Sanctuary Social Work: Ethics and Practice in the Mass Deportation Era

Immigration enforcement in the USA increasingly intrudes into schools, health care facilities, and social service settings, creating ethical conflicts for social workers whose professional obligations center dignity, justice, and well-being. This article advances a conceptual framework for sanctuary social work , a practice paradigm that integrates social work ethics, human rights principles, and applied resistance to harmful state practices. Drawing on the NASW Code of Ethics, human rights scholarship, and empirical research on the impacts of immigration enforcement, the article argues that ethical neutrality is untenable when enforcement practices systematically undermine access to health care, education, family unity, and community participation. Using the Grand Challenges for Social Work as an analytic lens, the article demonstrates how aggressive enforcement exacerbates health disparities, social isolation, and racial injustice. The framework emphasizes three interconnected domains of action: adaptive service design to reduce risk and maintain access, proactive connection to legal resources and rights-based information, and interdisciplinary advocacy and legal engagement. Recent developments, including lawsuits filed by educators and advocacy by health care professionals, illustrate opportunities for cross-professional action. Sanctuary social work is presented as an ethically required orientation that repositions resistance, protection, and collective accountability as core components of professional practice in the mass deportation era.