SOUTH HADLEY — When Mount Holyoke College researchers Serin Houston and Anatasica Tucker talk about their recently completed database of migrant sanctuary policies enacted across the country, they can’t help but laugh at the sheer amount of work they put into the report.

“Every single part is so thoughtfully curated and decided. There’s nothing that is happenstance,” said Houston, associate professor of geography and international relations. “We laugh. It’s a laugh of knowing.”

Over the last decade, the researchers have complied 234 sanctuary policies adopted at the city and county levels in communities throughout the United States between 2001 and 2014. The time period coincides with the Sept. 11 attacks and ends with the expiration of the Secure Communities Program, an initiative that allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and remove migrants with criminal records.

The policies included in the database are sorted into four categories: executive orders, ordinances, policing policies and resolutions.

A second part of the project involved writing a story map to reflect all the data for a general audience. This includes interactive maps, data visualizations and case studies about sanctuary policies, what they entail and how they were used in different cities, towns and counties.

“As far as we know, this is the first archive of immigration sanctuary policies that includes metadata on the policies,” Houston said. “It is also the first story map that shows the multiple meanings and practices of U.S. immigration sanctuary policies.”

Tucker, an instructional technologist at Mount Holyoke, said she was humbled by how her understanding of sanctuary didn’t match with the archive.

“I really had this sense that sanctuary was, frankly, more present and available,” she said.

The two researchers hope that their work will evoke a sense of curiosity and help students, other researchers, immigrants and citizens expand their definition of sanctuary.

“Sometimes sanctuary gets very tightly linked with just migration, but often it’s policies about expressing a place’s of sense of justice and belonging,” Houston said. “We wanted to make sure that we were incorporating that.”

A majority of the sanctuary policies included in the database were adopted by communities in the West. Cities were three times more like to have a sanctuary policy than counties.

The most common of the four sanctuary types are resolutions at 51.7%, which Tucker said have the least amount of municipal power.

“I think how (policies) were just distributed was really notable to me,” she added. “There were fewer policies with real heft than I had expected or anticipated. A lot of them were very well-meaning, and I think important for the community to come together around ... But the clear legal framework for enacting sanctuary was not the largest percentage in our archives, by far.”

None of this was apparent to Houston when she began creating the database in 2013, inspired by a student’s request to be a research assistant at the same time Houston was brainstorming a post-dissertation project. Sanctuary, she said, was the perfect middle ground between her two previous research topics: immigration and the role of social values in urban government policy.

“At the time I very, perhaps you might even say cavalierly, said ‘well, there’s no database about all the sanctuary policies in the U.S. Let’s make that database,’” Houston said. “I had no appreciation at the time of how practically impossible that would be, because there’s not a shared understanding of what constitutes a sanctuary policy.”

By the time Tucker came on board at the beginning of 2023, Houston and her team of students had spent the better part of a decade gathering, classifying and analyzing sanctuary polices across the United States. With no consensus on the definition of sanctuary, Houston’s student team, consisting of Alena Ayvazian, Gigi Downey, Amelia Green, Olivia Lawrence-Weilmann, Kiana London, Colleen Molnar, Charlotte Morse, Sandy North, and Quinn Wallace, had to decide what sanctuary meant to them, then parse through hundreds of policies to find the ones that met their definition.

Tucker, Houston said, was instrumental in incorporating the metadata element in the database. Her background in library science and technology was the missing expertise Houston needed to make her vision a reality, allowing the two researchers to turn a platform formally used to exclusively share student work into a long-term hosting service for their database.

“We kind of honestly have two separate projects that are knitted together,” said Tucker, referring to the database and story map. “I think our challenge in the story map was to make it approachable and to meet people who are visiting the story map where they are, whether that be a researcher who wants to get into nitty-gritty details, or a student wanting to learn more about what a specific policy means or someone who might be searching for a place to live.”

The two researchers also address the potential misuse of the database’s information to target any group or community. If Houston or Tucker notice that their work is being used for the wrong reason, they said, they will take the database down. In fact, Houston said her team had developed a different version of the story map in 2016, but following Donald Trump’s winning the presidency, Houston said, the research group thought it was irresponsible to publish until the former president left the Oval Office.

“Ultimately, we just decided that where we’re at in this country, we need to have evidence-based information,” Houston said. “There was so much misinformation about sanctuary in circulation and it was having negative consequences, that actually, hopefully, we could begin to respond with something that was rooted in the policies themselves.”

Tucker added, “I am really proud of the work we did. I feel it has a lot of utility, but it also requires a tremendous amount of investment to work well. I think we have something that is stable and secure, and it really meets the needs of these documents.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.