Drum roll please!! After many years of dreaming about this project and months of collaboration, I am thrilled to announce that Anastasia Tucker and I are launching our story map of U.S. sanctuary policies and accompanying open-access policy archive!! Our story map spatially and temporally depicts immigration sanctuary policies that were passed at the city, town or county level in the U.S. from 2001 to 2014. We demonstrate that even though these policies address local immigration concerns and enforcement practices and fit our criteria for what constitutes an immigration sanctuary policy, they are not all the same.
Furthermore, we highlight the range of meanings and applications of immigration sanctuary policies through maps, data visualizations, and case studies to illustrate that sanctuary is a process, one that reflects civic values and understandings of justice. This is important to recognize given the politics surrounding sanctuary.
I am so delighted to share my sanctuary research with a wider audience through these digital formats. You can find a desktop/laptop version of our story map here and a mobile-friendly version here. Our archive of 234 policies is available through this link. As far as we know, this is the first archive of immigration sanctuary policies that includes metadata on the policies. This is also the first story map that illustrates the various meanings and practices of U.S. immigration sanctuary policies.
We invite you to explore our policy archive and story map. There is a lot of information included in both! You can also read more about other publications from my sanctuary research over here on the ‘My Projects’ page of my website.