Demonstrators protest ICE’s presence at San Francisco International Airport on May 1, 2026, in San Francisco.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
A plan floated by the Trump administration to cut off international air traffic to and from sanctuary cities as thousands of travelers head to California for the World Cup might violate the travelers’ constitutional rights, several legal experts told the Chronicle.
President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News on Tuesday that he was “drawing up plans” to halt international air travel at sanctuary cities by removing U.S. Customs and Immigration officers from their airports.
“We shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities,” Mullin said.
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But doing so would be “punishment for something that a court has held to be proper and constitutional. I cannot fathom that this would be permissible,” Bill Hing, a longtime professor of immigration law at the University of San Francisco, said Wednesday.
He cited rulings by a federal judge in San Francisco upholding sanctuary policies in California and its cities and counties, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2020 rejecting the Trump administration’s appeal of one of the rulings.
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And even if those decisions didn’t directly address international air travel, “basic issues of fairness and due process” should prevalent the federal government from punishing travelers to sanctuary cities, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University and coauthor of a widely used, 22-volume reference work, “Immigration Law and Procedure.”
Sanctuary laws bar officers from notifying federal agents about undocumented immigrants in state and local custody and from holding them beyond their scheduled release date so they can be transferred to immigration detention or deported. California’s sanctuary law does not apply to inmates convicted of a long list of serious crimes. Some California cities have their own sanctuary laws that limit cooperation even further.
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International flights to California are expected to increase next month when the World Cup, held every four years, opens in North and South American locations, including matches in Los Angeles on June 12 and Santa Clara on June 13.
The Trump administration’s previous challenges to sanctuary laws have been rejected by U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco in multiple rulings.
In his most recent ruling in April 2025, barring the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars in federal funding from 16 sanctuary cities and counties, Orrick cited a federal appeals court’s conclusion in a previous case that there was “no congressional authorization for broad withholding of funds from sanctuary jurisdictions.”
Although those rulings did not address a ban on air travel to and from sanctuary cities, Hing said their reasoning would apply equally to restrictions on air traffic.
“Sanctuary ordinances are constitutional,” Hing told the Chronicle. “Punishing a sanctuary jurisdiction for exercising its constitutional rights would be unlawful. Halting international air travel, like threats of canceling funding, is also totally unrelated to sanctuary policies.”
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Kevin Johnson, an immigration law professor and former law school dean at UC Davis, said he didn’t think Mullin was seriously proposing a ban on international air travel to and from cities like San Francisco, but “just wanted to make a threat.”
Asked about the court rulings upholding sanctuary policies, the Trump administration cited comments by Mullin on Tuesday criticizing those policies.
“In these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either, because they don’t want us to enforce immigration but they want us to process immigration at their facilities?” he said. “Nothing about that makes sense to me.”