America’s 250th birthday is an occasion to reflect on how our remarkable nation has weathered attack, civil war, and turmoil in politics, anchored by our foundational documents and laws. Immigration policy, and especially immigration enforcement, has emerged as a new stress test, generating unprecedented resistance, not just by agitators and protesters, but also at the state and local government level, through the adoption of sanctuary policies.
Our Constitution gives Congress the authority to write immigration laws, with directives, authorities, and funding for the president to implement and enforce them. In recent years, some Democratic state and local lawmakers, frustrated that Congress has not changed immigration laws to their liking, such as by offering an amnesty to those here illegally, have chosen to undermine the federal immigration agencies by adopting sanctuary laws and policies.
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Sanctuary policies are a serious challenge to the rule of law in the United States and to the constitutional immigration scheme. They also undermine public safety and community trust, which are among the most important features of our society that attract immigrants to America in the first place.
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Sanctuary policies typically take the form of a prohibition on local officials, especially police, from communicating or cooperating with federal immigration authorities, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Specifically, they usually prohibit police from holding criminal illegal immigrants in their custody for ICE, and bar ICE from entering jails and courthouses to arrest criminal illegal immigrants.
The result is that the highest priority targets for removal — those who have been arrested for crimes — are shielded from being taken by ICE in a secure location, and instead released back to the community, where ICE has to locate, stake out, and arrest them in public, ideally before the illegal immigrant commits another crime or flees from local prosecution.
Besides making enforcement costlier and more dangerous for ICE, these policies put the public at risk. According to ICE records, from 2021 to 2025, sanctuary policies freed more than 22,000 criminal illegal immigrants sought by ICE.
No one should be surprised, but everyone should be angry when many of those released offend again. In the last year in Fairfax County, Virginia, which has the third-worst record on sanctuary releases of criminals (after Santa Clara County, California, and Cook County, Illinois), at least two criminal illegal immigrants were released and then were subsequently re-arrested and charged with murder.
In February, Stephane Minter, a 41-year-old mother from Fredericksburg, was fatally stabbed by an illegal immigrant with dozens of prior arrests, including an escalating series of violent assaults. A judge had already ordered him removed, so ICE could have taken him if local authorities had been allowed to communicate.
Making matters worse, the local prosecutor, Steve Descano, allegedly offered lesser charges and lighter consequences for immigrant offenders to try to shield them from discovery and deportation.
The House Judiciary Committee is currently investigating Fairfax County sanctuary policies based on concerns about the threat to public safety and the inappropriate and possibly unconstitutionally lenient treatment of illegal immigrant offenders.
Defenders of sanctuary policies unfailingly maintain that they are necessary in order to preserve community trust and help immigrants feel comfortable reporting crimes. This rationale is not supported by data or experience. The most authoritative statistics on crime reporting, which are collected and analyzed annually by the Department of Justice, reveal that immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are just as likely to report crimes as Americans, and this is true even in parts of the country where police tend to cooperate fully with ICE.
On the contrary, sanctuary policies actually end up eroding trust in authorities. Immigrants don’t want criminal predators released back into their communities any more than anyone else. Many appreciate that the rule of law is stronger and more fairly administered here than in their home countries.
Immigrants and Americans alike generally expect that the immigration laws passed by their representatives will be enforced by the federal government, no matter who is in charge, particularly when the violators are criminals. Polls consistently confirm that voters across the political and demographic spectrum frown on sanctuary policies.
Unfortunately, victims of crimes facilitated by sanctuary policies cannot sue to overturn the policies. The Trump administration is trying, but while direct interference with federal enforcement is punishable, the federal government cannot force state and local governments to do the right thing under the 10th Amendment’s bar on “commandeering.”
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To restore the supremacy of the federal government on immigration, Congress must act against sanctuary policies, as several states have done, by clarifying that local police must have the discretion to cooperate with immigration agencies. There must be meaningful penalties for those who don’t comply, and remedies for victims harmed by sanctuary policies.
When state and local politicians are allowed to thwart immigration enforcement, it undermines the important and sensible constitutional provision that our nation should have one federal immigration law — one that deserves to be enforced as a matter of sovereignty.