The Department of Homeland Security put out another "worst of the worst" release over the weekend of August 17. ICE agents picked up illegal aliens convicted of murder, indecent liberties with a child, assault, and cocaine trafficking, and the agency followed up the next day with more arrests for child sexual assault and forcible sexual abuse. This isn't a one-off news cycle. DHS has published a version of this release roughly every few days since early August, and the pattern holds because the underlying population it's drawing from is that large.
I spent eight years in private security and executive protection. You learn fast in that line of work that a threat assessment means nothing if the people who run the building won't let you act on it. That's the exact failure playing out in California right now, and it's why I have no patience left for politicians who dress up obstruction as compassion.
Start with the numbers, because they do the arguing for me. DHS reports that nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests nationally involve someone already charged with or convicted of a crime in this country. That's not a rounding error. It means the agency isn't rounding up gardeners and dishwashers; it's working through a backlog of people the justice system already flagged and local jurisdictions chose to let walk.
California is the case study in what happens when a state builds that choice into law. Under SB 54, county jails can't tell ICE when a criminal alien with a detainer is about to be released. DHS says California's failure to honor those detainers let more than 4,500 criminal aliens back onto the street in a matter of months, a group whose rap sheets included 31 homicides and more than 200 sexual predatory offenses. A Mexican man with a prior detainer ICE couldn't act on is now charged with the fatal stabbing of two women and an infant in Stanislaus County. An illegal alien from India struck a four-year-old boy in a Fresno hit-and-run on April 28, 2026. A sanctuary jail cut him loose, but ICE arrested him on May 13. Every one of those cases had an off-ramp. California's own law removed it.
Compare that to Memphis. A federal, state, and local task force moved into the city last September, and violent crime fell nearly 40 percent within months, with sexual assault and robbery down by similar margins. The U.S. Marshals Service, which runs the operation, reports more than 10,000 arrests, over 1,700 illegal firearms off the street, and 154 missing children located and recovered. Nobody had to invent a new legal theory to get there. They just let the agencies that already have the authority use it, together, instead of working against each other. That's the entire argument in one sentence: cooperation between law enforcement layers saves lives, and obstruction between them costs lives.
I've spent years as a court-designated expert witness on fiduciary duty, and the concept I keep coming back to in this debate is the same one that governs a trustee handling somebody else's money: you owe the beneficiary your best judgment, not your preferred narrative. A sheriff who releases a convicted felon with an active detainer because the state legislature told him to isn't exercising judgment. He's outsourcing it to Sacramento and hoping the next victim isn't his problem. Fiduciary law would call that a breach. Public safety should call it the same thing.
To be fair, critics of task force surges raise a real concern about scope creep, pointing to reporting that a small share of Memphis arrests were for violent offenses specifically, with most tied to lower-level charges and traffic stops. That's worth watching, and any operation this size needs oversight to keep officers targeting actual threats rather than padding arrest totals. But that critique is an argument for better metrics, not for pulling federal agents out of a city where murder is down by double digits. Don't let a fair process complaint become cover for a return to the status quo that got Memphis labeled the nation's most crime-ridden city in the first place.
I’ve coached hurdlers. The whole event is built on clearing obstacles between the athlete and the finish line, not adding more of them. Sanctuary policy does the opposite. It puts a legal hurdle between a law enforcement agency that has already done the work of identifying a threat and the community that threat is about to walk back into. Every detainer California refuses to honor is a hurdle we built on purpose, and somebody's kid pays the entry fee.
The fix isn't complicated. Condition federal law enforcement grant funding on honoring ICE detainers for anyone already convicted of a violent or sexual offense. Give county sheriffs, not state legislators in Sacramento, the final call on cooperating with a federal detainer, since they're the ones who answer to the communities where these people get released. And prioritize the "worst of the worst" list first, as Secretary Mullin's DHS has been doing weekend after weekend, so limited enforcement resources go where the risk is highest.
Vito Corleone had a line about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. That works fine until the enemy is living two doors down because the local DA and the state legislature decided cooperation with federal law enforcement was optional. It isn't. It never should have been.
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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