The Trump Administration on Thursday included Long Beach in a list of more than 500 “sanctuary jurisdictions” across the country that could face legal action and other penalties if they don’t change course.
The list represents the latest tactic by President Donald Trump to put pressure on communities his administration sees as noncompliant with his mass deportation agenda.
Following up on an April 28 Executive Order called “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens,” the list names states, counties and cities — including 63 in California — that the administration believes “obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.”
Long Beach officials quickly took issue with this characterization.
The city “does not obstruct federal law enforcement in any way,” but it also does not assist in immigration enforcement, city spokesperson Kevin Lee wrote in a statement.
Lee said Long Beach has never declared itself a “sanctuary” city — a term that has no specific legal definition. But it has passed local rules that are seen as in line with sanctuary policies, including barring police and other municipal employees from collaborating with federal immigration officials in most circumstances.
That includes the city jail generally refusing to honor detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who will often ask local jurisdictions to hold prisoners for extra time so agents can retrieve them for deportation. The city says it cooperates in a limited number of situations, such as when ICE has a judicial warrant for someone’s arrest, as required by state and federal law.
The local sanctuary law, called the Long Beach Values Act, also prohibits the city from collecting any immigration-related data and bars the city from sharing any other data it does collect with federal immigration enforcement. For instance, when it was discovered that the Long Beach Police Department had accidentally shared license plate data with ICE, city officials said they moved quickly to correct the error. And in January, the city bolstered that law to put similar prohibitions into its agreements with third-party contractors.
It’s not clear if actions like this are what landed Long Beach on the list of sanctuary jurisdictions.
Lee said the criteria “remain entirely opaque,” and the city did not receive any prior notification or explanation about its inclusion on the list.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the list was created based on whether a city, state or county identified itself as a “sanctuary jurisdiction,” whether it has complied with federal officials enforcing immigration laws and if it had restrictions on sharing information with immigration enforcement.
Other cities, including the Republican-led Huntington Beach, were confused by their inclusion.
Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns, who supports Trump, told Voice of OC that the city’s addition to the list was a “misprint” or “grave error on someone’s part.”
Orange County and Kern County are the only Southern California counties not on the list.
The executive order that prompted the list directs the U.S. attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to notify each sanctuary jurisdiction of its inclusion. If they “remain in defiance,” the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security are then empowered to pursue whatever “legal remedies and enforcement measures” they consider necessary to make them comply.
In a prior executive order, the Trump Administration had already threatened to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities, although Long Beach had not been specifically named as a target until now.
Even before this, in the months prior to Trump’s second term, Long Beach began preparing for potential disruptions in federal funding, which are crucial to city operations.
Last fiscal year, Long Beach spent $315 million in federal funds, and it has pending grants for hundreds of millions more, including $400 million it hopes to win to build a replacement for the Shoemaker Bridge.
Federal dollars have gone to everything from park improvements to disaster preparedness and lodging for people experiencing homelessness. The city relies on federal grants to fund the majority – more than 80% – of its health department.
With the future of that money up in the air, the city has already started to tighten its belt. In a memo earlier this month, City Manager Tom Modica directed 18 of Long Beach’s 23 departments to reduce non-essential spending in the remaining months of the 2025 fiscal year because of broad financial uncertainty that included “the potential for significant reductions in federal grant funding.”
During Trump’s first term, his administration attempted to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary jurisdictions,” but California sued and a federal judge ruled in the state’s favor.