OPINION:
In the weeks before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest of Shayan Kahhal, a convicted illegal alien sex offender in Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order ending state law enforcement cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.
Ms. Spanberger’s reckless action mirrors those of sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide that protect criminal illegal aliens from federal immigration authorities. These are aliens who are murdering, raping, assaulting and terrorizing the public.
Sanctuary zealots claim to be “protecting” their communities and preventing local officials from being commandeered to enforce federal law, but they are not being asked to enforce federal law. They are just being asked to cooperate and not frustrate immigration enforcement.
Sanctuary jurisdictions are raising the cost of enforcement, imperiling federal officers and ensuring that dangerous, removable criminals are allowed to terrorize our communities.
In fact, sanctuary jurisdictions are reviving America’s oldest constitutional heresy: nullification.
What they are doing echoes the 1832 Nullification Crisis, the constitutional showdown that foreshadowed the Civil War. In 1828, Congress adopted tariffs that South Carolina claimed hurt the South’s agricultural economy. In response, John C. Calhoun claimed that states could “nullify” a federal law within their borders.
South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the federal tariffs void and threatening secession.
President Jackson saw this as a direct assault on the Constitution. What Ms. Spanberger and other officials like her are doing today is no different and just as dangerous.
Jackson warned that nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union” and “contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution.” Congress authorized him to use military force, if necessary, to enforce federal customs laws in South Carolina. The state capitulated and repealed its nullification ordinance.
Today’s sanctuary jurisdictions are invoking nullification by obstructing federal enforcement and attempting to regulate how federal agents carry out their duties.
Yet there is a difference between declining to be drafted into federal service and deliberately making federal enforcement harder, costlier and more dangerous.
When states ban local authorities from voluntarily notifying ICE of a criminal alien’s release, they are violating federal law: 8 U.S.C. § 1373, which prohibits such bans. In 1999, in City of New York v. United States, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said this statute did not violate the anti-commandeering doctrine.
Similarly, when states refuse to honor detainers that simply ask them to hold a criminal alien until federal agents can pick him up, that is not enforcing federal immigration law. When they attempt to regulate federal agents, they are not refusing to be commandeered; they are engaging in obstruction.
Every crime committed by an illegal alien carries a double tragedy: the horror of the offense and the fact that it was preventable because the offender should not have been in the country.
In sanctuary jurisdictions, that tragedy is compounded by local officials deliberately thwarting the federal process designed to remove dangerous criminals.
What is the cost in human lives? How many Americans are victimized by these reckless policies? According to the Bureau of Prisons and 2025 U.S. Sentencing Commission reports, as of June, approximately 22,700 inmates — about 14.7% of all federal prisoners — are criminal illegal aliens.
Yet illegal aliens are estimated to make up only about 3% to 4% of the overall U.S. population.
Texas is one of the few states that tracks crimes committed by illegal aliens. Over the past 15 years, these criminals have been charged with more than 600,000 crimes (813,000 over the course of their entire criminal careers) in the state, including 1,128 homicides, 78,570 assaults, 1,530 kidnappings, 16,348 sexual assaults and other sexual offenses and 70,225 drug-related offenses.
None of these crimes would have happened if these people had not been here.
Need more? Just browse the Homeland Security Department’s new “Worst of the Worst” website to find the 36,095 (and counting) criminal illegal aliens arrested by ICE since President Trump took office.
The database includes criminal histories of homicide, rape, child sexual abuse, armed robbery and drug trafficking. In Virginia alone, ICE has arrested 731 “worst of the worst” criminal illegal aliens. Virginia’s sanctuary policies spared these offenders at the expense of American victims.
How many more Americans must be victimized before sanctuary jurisdictions wake up? How many more Laken Rileys and Iryna Zarutskas need to die before voters demand that sanctuaries end their obstruction of federal law?
Americans will remain at risk until voters remove the irresponsible officials who place sanctuary policies above federal law and public safety.
• Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow. Daniel Mares is a legal intern in the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom.
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