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FIRST ON FOX: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is ratcheting up his crackdown against sanctuary jurisdictions across the country.
Jordan is sending subpoenas to district attorneys in Boulder, Colorado, and Fairfax, Virginia, accusing both of giving “preferential treatment” to “criminal aliens” when weighing whether and how to prosecute wrongdoing.
“Despite repeated requests for responsive documents and communications, you have not produced a single document. Accordingly, because you have failed to comply with the Committee’s requests, the Committee is serving compulsory process,” he wrote in separate letters to Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano and Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty, both obtained by Fox News Digital.
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“Your office’s lenient treatment of foreign national criminals endangers communities and ensures that criminal aliens escape both criminal and immigration accountability for their actions.”
Jordan’s committee has for weeks investigated district attorneys who have been accused of taking immigration status into account when pursuing criminal complaints, even when the alleged crime has nothing to do with the suspect’s legal status.
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Descano, in particular, has recently made headlines after the stabbing death of 41-year-old U.S. citizen Stephanie Minter, whose accused killer came to the U.S. illegally from Sierra Leone in 2012. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the man had been arrested over 30 times before Minter’s killing.
Descano, who has led the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office since January 2020, issued plea bargaining guidance that year saying prosecutors should “consider immigration consequences where possible” and consider “the collateral immigration consequences of the specific crime(s) the defendant is charged with,” according to local outlet WTOP News.
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Descano’s office told Fox News Digital in response to Jordan’s subpoena, “We are disappointed by the Committee’s needless escalation of this matter, part of a partisan siege on Fairfax County residents and their values that does nothing to improve public safety.”
“For the last eight months, CA Descano has engaged in good faith with the House Judiciary Committee’s inquiries, providing over 1,100 pages of documents as well as voluntarily testifying to answer the Committee’s questions. We will continue to respond to legitimate inquiries from the Committee,” the office said. “Despite this political sideshow, the office remains focused on keeping Fairfax County one of the safest large communities in the country.”
Meanwhile, Dougherty recently lost his Democratic primary campaign to be attorney general of the state of Colorado.
He told Boulder Reporting Lab in May that Jordan’s probe was “political theater that ignores serious failures within the federal immigration system.”
The city of Boulder issued an ordinance in January 2017, after President Donald Trump was elected, directing government employees not to work with federal immigration authorities or “inquire into a person’s immigration status.”
Boulder and Fairfax counties are known as a sanctuary jurisdictions, meaning local law enforcement is not bound to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
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Jordan’s probe is being conducted alongside Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., who chairs the Judiciary panel’s subcommittee on immigration enforcement.
Jordan previously told Fox News Digital that he would not rule out subpoenas if the district attorneys did not comply with Republicans’ requests for information.
“There’s a process we always go through. We ask for things, we ask again, we explain why, we work with their office — in some cases their counsel — and back and forth,” he said in late August. “And then if we have to use subpoenas, we certainly will do that … but we want to know the facts.”
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