This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Last week, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the County of Washtenaw, Michigan, and several of its local officials, accusing them of illegally interfering with federal immigration law. In a press release, DOJ touted the lawsuit as just the latest in “a series of 14 other suits” targeting “illegal sanctuary policies across the country.”
“Sanctuary policies” is not a legal term, and there’s no universal definition of what it actually means. Even within the Trump administration, what constitutes a “sanctuary city”—a conservative buzzword that generally refers to state and local laws that limit whether and how the jurisdiction can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement—has been subject to some dispute. In May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security posted a list publicly identifying hundreds of municipalities as “sanctuary jurisdictions,” and pulled the list down a few days later, following backlash from Trump-supporting sheriffs across the country who were confused and offended by the inclusion of their jurisdictions.
The Trump administration went back to the drawing board. And in August, the DOJ published a new list identifying 12 states, the District of Columbia, and several cities and counties as sanctuary jurisdictions. Two of those jurisdictions later agreed to collaborate on Trump’s immigration agenda, and DOJ subsequently removed them from the list.
However, avoiding the sanctuary list doesn’t guarantee that jurisdictions get to avoid the DOJ’s sanctuary lawsuits. Washtenaw, the sixth-largest county in Michigan and home of the state’s flagship university, doesn’t appear on the list. The DOJ is suing it anyway.
