In late May, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin renewed threats to pull federal customs officers from airports in so-called “sanctuary cities,” which could halt international travel through LAX — nearly 65,000 passengers per day. While Mayor Karen Bass dismissed the threatened action just weeks ahead of the World Cup, she said nothing about the more long-term threat. Despite repeated inquiries by Random Lengths, the city appears to have no plans to prevent or respond to the threat, despite already defending its sanctuary city ordinance in court for nearly a year.
The initial focus was on Newark — where detainees at the private Delaney Hall facility were on a hunger and labor strike, and community protests were mounting — and on the World Cup games, whose final is scheduled a stones throw from Newark’s airport. But the actual threat is far broader.
“Listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,” Mullin said in a Fox News interview, adding that the Trump administration was “drawing up plans” to do just that.
Trump’s “Justice Department” had published a target list of sanctuary jurisdictions last August, which covers major airports in New York, Newark, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Philadelphia.
Mullin’s threat drew warnings it “would cause immediate and lasting harm” from the U.S. Travel Association, while a broader coalition of travel industry organizations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned that “International aviation networks are highly interconnected, and operational changes at a small number of gateway airports will quickly ripple across the country, negatively impacting travelers, cargo shipments, supply chains, and the communities that depend on those connections.”
While many might suppose that such a clear warning from the business community would be sufficient, the enormous costs of Trump’s illegal tariffs clearly shows it’s not. What’s more, in February, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission called the Chamber of Commerce “a left-wing, open borders supporting activist group.” These are signs that the Trump administration is crossing the line other fascist regimes have crossed when they no longer feel the need to placate the traditional conservative business interests who helped them gain power. But the cost to America could be staggering.
Stopping all international flights at the 18 airports serving identified sanctuary cities would cost the economy more than $70 billion and impact 68 million international passengers per year, according to the U.S. Travel Association. The dollar figure may be low. LAX alone generates almost $40 billion, according to 2012 data on its website, adjusted for inflation. But, as with Trump’s tariffs and city-targeting ICE raids, the concern is less about permanent impacts than with strategic disruptions — shutting down international flights for a few days or weeks in order to coerce cities to stop protecting immigrant communities.
The city’s seeming lack of response to this threat is puzzling, to say the least, given that it’s vigorously fighting to defend its sanctuary city policy in court. On June 30 last year, the Trump administration sued the city, mayor and city council, contending that sanctuary laws are illegal, and expressly designed to “obstruct the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe.”
The suit, typically, was framed in terms of Trump’s personal grievance: it argued that then-candidate Donald J. Trump campaigned and won the presidential election in 2024 “on a platform of deporting the millions of illegal immigrants the previous administration permitted, through its open borders policy, to enter the country unlawfully.
“Days after President Trump won the Nov. 5, 2024 election, the Los Angeles City Council, wishing to thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations, began the process of codifying into law its sanctuary city policies.”
But there’s no evidence whatsoever that Trump is carrying out “the will of the American people regarding deportations.” His general campaign promise to deport “the worst of the worst” was sharply at odds with the reality of mass deportations, where 70% have no criminal record at all, and most of the rest are either minor, years old, or both. In Newark, it’s even more stark: 90% have no criminal record, according to a New York Times investigation. The nationwide anti-ICE push-back, and polling support dropping into the 30s are prima facie evidence that Trump is ignoring the will of the American people.
But, of course, that’s not a legal argument. In response, on Aug. 31 last year, LA filed a motion to dismiss, relying primarily on the fact that the city’s policy mirrors California state law, which the first Trump Administration unsuccessfully challenged in a case (United States v. California) that it lost in the Ninth Circuit in 2019.
After a weak opposition brief failed to even discuss that case, LA followed up on Sept. 18, stating, “The Motion established that the Ordinance at issue mirrors a California state law known as the Values Act, which was upheld as constitutional by the Ninth Circuit in an opinion rejecting many of the very same challenges raised in this case. … The Opposition utterly ignores the contrary rulings in California, pressing the same arguments that were rejected by the Ninth Circuit.”
While a ruling has not yet been made, the Trump administration seems doomed to fail, which helps explain why they would turn to extreme economic coercion to gain what they can’t win in court. It’s unfortunate, to say the least, that LA seems to have given no thought to what it will do in that case.