Nick Freitas is a Republican delegate to the Virginia General Assembly representing James Madison’s old district, in the Piedmont counties of Greene and Madison, and parts of Culpeper and Orange Counties. He’s also a social influencer who makes short videos explaining issues in simple terms, and a video he posted to X (pronounced “Twitter”) on December 27 makes short work of “due process”, criminal prosecutions, and immigration.
“Let’s Say Somebody Breaks into Your House”
The tweeted video is just one minute long, and it will likely be your best use of 60 seconds today:
Due process and immigration law… pic.twitter.com/vmQcnWdfB5
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) December 27, 2025
Freitas take is pretty straightforward, comparing a burglar cum squatter to an alien who enters illegally.
In the house analogy, the homeowner calls the cops and after they determine the squatter doesn’t belong there, they throw the miscreant out.
That identification and removal system is the essence of due process, and comparable to the way civil immigration enforcement works. It’s not punitive; it simply restores the status quo.
Of course, burglary is a common law and, in most places, statutory crime (“breaking and entering” is a variety thereof), just as “improper entry” by an illegal migrant is a also federal criminal offense – subject to imprisonment and/or a fine – under section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
“However, We’re Now Going to Insist that this Person Get to Stay in Your House”
Freitas then offers a reductio ad absurdum analysis in which there is an insistence that the offender be allowed to remain in your home until they are convicted for the criminal offense.
He explains:
You would think that is ridiculous. Because it would be. Because the due process for removing them from your property is to legally ascertain that they have no right to be on your property. The legal process for punishing them for the charge of breaking and entering requires the trial and the jury of your peers and the punishment phase and everything else.
Now apply this to federal immigration law. See, once we’ve legally ascertained that you don’t have a right to be in the United States you can be deported. So, all the lefties running around going, “Oh, they’re not being afforded due process.” What they seem to be implying is that, “No, no, no. Don’t just deport them. Jail them. Try them. Convict them. Punish them, fine them and potentially put them in prison for violation of federal immigration law. Then deport them.”
Sanctuary Laws and “Judicial Warrants”
You may at first think that Freitas has gone too far in his analogy, because you haven’t heard any politico or advocate, “lefty” or otherwise, demanding that illegal entrants be criminally convicted, fined, and imprisoned before deportation. But if you do think that you’ll be wrong. Let me explain.
As the Center has highlighted for years, the biggest impediment to immigration enforcement in the interior are so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions, defined as “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.
Fairfax County, Va., 52 miles from Freitas’s district, shies away from calling itself a “sanctuary,” claiming instead it’s just “devoted to protecting the rights of all its residents, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status, and to ensuring they have an equal opportunity to participate in our economic vitality.”
Of course, if you’re here illegally and not authorized to work, I am not sure how you can participate in Fairfax’s “economic vitality”, but in any event the county passed what it refers to as a “Trust Policy” in January 2021 to express its aforementioned “devotion”.
Under section III.B of that Trust Policy:
Employees shall not provide access to any County facilities, property surrounding any facility, equipment, records or databases or funds not accessible to the public unless mandated by federal or state law or regulation, criminal judicial warrant, court order or subpoena specifying the information or individuals sought.
In other words, ICE can’t go into the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center to take custody of criminal aliens unless allowed by state law or regulation, federal law or regulation, or with a “criminal judicial warrant, court order or subpoena specifying the. . . individuals sought”.
The state doesn’t interpose in immigration matters, while ICE officers arrest aliens for civil deportation purposes in accordance with “federal law” and “regulation” on administrative “warrants of arrest” issued pursuant to section 236(a) of the INA.
But section II of the Trust Policy makes clear that, in Fairfax County, “An administrative warrant is not a criminal judicial warrant.”
That means the only option left for ICE officers seeking to take custody of a criminal alien in the ADC is to obtain a “criminal judicial warrant, court order or subpoena” – which can only be secured by starting the process of charging the alien with a federal crime.
Fairfax County is hardly alone. Nearby Arlington County, Va. (which also denies it is a sanctuary) has its own “Trust Policy”, and it similarly states: “Employees shall neither participate in nor facilitate civil immigration enforcement operations, unless otherwise required by an applicable state or federal law, criminal judicial warrant, court order or subpoena deemed applicable by the County Attorney.”
In fact, the “judicial warrant” dodge is such a staple of the sanctuary playbook that more than six years ago I felt compelled to explain in great detail that “Immigration Judicial Warrants Don't Exist”.
“Don’t exist” in civil immigration enforcement, that is. But they do in criminal immigration enforcement, proving Freitas’s implicit point that sanctuaries don’t just want removable aliens deported—they want them prosecuted first, but will insist those aliens be allowed to remain while that process plays out.
“Eluding Inspection”
Section 275 of the INA doesn’t only make it a crime for an alien to “enter or attempt to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers” (that is, illegally).
It also makes it a crime (subject to imprisonment and/or a fine) to “elude examination or inspection by immigration officers”, and in June, DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel – the in-house lawyers the “world’s largest law office” – issued an opinion concluding that “eluding inspection” under section 275(a)(2) of the INA is an offense that continues up to the point an alien who enters illegally is caught.
In other words, even if an alien “jumped the line”, evaded Border Patrol agents, and travelled to Fairfax County 20 years ago to seize the “equal opportunity to participate in” that suburb’s “economic vitality”, the alien can still be charged criminally by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia with the federal crime of “eluding examination or inspection” under section 275(a)(2) of the INA.
It would, admittedly, be time-consuming for ICE and the U.S. Attorney’s office to prepare such cases, but perhaps DOJ and DHS could call the county’s bluff and give the politicians and advocates there exactly what they are demanding: a raft of criminal judicial warrants for every alien in the Fairfax County jail.
Freitas ends that tweet by questioning whether counties like Fairfax are “helping” aliens the way they “intended”, but if that’s what they want and the way they want it, fine.
The federal government has unfettered authority over immigration, but for years local grandees have been allowed to thumb their noses at immigration enforcement. If criminal prosecutions, fines, and imprisonment before deportation are what sanctuaries want, DHS and DOJ should give it to them, as H.L. Mencken once said, “good and hard”.