ICE Attacks Sanctuary Policies, Leaving Immigrants Vulnerable
Graphic by Neshama Ryman
The ground is shifting quickly beneath the feet of immigrants, their families, and the lawyers who represent them. Since Jan. 20, 2025, immigrants in Los Angeles, Boston, and other major United States cities have faced a sharply altered law enforcement landscape as the Trump administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expand interior operations and detention. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s emergency orders have narrowed relief timelines and expanded the powers of the executive branch.
Immigration attorneys and immigrant families reported to the Harvard Independent that ICE’s presence has become invasive, with families fearing separation from their children, unfair arrest, and even leaving the house as federal lawsuits against “sanctuary” policies and a broader detention footprint reshape daily life.
“There’s a sense of panic right now,” a Harvard Law student who works at the Harvard Law School Immigration & Refugee Clinic said. “It’s causing so much downstream distress.”
Due to new orders from the Supreme Court, immigration lawyers have been forced to change their practices since the start of Trump’s second term. Under the revised practice, the Court dictates whether individuals can remain with their families during their proceedings. Recent emergency orders have shortened windows and broadened enforcement discretion. This has made litigation feel like a race against the clock, especially for clinics juggling dozens of clients across multiple courts.
“Our work has been defined by uncertainty and fear,” an immigration attorney from Massachusetts who requested anonymity due to sensitive client information said. “It’s very difficult for folks to wrap their heads around what’s happening when everything is moving so quickly, and it kind of seems like there’s a new policy to grapple with every week, if not every day.”
The American Immigration Council explains how state and city sanctuary policies are rooted in “the idea that the federal government cannot force jurisdictions to take part in immigration enforcement.” On the ground in Los Angeles and Boston, legal battles are increasingly over how much power sanctuary policies hold. The United States Department of Justice sued both cities in June and September 2025, arguing that local limits on cooperation with civil immigration enforcement obstruct federal power.
California went through this same legal battle in 2018.
“The Trump administration has sued California already for its sanctuary policies in the first Trump administration,” Professor Jean Reisz, the Co-Director of the University of Southern California Immigration Clinic and Clinical Associate Professor of Law, said. Eventually, these policies were “held by the court of appeals to not be in violation of federal law,” she continued.
While legally these cases have shown that Washington D.C. can’t force local officers into federal programs, they also reflect how local governments cannot obstruct ICE.
“Sanctuary is a bit of a misnomer, because you can’t really protect somebody in your community who you know is subject to arrest by ICE,” Reisz explained. “ICE has the ability to go into places and arrest people and you can’t obstruct it, but you don’t have to help, and you can make it difficult.”
These policies have directly impacted Massachusetts. “ICE raids have definitely picked up in Boston a lot,” the student at the HLS Clinic said.
“Massachusetts is one of the places that’s been most heavily targeted for enforcement, and that’s been happening since at least May of this year,” the immigration attorney added.
The effects of these operations are reflected in an increase in arrests throughout the country. As of September 2025, over 60,000 people were in ICE custody, with roughly 70% having no criminal convictions. ICE’s recent annual report put the average stay at 46.9 days. Yet clinics routinely report clients held for months, some for even more than a year. These timelines impact everything from keeping separated parents from their children to halting a detained immigrant’s necessary medical care while their bond request sits unheard.
“In the beginning, when the raids started happening in Los Angeles, I think that a lot of the detention facilities weren’t prepared for the influx of people, and there were issues with getting medication, food, water,” Reisz said.
Conditions in custody are not uniform, and that variability has become a central point of contention. Watchdog reports, lawsuits, and medical workers have described serious gaps in some facilities, such as delays in medication, shortages of clean water, sleep deprivation, and limited access to counsel.
“[Detention facilities] aren’t prisons that have programming and other kinds of opportunities for inmates—which I know that sounds crazy. It’s like the prisons might have better conditions than the detention facilities,” Reisz said.
The picture that emerges is uneven and hard to verify, especially as people are moved among facilities or out of state with little notice to families.
“Something that’s become more and more common in recent months is that when someone gets detained, often their family doesn’t have any information about where they are or if they’re okay for days, because the ICE online locator doesn’t get updated and the person isn’t given a phone call at the ICE field office,” the immigration lawyer from Massachusetts explained.
“You’ll hear about people going out to work in the morning and just not coming home at the end of the day. Maybe their family finds someone who saw or heard what happened, or maybe they find the person’s car on the side of the road, but apart from that, they have no information,” the lawyer continued.
“It’s like their loved one has just disappeared. Then, after a few days, the person pops up in the system, and they’re in a detention center halfway across the country. Can you imagine that happening to your dad or your brother, or your partner? You can’t put into words the devastation families are facing every day in Massachusetts.”
Meanwhile, the geography of custody has stretched internationally. On Oct. 2, ICE transferred the last migrants out of a detention center in the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The administration initially intended to hold tens of thousands of detainees at the site, drawing scrutiny from rights groups that reported abusive conditions during short-term holds before deportation. It totaled 700 migrants before they were relocated to other sites.
Venezuelan men described being sexually assaulted and forced into sexual acts after the administration sent them to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, telling NBC News they experienced physical and psychological torture. Clinic lawyers now prepare clients for a wider range of possibilities and brace families for the unexpected.
“They’re often classified foreign relations information that isn’t publicly available. So I can’t say much about whether or not I would even call CECOT an international detention facility,” Reisz said.
New policies are also changing how families engage with healthcare. In a nationally representative Urban Institute survey, 38% of mixed-status families reported taking “protective steps” like seeking legal advice or making a detention plan because of anticipated enforcement.
Doctors are finding that people who have been assaulted, or who have serious conditions like diabetes or a high-risk pregnancy, are skipping or delaying care out of fear of ICE. In the KFF/LA Times “Survey of Immigrants,” 22% of immigrant adults reported skipping or postponing care in the prior year. A parent who hears of a potential ICE raid must weigh symptoms against the possibility of being detained for weeks if something goes wrong.
For now, clinics in Los Angeles, Boston, and beyond will keep doing what they have always done under pressure. Policy debates will continue in Washington and in federal courts from California to Massachusetts. But the stakes are in the lives these lawmakers touch.
“It’s really important not to look away [from] what is happening. This is something that is happening every single day,” the immigration attorney said.
Courtney Hines ’28 (courtneyhines@college.harvard.edu) recommends contacting Luce Defense Hotline if you’d like to report ICE in your area and Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network for legal and moral support with immigration.