DENVER — President Donald Trump issued executive orders Wednesday to tighten the reins on illegal immigration.
One portion of his new immigration plan is to punish cities that “harbor” undocumented immigrants. The move will cut off funding for so-called “sanctuary cities.
While there is no legal definition, a sanctuary city is generally accepted as a municipality where police will not hold a person in custody based on their immigration status.
Denver, Aurora and Boulder seem to be sanctuary cities based on that definition.
“Our police officers are not (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said after the election. “We’re not going to unlawfully detain people in our facilities that we don’t have a warrant to hold them any longer.”
In a news conference Wednesday, Hancock reiterated Denver’s stance.
“We will not support taking unlawful or unconstitutional actions on behalf of our federal law enforcement,” he said.
Some argue without such a policy, it makes it more difficult for police to investigate other crimes as potential witnesses might not come forward because they are scared of being deported.
But Hancock made it clear that Denver believes it is not violating federal laws.
“We are not a sanctuary city,” he said. “Denver does not have a policy of noncooperation on immigration enforcement.”
Depending on the definition the new administration uses to determine what qualifies as a sanctuary city, Denver stands to lose millions of dollars in federal funding.
According to a spokeswoman for Hancock, in 2015, Denver received about $175 million in federal grants, which is a little more than 10 percent of the total city budget. The federal money was mostly used for transportation, housing and human services.
“We don’t believe we’re in any violation to lose federal funding,” Hancock said.
Boulder, on the other hand, has taken a staunch position on the president’s order.
At the beginning of 2017, the Boulder City Council unanimously voted to pass an emergency mandate codifying the city’s practices regarding the treatment of immigrants.
The ordinance says Boulder will not ask a person about their immigration status. Boulder will not cooperate with federal authorities conducting immigration investigations. And Boulder police officers will not stop someone based solely on suspicion of being undocumented.
But the city said law enforcement officers will assist federal investigators in nonimmigration issues.
“We stand behind our ordinance regarding inclusive treatment of immigrants in our community, and will not violate immigrants’ constitutional rights just because the new president wants us to,” Mayor Suzanne Jones said in a statement.
Boulder receives about $8.5 million in federal funding. Like Denver, a bulk of that money is put toward transportation.
“I am not going to speculate whether the city would be able to cover a loss of this magnitude, or how we might go about that,” Jones said.
It is still unclear whether Boulder would be at risk of losing federal funding under Trump’s executive order, depending how a sanctuary city is defined.