During a congressional hearing last year, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) explained: “Violent criminals have no place on our streets; if they are undocumented, we want them out of Illinois and out of our country.” And yet, as I explained last October, both the Land of Lincoln and Chicago (it’s largest city) have some of the most restrictive sanctuary laws in the country, meaning they refuse to assist ICE in taking custody of those very same “violent criminals”. If that sounds oxymoronic, welcome to the world of politics, where partisanship often allows no space for common sense.
“Judicial Warrants”
The hearing in question was held last June by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (of which I am an alumnus staffer), and captioned “A Hearing with Sanctuary State Governors”. Here is the full excerpt from that portion of the governor’s written testimony:
Violent criminals have no place on our streets; if they are undocumented, we want them out of Illinois and out of our country. When the federal government has a judge-signed warrant for a criminal’s arrest, we work to assist them, regardless of that criminal’s immigration status. [Emphasis added.]
Logically, the State of Illinois and its chief executive are assisted by an army of lawyers, and in fact the office of the state’s attorney general, Kwame Raoul (D) claims to have “approximately 450 attorneys who specialize in more than 40 areas of law”.
None of those divisions specialize in immigration per se, but Raoul, “a graduate of DePaul University [who] earned his law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law”, seems like a pretty smart cookie and probably keeps a jarful of other smart cookies on his staff.
He should know that: (1) in section 236(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Congress gave immigration officers the authority to arrest removable aliens on administrative warrants “issued by the” DHS secretary; and (2) consequently, there is no mechanism by which ICE can seek a “judge-signed warrant” for the arrest of a “violent criminal” or any other “undocumented” immigrant.
In other words, you can substitute “dragon’s blood” or “powdered unicorn horn” for “a judge-signed warrant for a criminal’s arrest” in Pritzker’s statement, and it would be equally apt.
If the governor or the Illinois AG aren’t clear on this issue, however, the latter controls an annual budget of $184.5 million, and I am willing to work for just a fraction of that amount to advise him on the issue.
“Kwame Partners with Federal and Local Law Enforcement”
And if you believe Raoul’s personal campaign website, assisting immigration officers to take custody of aliens in Illinois state and local jails would be just the sort of endeavor he prides himself on:
As the state’s chief legal and law enforcement officer, Kwame works in a bipartisan manner with prosecutors and police chiefs across Illinois to fight crime and develop criminal justice policy. Kwame partners with federal and local law enforcement to prosecute murder, violent crimes, crimes of sexual violence, and gun trafficking. Kwame was honored as Public Official of the Year by the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police for his leadership on criminal justice matters.
He’s especially proud of his “partnership with the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center to conduct trainings to prevent mass shooting threats in schools, places of worship, and other public places” — clearly a laudable undertaking.
Similarly, in August 2025, Pritzker’s office issued a press release boasting about how his state “regularly collaborates with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with the shared goal of addressing serious violent crime”, to which Raoul added:
Throughout my tenure, I have successfully collaborated with federal law enforcement partners, such as the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigations [HSI], to investigate and prosecute crime in Illinois, as have other local and state law enforcement partners around the state of Illinois.
That strongly suggests neither Pritzker, nor Raoul, nor any other state or local official in Illinois imposes impossible-to-comply-with “conditions precedent” (events “that must occur before a right, claim, duty, or interests arises” under the law) like Illinois’s “judge-signed warrant” demand for ICE officers or their other federal “partners” in “the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service and HSI”.
“Winning Legal Battles Against Trump”
That disconnect may seem strange, until you appreciate why Pritzker and Raoul not only won’t assist ICE, but actively impede immigration officers in taking custody of those “violent criminals” the governor claims to harbor such a vehement dislike of.
That Illinois AG’s office budget figure above comes from an article in Capitol News Illinois headlined “Raoul suggests underfunding of his office could make winning legal battles against Trump harder” — plainly indicating that the AG views his office as the “enemy” of the current administration.
If you are not convinced, consider the following from that piece:
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and unleashed federal immigration agents in states, Illinois has navigated a more-difficult relationship between the state and federal governments.
Raoul said that hostility sometimes gets in the way of work to pursue drug and gun trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and organized retail crime. Cracking down on those crimes is normally a collaboration between the state and the federal government, he said.
The only thing making the “relationship between” Illinois and the feds “more difficult” since Trump returned is the state’s hostility to immigration enforcement, and if that hostility is impeding Illinois’s efforts on “drug and gun trafficking, child sexual abuse material, and organized retail crime” (areas where there’s frequent overlap between immigration and criminal enforcement), it’s time to end that hostility.
But’s that not happening, and consequently ICE is forced onto the streets to find at-large criminal aliens in operations that may result in high-profile confrontations, not only between officers and suspects but between officers and protestors who are attempting to impede those operations.
“Hanlon’s Razor”
Both Pritzker and Raoul decry such encounters (by blaming ICE), but given that the most efficacious and logical response to curbing often-confrontational street arrests of criminal aliens is to simply allow ICE to arrest them while they’re in state and local criminal lockups, why do they continue to reject that option?
“Hanlon’s razor” is a rule of thumb described as a “mental safeguard against the temptation to label behavior as malicious when incompetence is the most common response”.
It’s likely the best heuristic to follow when weighing most government missteps (real and imagined), so perhaps Pritzker, Raoul, and countless other sanctuary state politicos simply fail to understand that responding to perceived ICE arrest abuses by barring immigration officers from state and local jails is a self-defeating activity — and an unduly dangerous one for the public.
The only other alternative is to conclude sanctuary officials are deliberately provoking ICE into arresting criminal aliens (violent or otherwise) in their jurisdictions in risky “high-profile confrontations” of the sort described above.
Such “provocation”, however, is the weapon of terrorists (see Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, which had no strategic, but significant propaganda, value) and teenagers, and thus beneath the dignity of any U.S. elected official.
The Obvious Response
If sanctuary honchos want to tie ICE up with so many criminal aliens it’s too busy to bother with what Gov. Pritzker described in his congressional testimony as “law-abiding immigrant families”, they should open their prisons and jails to immigration officers. It’s the only obvious response, assuming they are being truthful about their collective concerns with “public safety” — and not just playing politics.