Arellano: Homeland Security's 'sanctuary city' list is riddled with errors. The sloppiness is the point

Yahoo

03-06-2025

The Department of Homeland Security's "sanctuary jurisdiction list" has more holes than the plot for the latest 'Mission Impossible' film.
All you need to know about its accuracy is how my native Orange County fared.
The only O.C. city on the list is Huntington Beach — you know, the 'burb with an all-Republican council that's suing California for being a sanctuary state, declared itself a 'non-sanctuary' community in January and and plans to place a plaque outside the city's main library with an acrostic "MAGA" message.
Missing from the list? Santa Ana, long synonymous with undocumented immigrants, which declared itself a sanctuary city all the way back in 2016 and has a deportation defense fund for residents.
More laughable errors: Livingston, the first city in the Central Valley to declare itself a sanctuary for immigrants in 2017, isn't on the list. Yet Santee in San Diego County, so notorious for its racism that people still call it 'Klantee,' is.
There's even Represa. Ever heard of it? Me, neither. Turns out it's not a city but the name of the post office for two places not exactly known as sanctuaries: Folsom State Prison and California State Prison, Sacramento.
Read more: Trump signs orders ramping up immigration showdown with sanctuary cities and states
Within hours of his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order tellingly titled 'Protecting the American People Against Invasion' that, among other things, stated that sanctuary jurisdictions should no longer receive federal funds.
But the May 29 list laying out the jurisdictions that are supposedly subject to the penalty was so flawed that it was taken off the Homeland Security website within days. It's still not back up. The effort seemed cobbled together by someone who typed 'sanctuary' and a city's name into Google and swallowed whatever the AI spat up without even bothering to cross-check with Wikipedia.
Trump's opponents are already depicting this fiasco as emblematic of an administration that loves to shoot itself in the foot, then put the bloody foot in its mouth. But it's even worse than that.
The list shows how blinded by fury the Trump administration is about illegal immigration. There is no mistake too big or too small for Trump to forgive, as long as it's in the name of deportation and border walls. The president's obsession with tying all of this country's real and imagined ills to newcomers reminds me of Cato the Elder, the Roman Republic politician famous for allegedly saying 'Carthage must be destroyed' at the end of all his speeches, no matter the topic.
That's why the pushback by politicians against Homeland Security's big, beautiful boo-boo has been quick — and hilarious.
Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns appeared on KCAL News to declare that Surf City's inclusion was 'pure negligence' while holding a small white bust of Donald Trump the way a toddler clings to its blankey.
Vista Mayor John Franklin, meanwhile, was on the city council that voted in 2018 to support the Trump administration's unsuccessful lawsuit against California's sanctuary state law. He told ABC 10News San Diego that he thought Vista made the list because 'another city in the county that bears a similar name to ours … may have, and I haven't confirmed it yet, adopted a sanctuary policy.'
Dude, say the city's name: Chula Vista, a far cooler, muy Latino town closer to the U.S.-Mexico border than Vista is. It's also on the list and isn't a sanctuary city, either.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) told the Voice of OC that he recently advised Santa Ana officials to 'keep their head low' and not make a big deal about their sanctuary city status — as if hiding under a desk, like a "Scooby Doo" caper, will somehow save the city from the Trump administration's haphazard hammer.
Immigration, more than any other part of Trump's agenda, exemplifies the Silicon Valley cliché of moving fast and breaking things. His administration has deported people by mistake and given the middle finger to judges who order them brought back. Trump officials are now shipping immigrants to countries they have no ties to, and shrugging their shoulders. Immigration agents are trying to apprehend people in places long considered off-limits, like schools and places of worship.
And yet, this still isn't enough for Trump.
Read more: U.S. attorney in L.A. moves to 'neutralize' California's sanctuary rules
Deportation rates are rising, but still not to the levels seen in some years of the Biden and Obama administrations, and not even close to Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower-era program that deported over a million Mexican nationals. Trump's deportation dream team — Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, border czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — has berated ICE officials for not doing more to comply with Trump's wishes.
The sanctuary list embodies all of this. Who cares if the wreckage involves human lives, or the Constitution? The sloppiness is the point. The cruelty is the point.
Homeland Security didn't answer my request to explain the flaws in its sanctuary jurisdiction list and why it was taken down. Instead, a spokesperson emailed a statement saying 'the list is being constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly." The decision whether to include a place, the statement said, 'is based on the evaluation of numerous factors.'
Except the truth, it seems.
Let's laugh at the absurd mistakes while we can. Really, how pendejo can you be to think that Huntington Beach is friendly to undocumented immigrants but Santa Ana isn't? Let's laugh while we can, because things are going to get much worse before they get better.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.