Trump’s border czar rips Newsom after newly released illegal migrant allegedly butchered California man

A man is dead outside his own home in the Bay Area, and the suspect walked out of custody the day before it happened. That timeline is the whole story. Not his country of origin, not his immigration status in the abstract, but the fact that someone released back onto the street had, within twenty-four hours, allegedly taken a knife to an elderly man. Tom Homan didn't have to reach for talking points on this one. The sequence of events did the work for him.

California's sanctuary policies were built on the premise that local jails shouldn't be doing the federal government's immigration enforcement for it. Fine, that's a legitimate policy debate to have in the abstract. But policies have consequences in the specific, and this is what the specific looks like: a detainer request presumably ignored or never acted on, a release, and then a body. Newsom's office will point to due process and local discretion. Somewhere there's a family that just wants to know why the system let this man walk.

We're not saying every illegal migrant is a threat, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. But when a jurisdiction builds a wall between its jail intake and federal immigration authorities, it's accepting risk on behalf of people who never got a vote on it. The elderly victim in this case didn't sign up to be collateral in a fight over jurisdictional pride. That's the tradeoff sanctuary policy quietly makes, and it's long past time California's leadership had to answer for it out loud instead of in press-release euphemisms.