In February 1854, Anthony Burns, a young man born into slavery in Virginia, secretly boarded a ship bound for Boston to escape. Months later, his arrest by federal officials sparked outrage. After a violent attack failed to rescue him from the courthouse, a judge ordered Burns returned to slavery. Federal soldiers escorted him through the streets as a crowd of 50,000 people protested.
Before the Civil War, Northern cities like Boston impeded the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Residents organized through local uprisings, bail funds, and the Underground Railroad to free people arrested for escaping enslavement. When the federal government responded with the much stricter Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — complete with criminal liability for anyone who obstructed slave catchers — Black and white Bostonians formed a committee to thwart its enforcement. Other cities codified their resistance in Personal Liberty Acts, like Chicago’s 1850 resolution prohibiting local cooperation with the federal law: “[W]e do not … consider it a part of our duty, or the duty of the City Officers of the City of Chicago, to aid or assist in the arrest of fugitives from oppression.”
Over 175 years later, cities’ historic role as hubs of resistance takes on renewed resonance in today’s era of rising authoritarianism in the United States. Take how cities are responding to attacks on immigrant neighbors. Local opposition to federal immigration policies is multi-faceted, from denying resources and blocking illegal overreach to channeling the moral authority of their residents. During the federal occupation of Minneapolis earlier this year, for example, Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter staged a press conference at a church with the state governor and faith leaders, and over 100 clergy members were later arrested while protesting ICE.
Even though cities are notably absent from the federal Constitution, state constitutions and laws give cities substantial authority to run their own affairs. They can use local policy and spending power to diverge from federal priorities, withhold local cooperation from the federal government, and increase rights beyond federal guarantees. As constitutional scholar Heather Gerken has termed it, they can “dissent by deciding.” Localities can also litigate to challenge federal policies directly and restrain federal control over city power. And they can marshal collective political leadership to rally public opinion against federal actions. Together, these tactics can expose federal vulnerabilities, slow or halt federal execution, and ultimately help expand the definition of who can access full rights and freedoms. Of course, many of these same tactics have already been deployed by cities against these same rights, such as “sanctuary cities for the unborn” and other anti-abortion tactics Professor Kaitlin Ainsworth Caruso has examined at length.
Immigration
No issue better displays the range of tools available to cities than modern immigration policy. Hundreds of localities have passed what are commonly known as “sanctuary” policies, which restrict how and when they collect and share data, lend local police officers’ time and resources, or honor requests from the federal government to hold people in local jails. While the first wave of sanctuary cities began in the 1970s and ’80s, these policies have taken on new significance during the second Trump administration. Echoing the Personal Liberty Acts of the pre-Civil War period, they force the federal government to bear the significant cost of its own policies — especially in time and personnel — by holding back local support.
Despite intense federal pressure, including efforts to withhold federal funding from local governments, local sanctuary policies have withstood legal scrutiny. In California, San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties defeated the first Trump administration’s attempts to “defund” sanctuary cities in 2017. The cities challenged the federal effort as a violation of the 10th Amendment, which prevents the federal government from commandeering local resources. The second Trump administration has ratcheted up that pressure with direct lawsuits against numerous cities, yet every court to consider the issue — including in a case on behalf of 50 cities and counties — has again sided with local jurisdictions’ power to control their resources free from federal coercion.
Cities have also led the way in resisting the second Trump administration’s violent immigration raids. Boston, Chicago, and Seattle issued executive orders in early 2026 to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using city-owned property to stage enforcement activities, and to collect evidence to prosecute federal officials who abuse their power.
When the administration threatened National Guard and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployments to Chicago in the fall of 2025, Mayor Brandon Johnson rallied local officials and community members to push back. City leaders held know-your-rights trainings with faith, business, and advocacy groups, and prepared city agencies for a variety of litigation options, including suing over violations of federal laws that restrict the federal government’s power to deploy the military for domestic purposes. The city’s initial response, with support from the state, delayed federal deployment by several weeks and gave local leaders more time to prepare. Ultimately, the city and state’s joint litigation challenging the legality of federal military deployment to the region was successful in the Supreme Court, and the administration abandoned the deployment.
When over 3,000 ICE agents descended on Minneapolis, federal officials lamented the “difficult operating environment” for federal immigration agents because of the strength of local organizing and the absence of city support. After the January 2026 federal killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, outcry from elected officials and community leaders across the country mobilized a bipartisan group of senators to deny increased funding to DHS (the agency that houses ICE). That, and the resulting shift in public opinion, caused the administration to pull agents from Minneapolis just one month later.
In a number of other contexts, cities and counties have directly challenged the legality of federal laws and policies in court, calling attention to the harms they would inflict on local governments and their communities. Cook County, Illinois, for example, joined a local immigrant rights group to challenge the first Trump administration’s public charge rule, which would have banned immigrants from accessing many public benefits. Other cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore, did the same, and all secured court orders preventing the rule from taking effect.
Cities have not yet succeeded in changing federal immigration policies writ large. Yet through collective resistance, they have both made it harder for the federal government to execute the full horrors of its discriminatory deportation agenda and begun to build a public case for more sweeping change in federal law and practice.
Marriage Equality
Cities have long been strongholds of activism for LGBTQ+ rights, from local anti-discrimination ordinances to laws protecting transgender access to bathrooms and other public spaces. But no LGBTQ+ rights issue has been shaped by cities more than the fight for marriage equality. Marriage equality burst onto the national political stage in the 1990s, when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that banning same-sex marriage was discriminatory. The backlash, locally and nationally, was swift, including the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 alongside multiple state-level bans.
Then in late 2003, Massachusetts became the first state permanently to legalize marriage equality. Inspired by that ruling — and dismayed by President George W. Bush’s call for a national ban on same-sex marriage — then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom launched a daring act of government-sanctioned civil disobedience in February 2004. Mayor Newsom instructed his city clerk to begin issuing marriage licenses, concluding that refusing to do so violated California’s constitution. A month-long “Winter of Love” began, when more than 4,000 same-sex couples tied the knot while national news covered the daily court battle to stop them. Cities across the country joined in, from New Paltz, New York and Multnomah County, Oregon, to Asbury Park, New Jersey and Sandoval County, New Mexico.
When the California Supreme Court later nullified the marriage licenses, it invited San Francisco to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s marriage ban directly. After four years of litigation led by the city in coalition with LGBTQ+ rights groups, the state’s Supreme Court legalized marriage equality in 2008.
Later that fall, California voters passed Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Two same-sex couples filed a lawsuit against it in federal court, and the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office joined the case on the side of the couples. After trial, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Prop 8 was unconstitutional and that forbidding same-sex couples from marrying violated their civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed an appeal of his ruling on standing grounds — a decision that reinstated marriage equality in California and paved the way for nationwide change just a couple of years later.
The fight for marriage equality demonstrates how local jurisdictions can exert significant power. Mayor Newsom’s initial publicity stunt, while unsuccessful in securing immediate rights, had a lasting impact on public opinion. In full view on their television screens, people saw retired women who had been together for decades bring their grandkids to watch them get married; kids with balloons excited to see their parents officially recognized; couples openly weeping at the public recognition of their love. Over the course of a decade, the city wielded all its tools to rally public opinion and courts to overturn a federal regime that oppressed its people.
Abortion
For decades, abortion has been a contentious legal, political, and policy issue. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, states have driven that national conversation and tested the bounds of the federal right to abortion. The role of local governments has been less well-understood and appreciated when it comes to abortion rights and access to reproductive health care. But especially since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, cities have begun to re-deploy a range of tools from the Fugitive Slave Law era.
Oakland, California, declared itself a sanctuary city in 2022 for women seeking abortions, directly borrowing from the immigration and slavery concepts. Dozens of cities have developed or funded resources for people seeking to travel to abortion care across county and state lines.
Throughout the country, nearly 90 local prosecutors publicly committed not to prosecute abortion cases, blunting the impact of state criminal bans in jurisdictions representing more than 28 million Americans. And several cities have passed versions of the Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone (Grace) Act, a law instructing local police departments to de-prioritize investigating and prosecuting reproductive healthcare cases.
When local prosecutors do try to build a case, local officials have refused to turn over data or provide assistance. In early 2025, then-Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck blocked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to file a judgment against a New York doctor who had declined to appear in a Texas lawsuit against her. Bruck’s decision ensured that New York State’s shield law — which aims to prevent hostile states from prosecuting doctors who send medication abortion into their jurisdictions — effectively protected the doctors and patients who depend on them.
Like immigration and the pre-Civil War Personal Liberty Acts, cities are still in a defensive posture on abortion, using their tactics to slow and weaken the tools of criminalization and call attention to the moral outrage of denying care. But for a woman in an apartment in Austin, Texas, who received mifepristone in the mail from a New York doctor, or for a doctor who provided care without fear of prosecution in Tucson, Arizona, local resistance and leadership has offered a safe haven.
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Despite being at the bottom of the national pecking order, cities punch well above their weight and continue to deploy tactics developed in the 1850s to challenge the federal government today. They guard their power, limiting the federal government’s attempts to commandeer their policies and resources. They flex their influence in courts of law and public opinion to expose federal overreach and mobilize communities to fight back. And they band together to secure strength in numbers, reducing the ability of authoritarian regimes to isolate, divide, and conquer. The 21st century federal government has much more power to exact revenge against dissenters. That makes solidarity more important than ever.
Collective action within and across communities is a powerful antidote. Boston’s reaction to Anthony Burns’s arrest foretold the response of Minneapolis residents and city leaders in January 2026, when they saw their neighbors terrorized and killed by ICE agents; of San Franciscans in 2004 who saw their neighbors feel the fleeting joy of equality only to have it ripped away; and of city residents across the country in 2022 who saw their neighbors denied care while they miscarried in a hospital parking lot. As Professor Jelani Cobb has said, “In a democracy, the fundamental civic unit is neighbor.” Cities are the unit of government that houses, and speaks up for, neighbors.
