Save SBA from Sanctuary Cities Act of 2025

What is this bill?

• HR 2931, sponsored by Brad Finstad (R-MN-1)

Continuing this week’s theme of small business themed bills, HR 2931 would allow the Administrator of the Small Business Administration (former Senator Kelly Loeffler) to close & move any SBA district office located in a sanctuary city, county, or state.

I was surprised to find that there’s not really a set legal definition of the phrase sanctuary city. As of now it serves as a catch all for a jurisdiction that limits “…the extent to which a local/state government will share information with federal immigration law officers.” What those limits are varies from place to place, but the one thing they all have in common is that they do not block ICE from entering city limits and detaining people. Journalist Chad Loder noted on Bluesky that sanctuary statutes are “…largely meaningles. When ICE wants local police cooperation, they just file a mutual aid request and check the "dangerous fugitive" checkbox rather than the "immigration detainer" checkbox.”

Hatred towards the term has been growing for decades & punishing cities who defy the Trump administration’s desire to break deportation records is clearly the top priority of this act.

That said, this bill has run into an embarrassing hurdle of someone else’s making. Consideration of the bill was announced around the same time that the Department of Homeland Security released their comprehensive list of sanctuary cities, counties, and states. This is where I would normally link the list, but its been 404’d in the past few days. This is because the initial list was chock full of jurisdictions that didn’t have sanctuary statutes. Some claim this is because the list was compiled using AI, but no matter the reason, it infuriated hundreds of immigration-hating county sheriffs in charge of the jurisdictions in the faulty list.

For now, the bill doesn’t have an official set of offending locales, so the only option is to use the initial list. It’s a bit awkward to just post the spreadsheet I made, so here’s a map instead.

Now, this isn’t a perfect map. Missing are cities that don’t take up the whole county, like Anchorage, Honolulu, Boise, or Milwaukee. But what would be more accurate is a map that shows which counties would temporarily lose their assigned SBA District office if Loeffler chose to move every office that qualified.

Based on the now retracted list, 47 out of the 94 district offices would be at risk of moving. 27 states would have no offices available to them until an office move was completed. Even then, some places deemed sanctuary states would have to just wait and see if they were assigned to a neighboring state.

But, like I said, the law leaves the closing & moving of a qualifying office up to Kelly Loeffler’s discretion. And if a city or state became more amiable to ICE, then I guess they wouldn’t have to worry about losing physical access to dozens of loan and development programs. All you have to do is sacrifice your city or county’s immigrants.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if using sanctuary cities as an excuse to close the offices of a government agency works, then that opens up using the same reasoning to close other department offices, such as, say, the Social Security Administration.

Which Dems voted for it?

• House (5 Dems)

  • Henry Cuellar (TX-28

  • Don Davis (NC-1)

  • Laura Gillen (NY-4)

  • Jared Golden (ME-2)

  • Marie Glusenkamp Perez (WA-3)

Did it pass?

• Passed the House on 6/5/25 by a vote of 211-199