This article focuses on the immigration-related demands currently being placed on local police in the United States and the emergence of what we call a “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” (MJP) of immigration enforcement. We report results from nationwide surveys of city police chiefs and county sheriffs and intensive fieldwork in three jurisdictions. The enforcement landscape we describe is complicated by the varying and overlapping responsibilities of sheriffs and city police, and by the tendency for sheriffs to maintain closer relationships with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the MJP—for immigrants, for their communities, and for the evolving relationship between levels of government in the federal system.

The research project entitled “Local Policing in the Context of Immigration” (LPCI) was active from 2007 through 2016. The purposes of the study were to explore and describe the types of local policies and policing practices that local jurisdictions and police agencies throughout the United States were undertaking with regard to police encounters with immigrants (specifically, unauthorized or undocumented immigrants), and to investigate the characteristics of local communities that were associated with these various approaches to immigration policing as well as the potential consequences of local immigration policing for immigrants, communities, and the nation.

Political liberals are significantly more supportive than conservatives of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, transit-oriented development, and other aspects of the “compact city,” not just in their views about government policy toward metropolitan development but also in their consumption preferences regarding neighborhoods. I argue that social psychologists’ theory of moral intuitionism helps account for these differences. In this view, liberals and conservatives emphasize different sets of affective, emotion-laden moral impulses—such as those involving fairness, purity, or ingroup loyalty—predisposing them toward particular reactions to compact development. Political ideologies also are associated with different personality traits that are relevant to opinions on the built environment. To explore the intuitionist hypothesis, I review qualitative accounts that suggest an association between certain moral worldviews and attitudes toward development patterns. I then conduct multivariate analysis of a public opinion survey that contained questions relevant to moral foundations and to views on compact development.