Which states have the lowest cooperation with ICE enforcement in 2025?
Executive summary
The states that appeared to show the lowest cooperation with ICE enforcement in 2025 were those that have enacted broad “sanctuary” limits or persistent local policies restricting jail access and detainer compliance—most prominently California, New York, Illinois and Colorado, along with the District of Columbia—according to policy maps and arrest-rate reporting [1] [2] [3] [4]. Reporting also makes clear that there is no single federal ranking in the public record provided here, and available sources use different methods (legal review, FOIA data, arrest tallies), so any list is best read as a set of strong indicators rather than an absolute order [3] [1].
1. Why these states show up as the least cooperative: law, policy and practice
California, New York, Illinois and Colorado are repeatedly identified in advocacy and research maps as having state laws or statewide guidance that limit routine cooperation with ICE—banning honor-based detainer compliance without a warrant, restricting ICE access to jails and other public institutions, and issuing law-enforcement guidance against assisting federal immigration operations—which produces lower local entanglement with ICE [2] [3] [1].
2. Arrest-rate evidence: low ICE arrest rates where local cooperation is constrained
Empirical arrest data reinforce the policy signal: Northern California recorded some of the nation’s lowest ICE-arrest rates in 2025, a pattern that analysts attribute to state sanctuary law, community resistance and local policies that limit jail transfers to ICE [4]. More broadly, researchers behind the Deportation Data Project and prison-policy briefings show that states with stronger cooperation produced far higher per‑capita ICE arrest rates, underscoring the inverse relationship between sanctuary-style limits and ICE activity [5] [6].
3. The maps and methodology caveat: different sources, different definitions
Key public resources—the Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s entanglement map, Migration Policy Institute’s analysis and state legislative trackers—use distinct criteria (laws, jail access rules, formal agreements like 287(g), and FOIA disclosures) to mark jurisdictions as limiting cooperation, so “lowest cooperation” is a composite judgment rather than a single quantitative metric available in the supplied reporting [3] [1]. This means a state can be legally protective yet still see local exceptions or data anomalies.
4. Countertrend: federal pressure, 287(g) expansion and states that buck sanctuary policies
The Trump administration’s aggressive push in 2025 expanded 287(g) deputizations and other ICE partnerships—raising the number of local participants dramatically—and paired with state-led operations (Florida and Texas were cited for heavy collaboration) to produce the concentration of arrests in cooperating jurisdictions and to blunt the reach of sanctuary protections in practice [7] [8] [1] [6]. Those countervailing trends explain why sanctuary states remained resistors rather than total blockers of federal enforcement.
5. Politics, litigation and the limits of the public record
Efforts to curtail ICE have been both legislative and litigative—state attorneys general producing guidance and some legislatures expanding protections while the federal government sues or threatens funding penalties—so the list of “least cooperative” states is politically contested and shifting; reporting documents the tug-of-war but does not provide a single authoritative 2025 ranking in the provided sources [9] [10] [1]. Researchers relying on arrest tallies, policy maps and FOIA-derived indicators converge on core states (California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, D.C.) as the strongest limiters, but full, comparable state-by-state rankings are not present in the supplied reporting [3] [4].
6. Bottom line and journalistic verdict
Based on policy-mapping (ILRC, MPI), state guidance (attorney‑general advisories), and arrest-rate reporting (Deportation Data Project / academic analyses), the clearest candidates for the lowest cooperation with ICE in 2025 are California, New York, Illinois and Colorado, with the District of Columbia also functioning as a sanctuary jurisdiction; this is corroborated by lower ICE arrest rates in parts of those states and by repeated inclusion on nonprofit and policy maps that measure noncooperation [3] [1] [2] [4]. The reporting also highlights that cooperation is dynamic: federal incentives, 287(g) proliferation, legal challenges and local exceptions can and did change how those protections played out on the ground, so any definitive state ranking would require a unified methodological dataset that the present sources do not provide [7] [8] [5].