The immigration fight and the Second Amendment fight are the same fight. I have been hammering this point for years, and this week a Florida sheriff gave one of the clearest explanations I have ever seen for why sanctuary-city non-cooperation with ICE is not only lawless — it is physically dangerous to Americans and a deliberate political strategy to undermine every constitutional right we hold.
The Mechanics Non-Cooperating Officials Want You to Miss
Here is how ICE enforcement is supposed to work when a local agency plays by the rules. Local law enforcement arrests someone. That person goes into custody — a county lockup, a city jail, a state facility. If that person is an illegal alien, ICE issues an administrative detainer under the 287(g) program, 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g), asking the holding agency to notify ICE and hold the individual up to 48 hours so agents can take custody.
That’s it. ICE drives quietly to the jail. No public spectacle. No street confrontations. No screaming on camera. The detainee walks from one cell to another. He gets processed into federal custody and ultimately deported. Clean, safe, simple.
What sanctuary-city officials do instead is refuse those detainers. They release the detainee back into the public — back onto the streets — where he can and does commit additional crimes against Americans. And now ICE has to send twenty agents to arrest him on a public sidewalk, with all the accompanying confrontations, safety risks, and manufactured outrage.
The disorder you’re seeing in Minnesota, Los Angeles, Illinois, and Portland is not caused by the Trump administration. It is manufactured by the elected officials in those cities and states who ordered non-cooperation in the first place.
Sheriff Judd Put the Numbers on the Table
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd laid it out in a recent press conference, and the numbers are striking. Of illegal immigrants his department has detained, 74% had criminal charges beyond their immigration status. The remaining 26% were, in his words, “collaterals” — found in the same vehicle or at the same scene.
“Three out of four of them have committed another criminal charge. Now, think about that for a second. They couldn’t commit that crime if they weren’t here, but they did.”
His department has arrested 557 individuals this year alone with criminal charges on top of their illegal presence. These are not hypotheticals. These are active criminals being cycled back into American communities by sanctuary policies.
Judd also explained exactly why ICE has flooded into blue metros with large deployments:
“The reason that you see ICE flooding into Minnesota and Minneapolis and into Los Angeles, into these big cities, is because they refuse to turn over the illegal immigrants who are being arrested by the local police department where there’s outstanding ICE warrants.”
You do not see that in Florida because Florida cooperates. No mass ICE operations in Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa, or Orlando. The 287(g) agreements work. The detainees move from state custody to federal custody without incident.
Virginia’s Day One Signal
The day before I recorded this, Abigail Spanberger was inaugurated as Governor of Virginia. Her very first act in office — not a jobs bill, not a public-safety measure, not anything remotely pro-citizen — was an executive order terminating Virginia’s 287(g) agreements with ICE, including those held by the Virginia State Police and the Virginia Department of Corrections.
Think about what that signals. The first executive act of a new governor is to order state law enforcement to stop cooperating with federal agents enforcing immigration law. This is not a governing philosophy. This is a deliberate choice about who your constituency is.
And the answer is: not Virginians.
The Second Amendment Connection You Cannot Ignore
My overall thesis remains what it has always been: the most important long-term threat to the Second Amendment is not a bad district court ruling or a hostile circuit panel. It is demographic and political replacement on a scale large enough to permanently shift the Senate, the House, and ultimately the Supreme Court.
If blue states succeed in importing and retaining a non-citizen and recently naturalized population that has zero cultural investment in the American tradition of individual rights — including the right to keep and bear arms — they will eventually have the Senate votes to confirm justices who will gut every favorable Second Amendment ruling of the last twenty years in a single term. Ketanji Brown Jackson on a packed Court, with four or five like-minded colleagues, ends the Second Amendment as a judicially enforceable right. Full stop.
No amount of good Second Amendment litigation wins that fight. This is why sanctuary-city policy is a Second Amendment issue. The left understands the math even if many in our community do not.
Florida is proof that the alternative works. Cooperation with federal law enforcement, enforcement of existing law, and a clear message that criminal alien activity will not be tolerated — that is the model. Every state that chooses the opposite is making a deliberate bet that the political payoff of non-enforcement outweighs the cost of American victims.
That bet is being made with your safety and your rights as the collateral.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.