Urbana, St. Joe appeared on DHS list of ‘sanctuary jurisdictions'
The list, which named cities, counties, and states all throughout the United States, identified areas that are interfering with government deportations, according to the Trump Administration. This came after Executive Order 14287 was signed April 28, calling for a list of states and local jurisdictions that 'obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.'
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Per the EO, each jurisdiction would be notified of their 'defiance of Federal immigration law enforcement and any potential violations of Federal criminal law.' The list was also meant to be used by the Office of Management and Budget to identify federal funds in the sanctuary jurisdictions that may be suspended or terminated.
The list was published May 29, but as of May 31, a 'Page Not Found' message appeared instead. While the list was only publicly up on the DHS' website for a short time, Illinois cities and counties that were named took notice.
Seven cities in Illinois appeared on the list, including Urbana and St. Joseph.
WCIA reached out to both Urbana's Mayor, DeShawn Williams, and St. Joseph's Mayor, Jim Page.
Williams said Urbana has been a Sanctuary City for nearly 40 years –and they don't plan on changing that.
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'Urbana will not be bullied. We have been a Sanctuary City since 1986, and we reaffirmed that commitment in 2016 because we believe in human dignity, community safety, and equal protection for everyone who calls Urbana home,' Williams said in a statement sent to WCIA. 'When cities like ours face federal threats or funding pressure for standing by these values, it's not just a matter of policy —it's a matter of principle and moral responsibility.'
Page did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
WCIA's sister station WGN reported that six of Illinois' 102 counties were included on the DHS' list.
Effingham County was among the 102 counties named. Joshua Douthit, Board Chairman of Effingham County, shared a statement in response to the DHS placing Effingham County on the list of 'Sanctuary Jurisdictions.'
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'Effingham County remains steadfast in its commitment to upholding the rule of law and ensuring the safety and security of our residents. While recent DHS reports have categorized our county as a 'sanctuary jurisdiction,' we want to unequivocally affirm that Effingham County supports legal immigration and fully endorses the federal enforcement efforts of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency,' Douthit said.
Douthit added that the county made it clear that they are not a sanctuary county by adopting resolution 24-13, and said they will not spend tax dollars on the 'immigration crisis.'
'Effingham County welcomes those who seek to enter and remain in the United States through legal means and values the contributions of immigrants who comply with the laws governing our nation. We will continue to follow all legal guidelines regarding our ability to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration issues in the interest of public safety, legal integrity, and the well-being of our residents,' Douthit said.
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WCIA reached out to the DHS to find out how each city or county was chosen for the list, what appearing on the list might mean for those whose names were originally included, and why the list was removed. The DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other counties included in the list:
Adams County
Alexander County
Bond County
Boone County
Bureau County
Calhoun County
Carroll County
Cass County
Champaign County
Christian County
Clark County
Clay County
Clinton County
Coles County
Cook County
Crawford County
Cumberland County
DeKalb County
De Witt County
Douglas County
DuPage County
Edgar County
Effingham County
Fayette County
Ford County
Franklin County
Fulton County
Gallatin County
Greene County
Grundy County
Hancock County
Hardin County
Henderson County
Henry County
Iroquois County
Jackson County
Jersey County
Jo Daviess County
Johnson County
Kane County
Kankakee County
Kendall County
Knox County
Lake County
LaSalle County
Lawrence County
Lee County
Livingston County
Logan County
Macon County
Macoupin County
Madison County
Marion County
Marshall County
Mason County
Massac County
McDonough County
McLean County
Mercer County
Menard County
Monroe County
Montgomery County
Morgan County
Moultrie County
Ogle County
Peoria County
Perry County
Piatt County
Pike County
Pope County
Pulaski County
Putnam County
Randolph County
Richland County
Rock Island County
St. Clair County
Saline County
Sangamon County
Schuyler County
Scott County
Shelby County
Stark County
Stephenson County
Tazewell County
Union County
Vermilion County
Wabash County
Warren County
Washington County
Wayne County
White County
Whiteside County
Will County
Williamson County
Winnebago County
Woodford County
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the case in which Thomas wrote that concurring opinion, narrowed Humphrey's Executor by allowing Trump to fire the CFPB's director. That decision, in turn, paved the way for the Trump administration to dismantle the agency altogether when it retook power earlier this year. At the center of the court's approach to these agencies is a fundamental misunderstanding about the separation of powers and the early republic. In his majority opinion in Selia Law, Roberts explained the Framers' mindset through his own hyper-presidentialism. He sketched a vision of the Constitution where Congress was a potential fount of despotism and the presidency was the bulwark of American democracy. 'The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that 'differences of opinion' and the 'jarrings of parties' would 'promote deliberation and circumspection' and 'check excesses in the majority,'' he wrote, quoting from the Federalist Papers. 'By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities. As Madison put it, while 'the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be … divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.'' 'The Framers deemed an energetic executive essential to 'the protection of the community against foreign attacks,' 'the steady administration of the laws,' 'the protection of property,' and 'the security of liberty,'' Roberts continued, quoting again from various parts of the Federalist Papers. 'Accordingly, they chose not to bog the Executive down with the 'habitual feebleness and dilatoriness' that comes with a 'diversity of views and opinions.' Instead, they gave the Executive the '[d]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch' that 'characterise the proceedings of one man.'' I do not doubt that the Framers intended the presidency to be a potent and vital branch of government. But Roberts's understanding of the founding era is impossible to square with even a modicum of historical context. The Framers did not write the Constitution in a vacuum; they gathered for the express purpose of fixing the flaws in the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, there was no president and no national system of courts, and its legislature had few powers that could only be exercised unanimously. The Constitution, by its very nature, created a far more powerful executive and judiciary than what existed under the Articles. Something is always infinitely greater than nothing. Far from weakening the legislative branch, the Framers made it a substantially more powerful institution than its predecessor under the Articles or the revolutionary-era Continental Congress. They imbued it with the power to tax and regulate interstate commerce. They transferred to it the states' powers over trade, copyright, naturalization, and diplomacy with Native American nations. It has the power to create and destroy any federal court other than the Supreme Court, and it can limit even the high court's jurisdiction to a significant degree. Congress can remove any executive or judicial officer from power with a majority vote in one chamber and a two-thirds vote in the other, while the president and the courts cannot remove a single senator or representative from their duly elected office for any reason whatsoever. It can disband and defund the president's armies and agencies at will. It could add a hundred justices to the Supreme Court on a whim. All of these powers are just the explicit, undisputed ones at its command. If the Framers actually thought the legislative branch was a 'unique threat to individual liberty,' they didn't show it when they actually wrote the Constitution. I digress slightly. Even against this backdrop, Roberts refused to kill Humphrey's Executor altogether. He distinguished between the CFPB, which had a single director, and agencies like the FTC or the SEC that had a single multimember commission. Whether that conclusion is consistent with historical practice is debatable, as Kagan noted in her dissent in that case, but at least it is an intelligible legal and constitutional argument. Now the court has abandoned such things. Its apparent goal is to destroy (or, as in these particular cases, make it easier for other constitutional actors to destroy) federal regulatory agencies as they have existed for nearly every American's lifetime. It does not care that Congress has created them or that presidents signed them into law; it refuses to even acknowledge the elected branches' real interests here. In Wednesday's order, as I mentioned earlier, the majority explained that it thought 'the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.' Kagan noted in her Wilcox dissent that this framing got the issue exactly and deliberately wrong. 'On the latter side, the relevant interest is not the 'wrongfully removed officers,' but rather Congress's and, more broadly, the public's,' she explained, referring to the two fired NLRB appointees. 'What matters, in other words, is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms, protected from a president's desire to substitute his political allies.' Nothing sums up how hackish and unjudicial the court's approach has been more than its Federal Reserve exception in Wilcox. Many court-watchers had thought, especially after Selia Law, that the Supreme Court's current roster would not overturn Humphrey's Executor in its entirety, in large part because there would be no way to logically maintain the for-cause protection for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors if it did. Few things could more fundamentally disrupt and weaken American capital markets—and, by extension, the American economy—than giving a president direct control over the Fed's monetary levers. Imagine if Trump could set interest rates like he sets tariff rates. The NLRB members warned as much in their filings in the Wilcox case. So the conservative majority squared the circle by declaring, almost by fiat, that its implied overruling of Humphrey's Executor did not apply to the Federal Reserve. 'The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,' the court's unsigned order said without further elaboration. Its sole legal citation for this point was a footnote in Selia Law where the court had assumed, purely for the sake of argument in response to a dissent, that the Fed could claim a 'special historical status.' This is one step above simply writing, 'Why? Because the court said so, that's why.' Kagan could barely contain her disgust in her Wilcox dissent. 'And so an assumption made to humor a dissent gets turned into some kind of holding,' she wrote. 'Because one way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey's) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception). If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler—and more judicial—approach would have been to deny the President's application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey's.' All of this represents a fundamental shift in how the Supreme Court operates. The court could have allowed the CPSC and NLRB officials to stay in office to preserve the status quo during litigation, heard their cases on an accelerated briefing schedule, and overturned Humphrey's Executor while ruling against them on the merits. The court's critics could have disagreed with the court's ultimate reasoning, but they could have found no fault in how it operated to get there. Instead, the conservative justices simply did what they wanted to do because they could. What a dizzying sensation that will be for any American raised in our civic faith. Covering the court for the last six months feels less like covering a court of law steeped in the Anglo-American legal tradition and more like covering the Soviet Union's politburo or Iran's Guardian Council from afar. The Supreme Court's most impactful work this year has not been to decide actual cases and controversies on the merits, or to fairly balance the equities on shadow-docket questions, but to enforce a certain ideological vision upon the American constitutional order as quickly, as bluntly, and as hackishly as it can. I do not write lightly that the central theme coming from the Supreme Court as of late is that Trump's own vision for the country supersedes the laws that Congress has actually written—to provide for-cause removal protections, to create a Department of Education, to provide anti-torture protections for prospective deportees, and so on. As Humphrey's Executor's fate shows, that vision might even outrank the decisions of the high court itself when the justices agree with it. That raises an unsettling question: If the justices don't respect their own precedents or procedures, why should anyone else?
