The Trump administration has now logged more than twelve consecutive months of zero interior releases at the border, removed upward of 675,000 illegal aliens, and driven southwest border crossings to historic lows. Sanctuary holdouts like Boston are still rejecting every ICE detainer that hits their desk, and the communities they claim to protect are absorbing the consequences.
I watched the LA riots up close in 1992 from inside the presidential motorcade for George H.W. Bush. Streets burned, businesses were stripped bare, and ordinary people paid the price for a city that had decided accountability was optional. That experience never leaves you. Sanctuary policies are this generation’s nullification, the same doctrine antebellum governors dressed in states’ rights language before federal authority made the point the hard way. As someone who has spent three decades structuring complex deals, advising ultra-high-net-worth families, and testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, I’ll tell you what I tell juries: principals who refuse to honor their obligations always create casualties. The only variable is who pays.
Federal immigration enforcement belongs to Washington. The Supreme Court resolved this in Arizona v. United States (2012), holding that states cannot enact conflicting immigration rules or obstruct federal officers in the lawful discharge of their duties. The legal line is workable: passive non-cooperation, cities declining to deploy their own resources for federal enforcement, is generally constitutional. What crosses the line is actively shielding criminal aliens, misreporting detainer counts, or operating local jails as revolving doors for people ICE has already flagged for removal. That distinction matters, because that is exactly what cities like Boston and the entire state of California are doing.
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The numbers are damning. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem testified before the House Judiciary Committee that sanctuary jurisdictions declined 17,864 ICE detainer requests in 2025, out of 201,340 submitted nationwide. Boston’s Police Commissioner acknowledged 57 refusals under the city’s Trust Act. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons put the actual figure at 167, every one involving criminal charges: assault, weapons violations, domestic strangulation. The Boston City Council then voted 9-4 to block public disclosure of those records. That is not policy; it’s a cover-up. California is operating at a different scale entirely: DHS reported in February 2026 that 4,561 criminal aliens had been released from California jails after detainers went unheeded since January 20, 2025—a group whose collective charges include 31 homicides, 661 assaults, and 234 sexual predatory offenses. Those are not hypothetical. Those are dangerous people walking free in communities that had no say in the decision.
I coached youth football and rugby for years. You don’t build a winning team by letting the opposing side score at will while you explain your philosophy on the sideline. Sanctuary mayors call their policies “trust-building.” The residents who end up living next door to the recidivists those cities release have a different word for it.
The standard counterargument—that immigration enforcement chills crime reporting in immigrant neighborhoods—deserves more than dismissal, but less than it gets. The underlying concern isn’t irrational. What is irrational is treating it as a license to release individuals who are already in custody on criminal charges. Community trust constructed by releasing a man facing assault charges is not trust, it’s appeasement at someone else’s expense. The residents most directly endangered are disproportionately law-abiding immigrants themselves, who did not choose to live next to the people the city elected to protect. What erodes community confidence faster than anything is the knowledge that local police chose political symbolism over public safety, and that when something goes wrong, no one in city hall will be accountable for it.
The remedies are already in the books. 8 U.S.C. § 1373 prohibits local governments from restricting information-sharing with federal immigration authorities. The executive branch should withhold every federal dollar—highway funds, law enforcement grants, housing assistance—from any jurisdiction actively defying cooperation requirements. Congress is moving: the Sanctuary Shutdown Act of 2026 would impose a nationwide federal prohibition on sanctuary policies, pass it now. Where cities cross from passive refusal into active obstruction—hiding identities, blocking federal officers, burying detainer records—existing federal statutes on harboring and obstruction apply. Use them.
I arrived in California in 1990, when the state still ran on the premise that honest work and honest choices led somewhere worth going. Thirty-five years of single-party governance converted that premise into a policy laboratory, with someone else’s safety as the test variable. Sanctuary cities run the same experiment: declare the law inapplicable to your political coalition, then wait for someone else to absorb the consequences when it fails.
The Founders called this nullification. The Supreme Court called it unconstitutional. The only people still calling it compassion are the ones who will never have to explain to a grieving family why the man who killed their daughter had three active felony charges and a standing federal detainer the day the city let him walk.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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