EXCLUSIVE: Sanctuary Policies Shielded Illegal Alien Accused Of Impregnating His Teen Daughter

This is the kind of story that should stop everyone in their tracks, and yet it will likely get buried under the usual news cycle by Friday. A man in the country illegally, accused of impregnating his own teenage daughter, was allegedly able to stay hidden from federal authorities because the jurisdiction he was in decided that local cops shouldn't cooperate with ICE. That's not a policy failure in the abstract. That's a specific decision, made by specific officials, that had a specific consequence: a predator stayed on the street longer than he should have.

Sanctuary policy defenders always frame this debate around trust between immigrant communities and police, or about not wanting local law enforcement to do the federal government's job. Fine, have that debate in the abstract. But somebody needs to explain how that framework is supposed to work when the person being shielded is accused of one of the most horrific crimes imaginable against his own child. At some point the policy stops being about protecting a vulnerable community and starts being about protecting the people preying on it.

The line quoted from federal authorities, "we will find you wherever you are, we will arrest you, and we will deport you," should be the baseline expectation for how this country treats people who commit crimes like this while here illegally. It shouldn't require an exclusive investigative report to get there. Every sanctuary jurisdiction that congratulates itself on compassion needs to sit with the fact that their policy created cover, however unintentionally, for a case this ugly.

We're not interested in relitigating every immigration argument through this one case. But cases like this are exactly why the argument that sanctuary policies are costless, or purely symbolic, doesn't hold up. Somewhere a real teenager paid the price for a bureaucratic choice about who gets to ask questions. That's the whole debate in one sentence.