Yesterday (April 25), U.S. District Judge William Orrick III issued a nationwide preliminary injunction to block a portion of President Trump’s January 25, 2017 executive order on interior immigration enforcement. Santa Clara and San Francisco counties filed a lawsuit in March challenging the constitutionality of the executive order which includes a section that empowers the federal government to withhold funds from jurisdictions that refuse to comply fully with immigration enforcement.

President Trump’s executive order affected many self-described sanctuary cities around the nation that are refusing to provide the federal government with immigration information about people apprehended by local law enforcement. Others are not complying with requests by federal immigration authorities to hold certain immigrants for additional time in local jails. Despite the increase in sanctuary cities around the nation, the punitive nature of Trump’s executive order has also served as a disincentive for cities that are concerned about losing access to federal funding if they failed to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

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Jayashri Srikantiah, director of Stanford Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, agrees. “In Santa Clara County, like many other counties across the country, the lives of immigrants and citizens are intertwined. This means that any policy that affects immigrants affects us all. When the federal government tries to force local authorities to act like immigration agents, it harms community trust and safety, and results in racial profiling.”