When Boulder, Colorados city council voted unanimously last week to declare Boulder a sanctuary city, it wasnt exactly changing policy it was making a point to President-elect Donald Trump . Not only would the city keep refusing to help identify undocumented immigrants to immigration authorities, but it would adopt the increasingly controversial name, too .

Even more audaciously, local leaders shrugged off Trumps threats to withhold federal funds from cities that fail to cooperate with his proposed immigration crackdown. The city receives about $8 million in federal funding annually, according to the Daily Camera about 2 percent of its budget.

Theres value in codifying our practices, so that theyre very clear to us and theyre very clear for everyone, Boulder Mayor Suzanne Jones, a Democrat, told The Huffington Post. The important part of all this is to signal to members of our community that were all in this together. And to signal to the Trump administration that were going to stand up for the civil rights of everyone in our community, and we hope he does as well.

But while Boulder became the latest major city to concretize its sanctuary policy in response to Trump, the Boulder County Sheriffs Office first adopted the stance in 2014 . That year, a federal court ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests for local police to hold unauthorized immigrants on the agencys behalf werent mandatory , despite the Barack Obama administrations insistence to the contrary. Thus, the sanctuary city movement gained steam largely as a rebellion against what many liberal jurisdictions viewed as intrusive immigration enforcement efforts under Obama.