June 02, 2025 12:08 PM UTC

UPDATE: So Much For That DHS "Sanctuary" List Republicans Beclowned

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• by: Colorado Pols

MONDAY UPDATE: Since our original post on Friday below, the story of the Department of Homeland Security’s list of so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” originally released chock full of amateur mistakes, turned farcical as numerous Republicans raced to have locations represented by themselves removed from the list like Aurora city councillor Danielle Jurinsky took credit for achieving for her town on Friday. As the Denver Post’s John Aguilar reports:

[Re. Lauren] Boebert, who represents the Eastern-Plains-based 4th Congressional District, said in an interview Friday that she had successfully worked with the White House and federal officials to get the two counties, as well as the city of Aurora, off the list.

She said she’d started calling individual counties when she saw the list’s contents and that she’d successfully removed Douglas County before the list was published. Boebert said she was still trying to get a better understanding of how the list was compiled.

“It’s possible that there was outdated information that was being used — I don’t know exactly who was involved and what information was used to determine who goes on the list. That’s something I’m working on the discovery of,” she said. [Pols emphasis]

Rep. Gabe Evans is also jumping to take credit for getting friendly jurisdictions off the list, again apparently knowing something that DHS doesn’t:

Delanie Bomar, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, said the Republican freshman is “personally invested in advocating for law enforcement in cities and counties, such as Weld County, who do their job despite being under Colorado’s sanctuary state ruling policies.”

But as it turns out, all this expenditure of personal juice on the part of local Republicans to spare themselves from the Trump administration’s wrath was unnecessary, because as The Guardian reported last night:

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed a list of “sanctuary” states, cities and counties from its website following sharp criticism from a sheriffs’ association that said a list of “noncompliant” sheriffs could severely damage the relationship between the Trump administration and law enforcement.

After all that intra-Republican consternation, the “sanctuary jurisdiction” list that grabbed the headlines on Friday and sent Reps. Boebert and Evans scrambling for favors was TACOed within 48 hours! Since nobody can explain how anybody’s town wound up on this list or how Republicans were able to get themselves off the list so easily, it’s probably best to not try to come up with a coherent explanation for what just happened.

There isn’t one.

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As we wrote about earlier today, the Trump administration yesterday evening released a list of so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions allegedly defying federal law by regulating interactions between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials, though curiously hedging that “no one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information”–which we take to mean that the list means nothing, an opinion reinforced by the documents many spelling and geography errors that raise the question of whether the list was generated by a “hallucinating” AI query.

But if the document’s own disclaimer that it shouldn’t be trusted wasn’t enough for you, as AP reports via the Aurora Sentinel, it appears that Republicans with sufficient pull inside the Trump White House are able to have their own municipalities taken off the list with a simple phone call:

Aurora was on and is now apparently off a Trump administration list of “sanctuary jurisdictions” and a local city lawmaker said on a social media post she intervened to make it happen.

Jurinsky and the city did not immediately return requests for comment…

Jurinsky has claimed in past public meetings to have ties to the Trump administration. In October, she appeared at an Trump campaign rally at the Gaylord Hotel in Aurora in support of Trump’s push against Venezuelan gang immigrants, which he falsely claimed have overrun the city and much of Colorado. Trump announced there that a nationwide mass deportation campaign would be called “Operation Aurora.”

That’s right, folks! Consistent with Donald Trump’s announcement last fall that the nationwide purge of millions of immigrants would be called “Operation Aurora” after the wildly exaggerated stories of a city “overrun” by Venezuelan gangs that circulated during the 2024 presidential campaign, the Department of Homeland Security’s original list of so-called “sanctuary” locales released yesterday included the city of Aurora, Colorado. But after far-right city councillor Danielle Jurinsky got involved in some unspecified manner, Aurora was removed from the list before it was widely publicized with this morning’s news coverage.

What raises the obvious question: what new information did Jurinsky have about Aurora to change the Trump administration’s mind? Are we really supposed to believe that Jurinsky knew something about Aurora’s interactions with federal immigration officials that federal immigration officials themelves did not?

Or is this what it looks like, political connections yielding a political favor? If so, that says more about not just Republican crony politics, but the entire federal immigration purge than we could fit into a blog post. It’s an admission that the criteria for ending up on the DHS’s “sanctuary” shit list is, as it were, politically malleable at best–and maybe completely arbitrary at worst.

All we can say is, whoever wrote the good advice not to take this list at face value was right.