Right to the City, Right to Sanctuary: Sanctuary Practices, Urban Inequality, and Immigrant Political Subjectivities in New York

The evidence presented here is—to the contrary of arguments in recent literature on sanctuary cites—suggestive of an emancipatory potential of sanctuary practices in the urban environment, in spite of the fact that in many aspects of their lives the undocumented must remain in the shadows of the city. Sanctuary cities, it could be cautiously argued, thus have a potential to more robustly realize appropriations of urban space of a Lefebvrian “right to the city” and are suggestive of an alternativelegality grounded in ‘rightful presence.’ The New Sanctuary Coalition in New York actively dismantles the binary relations between ‘host’ and ‘guest,’ and disrupts the state monopoly on the legal and political through its accompaniment program and through a variety of sanctuary acts and practices.