Shasta Briefly Included in Federal List of Alleged “Sanctuary” Counties

Shasta County has designated itself a non-sanctuary county for undocumented immigrants twice, narrowly in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term, and then again under Biden in 2024. 

Despite that, last week Shasta somehow ended up on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of delinquent counties and cities across the nation that were allegedly out of compliance with federal immigration policy.

It’s not clear how jurisdictions were placed on the list. Asked why Shasta might have appeared, County Supervisor Kevin Crye responded to a Shasta Scout reporter by text late last week, writing simply: “because they are wrong.”

Shasta Supervisor Allen Long and Shasta County CEO David Rickert did not respond to requests for comment.

Forty-eight of California’s 58 counties appeared on the now-defunct list. Only Alpine, Fresno, Inyo, Kerns, Kings, Marin, Mariposa, Napa, Orange, and Placer were not included. The DHS list’s stated purpose was “to identify sanctuary jurisdictions, which are determined by factors like compliance with federal law enforcement, information restrictions, and legal protections for illegal aliens,” but did not explain further as to why some jurisdictions were included and not others.   

After an executive order by President Donald Trump on April 28, the DHS list was released briefly late last week. It was visible only until June 1 when it was removed amid immense backlash from local law enforcement agencies and officials. 

Shasta County’s local law enforcement agencies do maintain policies that comply with California state law, which prohibits police officers and sheriffs from coordinating directly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) except under very specific circumstances.  

Soon after the list went up, Kieran Donahue, the president of the National Sheriff’s Association, criticized it as “created without any input, criteria of compliance, or a mechanism for how to object to the designation.”

The list also caused new fissures between local California entities and the federal government. Similarly to Shasta, the Southern California city of Huntington Beach has declared itself a non-sanctuary city but appeared on the list anyway. In response to the DHS announcement, Huntington Beach’s mayor Pat Burns told the New York Times that the list was “negligent.”

“Note that the list can be reviewed and changed at any time and will be updated regularly,” the DHS’ webpage read in the few days the list was online. “No one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information,” the department also cautioned readers. 

Federal executive orders released by Trump in recent months have included formatting oddities, grammatical errors, and other more significant mistakes prompting some to accuse the administration of using ChatGPT to draft official language. Among other significant errors, an uninhabited island was included on Trump’s tariff list, prompting viral memes of penguins pushing back against the tariff order.

California law that forbids local law enforcement agencies from assisting ICE (expect in specific circumstances) has not prevented the federal agency from conducting raids up and down California, including a recent incident at a crowded restaurant in San Diego in which masked agents threw flash bangs grenades as some diners yelled and surrounded the operatives.

As has been increasingly observed, ICE agents have evolved in their operations, arresting people at naturalization hearings, impersonating utility workers, targeting young people who in previous administrations would likely not have been vulnerable to deportation, and shielding themselves from the kinds of transparency practices that other law enforcement agencies abide by.    

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