by James A. Bacon

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) maps cities, counties, and states across the country whose practices obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Types of obstruction include not complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

According to CIS mapping data, Virginia has one of the largest clusters in the country of non-cooperating law-enforcement authorities.

“It is alarming to see the continued proliferation of sanctuary policies, especially in places like Virginia, where ICE has had to use its scarce resources to re-arrest violent gang members and rapists in our communities who were set free by local jails, when they should have been transferred directly to ICE custody for a plane ride home,” said Jessica Vaughan, CIS director of policy studies, to The Washington Times.

Vaughan cited Fairfax County, where the jail has repeatedly released illegal immigrants accused of having sex with young teenage girls, writes The Times. One Honduran man, arrested for a child sex crime last summer, was released by the county, and then picked up earlier this year on four more child sex crime counts.

“There have been some extremely dangerous deportable criminal aliens who have been released by jails who could have been turned over to ICE, who have created danger in Virginia communities,” she said.

Bacon’s bottom line: I’m shocked. And when I say I’m shocked, it’s not as in Claude Rains in Casablanca saying “I’m- shocked-shocked-to-find-that-gambling-is-going-on-in-here way.” I’m genuinely astonished.

Well, not that I’m shocked to hear about Fairfax County letting repeat sex offenders escape the ICE dragnet. That’s par for the course where the political class extends sympathy to members of a victim class like illegal residents from Honduras… although not to the victims of the victim, likely all of whom are girls of similar Honduran immigrant background.

But I am shocked to see from the map so many localities in red-state territory from Hanover County to Campbell County.

I have not yet escalated my reaction to these findings from “shocked” to “outraged” because I’m not sure what’s going on.

Drill into the limited data available in the mapping system and you’ll see that most “county” noncooperation actually stems from regional jail systems — the Pamunkey Regional Jail System in the case of Hanover, and the Blue Ridge Regional Jail System in the case of Hanover.

It is inconceivable to me that so many Virginia localities outside Northern Virginia and blue-voting cities are uncooperative with federal immigration authorities. I wonder if what we’re seeing here is an artifact of how ICE collects and reports the data that Vaughan is drawing from.

Surely someone in the Governor’s Office or Attorney General’s Office would want to find out if we’re looking at a statistical mirage or widespread noncooperation with federal immigration authorities, which, if it is what it seems in the CIS map, would provoke genuine outrage.