The staff of the House Judiciary Committee issued a report this week taking aim at the criminal-alien-friendly policies in one of the National Capital Region’s largest suburbs — and one of two jurisdictions across the Potomac from the District of Columbia itself. “Arlington County, Virginia: The Dangerous Consequences of Sanctuary Policies” is quite the read, but the main target, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church, seems pretty unapologetic about what she and her office are up to.
“Sanctuary Jurisdictions”
The Center defines the term “sanctuary jurisdictions” as U.S. cities, counties, and states with:
laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.
In December 2024, my colleague Jason Richwine concluded that between “sanctuary states”, “states treated as sanctuaries”, and “sanctuary localities within non-sanctuary states”, 56.3 percent of the total unauthorized population, nearly eight million aliens in total, reside in sanctuaries.
Which makes sense, because if you’re running from ICE, you’d logically choose a place where local politicos either expressly or implicitly are attempting to conceal you from law enforcement.
The Arlington County “Trust Policy”
Of course, there are sanctuaries and there are “sanctuaries”, and Arlington County has taken great pains to place itself in the latter category.
Case in point is Arlington’s “Trust Policy”, formally “Arlington’s Commitment to Strengthening Trust with Our Immigrant Communities”, a diktat adopted by the county board in July 2022, then updated by the county days after the 2024 presidential election in November of that year and then updated again in May 2025.
It begins:
Arlington County (the “County”) recognizes that the County’s ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity is a key source of our strength. Our vision is to be a welcoming and inclusive community where every person is important, and every person thrives. The County is committed to protecting the rights of all residents, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status, and to ensuring every person in Arlington has an equal opportunity to participate in our economy.
The utility of “Google Translate” and similar apps and the continuing salience of Genesis 11:6-7 calls into whether “linguistic diversity” strengthens anything, while sections 212(a)(5), 237(a)(1)(C)(i), and 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) bar aliens in certain “immigration statuses” from an “equal opportunity to participate in” the wage-earning part of Arlington County’s economy, but the intro tells you clearly where the rest of the policy is going.
Section II, “Standards to Protect Confidentiality and Enhance Public Trust”, bars county employees from disclosing “to any person or entity the citizenship or immigration status of an individual” unless such disclosure is “required by applicable state or federal law or regulation, judicial warrant, court order or subpoena or complies with 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a)”, an exception that manages to be broad, narrow, vague, and — in the case of “judicial warrants”— largely impossible to comply with, all at the same time.
Section III, simply captioned “Law Enforcement”, bars local cops from: questioning anyone “about their immigration status”; detaining anyone “solely for the purpose of determining immigration status”; enforcing immigration law; or detaining or arresting anyone “based solely on federal administrative or civil immigration warrants or detainers”.
To make that last restriction clear for the irredeemably obtuse, the policy explains: “Any enforcement of such warrants or detainers is prohibited.”
“Section 7”
Note that prior to its latest amendment, the Trust Policy contained what was known as “Section 7”.
Section 7 permitted the Arlington County Police Department (ACPD), with restrictions, to “initiate contact with federal immigration authorities” concerning “an undocumented immigrant” if that alien was “identified as a gang member and is wanted or arrested for a violent felony or a criminal street gang offense” or was “arrested for a felony offense or is a confirmed gang member, where circumstances indicate notification to federal immigration authorities is prudent to maintain community safety”.
In addition, the ACPD was permitted under section 7(b) to contact immigration officers about any “undocumented immigrant who is arrested for a terrorism or human trafficking offense”.
In May 2025, the Board struck section 7 in toto, meaning that if an ACPD police officer encounters an alien human trafficker, terrorist, or violent gang member, the department is barred from contacting ICE about that individual — which is kind of a big deal given that Arlington is home to Reagan National Airport (a key transit point for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices) and the Pentagon, which was attacked by alien terrorist hijackers on September 11, killing 184 innocents.
With due respect, that’s not a policy, it’s a “Trust Tantrum” heedless to what is “prudent to maintain community safety”, or even what makes sense.
The House Judiciary Committee Staff Report
The staff report is just 23 pages long, and it is packed full of interesting stats, including that “sanctuary jurisdictions declined to honor at least 41,085 detainers from ICE” between October 2022 and early 2026, and more specifically that “state and local law enforcement agencies declined at least 17,864 ICE detainers” in just the first 12 months of the second Trump administration, “including for aliens charged with crimes ranging from sexual assault to murder”.
The main focus, however, is Dehghani-Tafti, the chief law enforcement officer in Arlington County and a prosecutor with some unique (and inconsistent) views of what constitutes “justice”. Committee staff deposed her on July 16, 2026, and the report is sprinkled with direct quotes from that exchange.
Perhaps most interesting is that local prosecutors, acting under Dehghani-Tafti’s express directions, give what committee staff described as “preferential treatment to aliens based solely on their immigration status — all so that criminal aliens can avoid deportation and remain in the United States indefinitely”.
That includes aliens charged with “the most heinous of crimes, including certain cases involving child victims, domestic violence, disarming a police officer, and assault”.
“DACA Is Different, Especially in the DUI Realm”
Dehghani-Tafti appears to be particularly beneficent to aliens with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, a questionably legal 2012 Obama-era policy that shields certain illegal aliens who came to the United States under the age of 16 prior to an arbitrary date in June 2007 from removal.
Keep in mind the oldest of those “childhood arrivals” is now 45, but if a DACA applicant or recipient has been convicted of a felony, three misdemeanors, or a “significant misdemeanor” as defined by regulation, the alien won’t qualify for the program and/or won’t have his DACA status renewed.
The regulation in question is 8 C.F.R. § 236.22(b)(6), and among the significant misdemeanors therein are “an offense of domestic violence, sexual abuse or exploitation, burglary, unlawful possession or use of a firearm, drug distribution or trafficking, or driving under the influence”, the latter known as “DUI” or “DWI” (for “driving under the influence” or “driving while intoxicated”).
Ask any trial-level criminal judge or immigration judge in a detained court (like I was) and they will tell you domestic violence crimes and DUI are among the most common offenses they see, likely because they are the most common crimes people in this country (males in particular) commit.
As the report explains, however, Dehghani-Tafti’s office treats DACA recipients with a degree of solicitude and concern that’s not shared with the U.S. citizens who elected her. Specifically, an excerpt of those policies included in the report states:
As a class of cases, DWIs are serious crimes and occur across all traditional boundaries of race, sex, and socioeconomic class. How we treat them, however, can exacerbate disparities, if we allow decisions to be guided by an individual's status in the community, like security clearance, job status, etc.
...
One exception, however, is an individual's status as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient. We handle cases that have varying levels of immigration concerns all the time, but DACA is different, especially in the DUI realm. A DUI conviction constitutes a "significant misdemeanor" in the eyes of USCIS and would prevent an individual from renewing their DACA status and thereby subjecting them to deportation back to a country they likely have never known. A DUI conviction for DACA recipients can therefore have disproportionate and devastating collateral consequences. Because of this, we must take an individual's DACA status into account when developing offers to ensure that, while appropriate sanctions and conditions are put in place to protect the public and prevent future similar behavior, an individual is not deported because of their decision to drive while intoxicated. [Emphasis added.]
As a retired career bureaucrat familiar with unpleasant facts but also fluent in sanctimonious political blather, let me break that down for you.
Driving drunk and/or high is bad, not only because does the offender take his own life and safety into his hands but also endangers anyone else in the general vicinity — other drivers, passengers, and pedestrians in particular.
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) reports that someone is injured or killed in a drunk driving incident “every 89 seconds”, and each day 32 people die in drunk driving crashes, “one person every 44 minutes” or 11,904 people who lost their lives in 2024.
In addition to the deadly nature of the offense, DUI/DWI convictions can have serious implications for one’s ability to gain or keep employment, particularly if you need a driver’s license for your job or a professional license (to be a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, etc.), or a federal government clearance — the latter a key issue in Arlington County.
Those employment implications are a key reason why hiring a lawyer to defend you after you have been arrested for drunk driving can cost you $10,000 or more.
If you are some fancy-pants (or fancy-scrubs) professional or government employee and think you and your high-priced mouthpiece are going to get any sympathy in Arlington County simply because your career is on the line, think again — your perceived privilege is among the “disparities” that can be “exacerbated” when prosecutorial discretion is at issue.
But if you are an illegal alien DACA recipient, who could be deported because you chose to get loaded or lit before hitting the streets, please have a seat while an Arlington assistant commonwealth’s attorney (ACA) crafts what Dehghani-Tafti described in her deposition as a “a lateral shift to a different charge” that will allow you to remain.
And given that an estimated half to three-quarters of people convicted of drunk driving keep driving drunk already, you will likely walk out the door concluding it’s not that serious an offense and continue to skip taking the Metro, a bus, a cab, or an Uber or Lyft.
In any event, if that sounds like discrimination based on nationality, it’s exactly what this policy describes. “Leniency for thee, not for my citizen taxpayers” is the veritable mantra of the Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney, based on the Judiciary Committee’s staff report.
“An Ad Hoc and Inconsistent Approach to Making Prosecutorial Decisions”
Discrimination in charging criminal offenses isn’t the only issue, however, because it also appears that the prosecutor’s office relies on an extremely arbitrary application of its rules when dealing with aliens.
During her deposition, committee staff asked Dehghani-Tafti:
You’ve said several times that it wouldn’t make sense to consider immigration consequences in a specific case or related to a specific crime and that your policy doesn’t specifically delineate prohibitions or exceptions to the consideration. Would it make sense, then, to make it clear for ACAs in your office which crimes would disqualify somebody from a consideration of immigration consequences in their case?
Here is her response:
Well ... what we have are guiding principles. And we have small teams. We have, you know, four supervisors with a handful of ACAs underneath them. They meet weekly with their staff. And we have twice a month all attorney meetings. And we have many, many impromptu conversations. This is culture, and it doesn’t need policies to be written down. [Emphasis added.]
Office “culture” is one thing, but having been a prosecutor, I can assure you that leaving any line attorney free to down-charge a specific class of criminals (aliens) based on vague unwritten “policies” inevitably shifts the authority from those in our federal constitutional order charged with writing laws (the legislature and governor in this instance) to whatever prosecutor picks up any given case on any given day.
For its part, the committee report complains that “Such an ad hoc and inconsistent approach to making prosecutorial decisions based on immigration consequences significantly raises the risk for differential treatment among criminal defendants, even including violent criminals, as well as potential civil rights violations”, and it’s difficult to disagree with that characterization, as well.
Through the Looking Glass
Under U.S. immigration law, certain aliens are supposed to be deported for their crimes — not receive special benefits because they’re here illegally. According to a key House committee, however, in the Wonderland of Arlington County, those concepts are inverted — citizens are punished while criminal aliens receive special remedies for the same offenses. I can describe the policy, but I can’t explain it.