s sanctuary policies may have provided a buffer against the potential negative consequences of Secure Community’s implementation on Hispanic residents’ trust in local law enforcement.