This week, Minnesota’s Board of Pardons — Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — voted to wipe out the conviction of a man found guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a 10-year-old girl, days before that conviction was set to get him deported. He’d assaulted her repeatedly over two years. He tried to buy her silence with $10. Walz’s board looked at that record and decided he’d earned a clean slate more than his victim earned a country that keeps her attacker out of it.
That’s not a rogue caseworker. That’s a governor, an attorney general, and a chief justice, voting on the record. If you’re still waiting for Democrats to have a coming-to-Jesus moment on who their sanctuary politics actually protect, stop waiting. You just watched the answer.
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For a decade, the Left has told us about a supposed “war on women,” usually meaning some senator said something dumb about abortion. Fine. Let’s talk about the real one — the one their own policies are running, right now, on locker rooms, on scoreboards, and, too often, on women’s lives.
I’ve coached high school track for years, boys and girls, sprints and hurdles. I’ve watched girls put in years of 5 a.m. practices to shave tenths of a second off a 400-meter dash. Then a state athletic association lets a biological male onto the girls’ side of the bracket, and years of work evaporate in one meet. That’s not inclusion. It’s a wealth transfer — scholarships, records, podium spots — straight out of girls’ hands, dressed up as kindness by adults who won’t say the word “boy” out loud.
Bathroom “protections” got the same treatment: quietly stripped away, with actual women nowhere in the room when it happened. Raise it at a school board meeting and see how fast “bigot” gets thrown at a mother who just wants a locked door between her daughter and a grown man.
Now the part that isn’t about locker rooms. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data reported to Congress in September 2024, the agency’s non-detained docket alone carried 13,099 people with homicide convictions and 15,811 with sexual assault convictions, plus more facing pending charges. That number spans years and different custody statuses — nobody honestly turns it into a clean five-year body count. But you don’t need a perfect number when you’ve got names.
Rachel Morin was murdered on a Maryland hiking trail in 2023 by a Salvadoran national in the country illegally — he’s serving life in prison without parole now. Laken Riley was killed on the University of Georgia campus in 2024 by a Venezuelan man who’d been released back into the community after entering illegally. Kayla Hamilton, a 20-year-old with autism, was raped and strangled in her Aberdeen, Maryland, home in 2022 by a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor from El Salvador with MS-13 ties — a child federal officials placed in a foster home instead of custody. Jocelyn Nungaray, 12, was murdered in Houston in 2024 by two Venezuelan nationals who’d crossed the border illegally. And a decade before any of it made headlines, there was Kate Steinle, shot dead on a San Francisco pier by a man who’d already been deported five times, in a sanctuary city that let him walk free anyway.
None of these women voted for the policies that got them killed. None of their mothers wanted a lecture about nuance while burying a daughter.
Which brings us to Capitol Hill, where Jessica Gorman sat before the House Judiciary Committee this week and told lawmakers about her daughter Sheridan, an 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman shot dead near a Rogers Park beach in March, allegedly by a Venezuelan national who’d already cycled once through Chicago’s sanctuary-city catch-and-release system. She asked the committee, point-blank, why people who broke into the country illegally matter more to Democrats than her daughter did. Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) answer was to shout that he felt her pain, then keep defending the sanctuary policy anyway. That’s not empathy. That’s a man who wants credit for caring without paying anything for it.
FOR THE LEFT, SOME LIVES ARE APPARENTLY MORE VALUABLE THAN OTHERS
Here’s the plain version. Democrats have decided potential voters — people who might someday become sympathetic constituents, campaign volunteers, or grateful beneficiaries of amnesty — are worth more than taxpaying American women and girls who already have the right to vote and, once they’re dead, apparently no political value left at all. Sanctuary policy isn’t compassion. It’s a math problem, and women and girls keep landing on the wrong side of it, from a Chicago beach to a Minnesota pardon hearing.
If you want to see a real war on women, skip the cable panel and read a clemency board’s minutes or a House Judiciary Committee transcript instead. It’s not subtle, and it’s not hypothetical. It has names, dates, and mothers who will never stop asking why.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
