The Dispatch, February 19, 2026
White House border czar Tom Homan recently announced a drawdown of immigration enforcement personnel in the sanctuary state of Minnesota, subject to the continued cooperation and support from local law enforcement agencies. Far from a retreat by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), this reduction in force is actually a significant win for the rule of law over sanctuary policies imposed by Minnesota politicians who oppose federal immigration laws. This outcome could pave the way for law enforcement leaders in other parts of the country to reverse similar policies that endanger communities and attract costly illegal immigration.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., congressional Democrats have shut down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a national effort to impose some of the same kind of impediments to enforcement that sanctuary states and localities have adopted. Their demands include requiring judicial warrants for routine immigration arrests and prohibiting enforcement near schools, churches, medical facilities, courts, and polling places, among other unreasonable demands.
What is a sanctuary policy? The term is generally understood to mean a state or local policy that seeks to shield illegal immigrants from the reach of supposedly unfair or overzealous immigration enforcement. The first sanctuary policies appeared in the 1980s, when humanitarian groups in the Southwest sought to protect Central Americans who had entered the U.S. illegally to escape conflict in their countries.
Over time, a few cities like San Francisco and Berkeley in California, and Santa Fe in New Mexico, led by politicians who opposed immigration enforcement and advocated for amnesty for illegal immigrants, declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuaries. They enacted “don’t ask, don’t tell” ordinances to forbid local officials from denying public benefits and services to undocumented immigrants and prohibiting officials, including police, from alerting immigration authorities after encounters with them.
In 2008, the federal government began implementing a nationwide fingerprint-sharing program known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE to match the biometrics of all those arrested by local police with immigration databases, and follow up with detainers, or requests to hold the immigrant for ICE to take custody for removal. This program helped boost interior criminal deportations under the first two years of the Obama administration, as ICE was no longer dependent on local police to identify undocumented criminals, and localities were happy to help ICE get rid of some of their lawbreakers.
Anti-enforcement groups soon moved to thwart this collaboration by convincing hundreds of state and local governments to adopt the most recent iteration of sanctuary policies, which is to prohibit local law enforcement agencies from: honoring ICE detainers, notifying ICE of the pending release of a criminal alien, or taking any action whatsoever to aid immigration enforcement. Today, there are some 12 states with sanctuary laws and more than 100 localities in other states that restrict law enforcement agencies from cooperating with ICE.
The results have been a disaster for public safety in the noncooperative jurisdictions, as thousands of criminal immigrants that ICE sought to take custody of were instead released, only to re-offend and create new victims. One case in particular sparked public outrage in 2015, galvanizing voter support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. On a summer day in San Francisco, a young woman named Kate Steinle was shot and killed while walking on a public pier by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times after numerous drug crimes. The Mexican citizen had been released less than three months prior by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office, which by policy had disregarded ICE’s request to take custody of the man once local charges were dropped. (Steinle’s shooter was later acquitted on murder and manslaughter charges but convicted of illegally possessing a firearm and deported.)
This is the main reason that sanctuary policies cannot be tolerated: They interfere with the removal of the highest priority targets for immigration enforcement, namely, the fraction of the non-citizen population that is committing crimes. According to ICE records that I obtained through the FOIA process, between October 2022 and February 2025, sanctuary policies resulted in the release of more than 26,000 criminal immigrants ICE was seeking to take into custody. More than half were released in California, and more than 1,000 were freed from jails in Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut each. The jail in Hennepin County, Minnesota—which includes Minneapolis—released 363 undocumented criminals ICE was seeking during the time period, including three people facing pending homicide charges and dozens of others convicted or charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, arson, burglary, drugs or weapons possession, and more.
The Steinle case was but one of many. ICE maintains that at least 10,000 criminals released by sanctuary policies were subsequently arrested for new crimes.
Moreover, sanctuary policies are costly to taxpayers, who must pick up the tab for shelter, health care, and schooling resulting from the disproportionate illegal settlement. For example, the sanctuary state of Massachusetts has spent an estimated $3 billion on sheltering illegal migrants, and millions more on food assistance, medical care, and schooling for the influx of an estimated 50,000 illegal migrants since 2021.
Sanctuary policies also make it harder for ICE to do its job. Local politicians often say that the local police have neither the time nor the expertise to do immigration enforcement. But ICE is not asking local police to do immigration enforcement; the agency is merely asking cities and states to offer the same cooperation that would be given to every other law enforcement agency—whether it’s the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and to honor their detainers within the parameters allowed by federal law.
Even so, sanctuary supporters maintain that the policies are necessary in order to encourage immigrants to report crimes. This is a myth. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the most authoritative source of data on crime reporting and captures the citizenship of crime victims, immigrants as a whole—and even illegal immigrants—are just as likely, if not more so, to report crimes, even in parts of the country without sanctuary policies. If community trust is a problem, there are better tools to improve it (such as anonymous tip lines, community outreach, and hiring multilingual officers) than releasing deportable criminals back to the streets.
Moreover, as we have seen over the last year, the sanctuary policies lead to exactly the kind of enforcement that advocates argue is frightening to immigrants. When ICE is not able to arrest criminal targets in jails, it has to apprehend them in public—at their dwelling, at work, in a courthouse, or on the street. In addition to requiring more officers and more time to surveil and plan the arrest, these operations also put officers and the public at risk. The targets have both attacked ICE officers and tried to flee, sometimes into schools and medical centers, causing havoc.
The reason immigration enforcement has not become a spectacle in Texas, Florida, and other states that also have experienced a significant uptick in enforcement is because ICE is working with, not against, local authorities, and its agents are able to operate in the secure environment of jails rather than in neighborhoods, where anything can happen. Despite the continued tough talk from pro-sanctuary politicians in Minnesota, they have now learned the hard way that it is safer and saner to allow law enforcement agencies to work together. But what about the other sanctuary jurisdictions? While the Trump administration is taking legal action against the most egregious sanctuary policies that violate federal law mandating unhindered local-federal information-sharing, it is constitutionally problematic for the federal government to compel local authorities to heed detainers or otherwise support ICE.
Given these constraints, the federal government should instead use financial incentives to convince sanctuary leaders to reverse their policies. Congress and the president should work together to bar noncooperative jurisdictions from eligibility for certain federal funding. The departments of Justice and Homeland Security award hundreds of millions of dollars annually to state and local governments for public safety, and those who interfere with immigration enforcement should be disqualified from this funding.
Similarly, about one-third of all municipal bonds issued annually are from sanctuary jurisdictions. Investors should weigh sanctuary policies as they do other indicators of risk and poor governance, and jurisdictions that needlessly undermine public safety and impose excess costs on taxpayers should lose their tax-exempt status for bonds or suffer a downgrade in their credit ratings.
Congressional Republicans should cede nothing to the Democrats who have shut down DHS in an effort to shut down immigration enforcement and impose sanctuary policies on the nation. Instead, once the government is fully open, Republican lawmakers should build on the lessons of Minneapolis, and not only defund sanctuaries but also legislate protections for law enforcement agencies that do routinely cooperate with ICE.
Without action from Congress, communities will continue to suffer harm resulting from misguided sanctuary proponents who put politics above public safety.