Congressional Republicans hammered the prosecutor of Virginia’s largest county Thursday during a House subcommittee hearing on criminal justice and immigration, the latest action targeting liberal local officials to attack broader Democratic policies.
What emerged during the more than two-hour-long hearing were two contrasting views of Fairfax County, with Republicans depicting the community of 1.1 million residents as a place whose leaders are willing to allow people in the country illegally get away with crimes while Democrats argued that local policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration officials keep residents safe.
“You’re a coward,” Rep. Brad Knott (R-North Carolina), a former prosecutor, told Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano (D) during the hearing, criticizing his office for dropping a case against a native of Honduras who had been accused of attempting to abduct a 4-year-old girl in 2023.
Descano tried to explain the lack of evidence that led to the decision, including the child’s mother not wanting her to have to testify, but Knott admonished him to “quit talking” and, moments later, to “be quiet.”
The clash came a week after the Justice Department, following news of several high-profile cases involving immigrants, announced it has launched an investigation into a long-standing policy in Descano’s office of considering the immigration consequences to defendants and their families in criminal cases. The policy mirrors others in blue jurisdictions and applies mainly to minor offenses. Republicans on the panel attempted to link it to cases in which alleged perpetrators of serious crimes escaped punishment.
One of the cases Republicans highlighted was that of Hyrum Baquedano-Rodriguez, the Honduran national who was accused of attempting to kidnap the girl after breaking into her family’s apartment. Baquedano-Rodriguez was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol after entering the United States in 2018, and a judge later released him on an immigration bond, according to the Department of Homeland Security. He had been convicted of six misdemeanor crimes in Fairfax County in the three years before his arrest on the abduction charge.
Descano’s office proposed two plea deals in the case, each calling for two years in prison, after it determined that a lack of evidence would make it hard to convict Baquedano-Rodriguez on charges that called for a longer prison sentence. Both plea deals were rejected by circuit court judges as too lenient. After the second ruling, Descano’s office dropped the charges entirely. That same day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Baquedano-Rodriguez as he was being released from jail.
“This is a great example of a case where — ” Descano said, attempting to explain to Knott the circumstances around his office’s decision.
“I’ve prosecuted cases,” Knott said, cutting in.
“Then you understand cases that don’t have strong evidence,” Descano said as Knott continued talking over him.
“When you dismiss a case, what happens to that defendant?” Knott said. “He walks free. A disgusting, perverted individual preying on children.”
The discussion didn’t delve into the details of the case, in which court transcripts show the victim’s mother told prosecutors she wanted to avoid having her then-6-year-old daughter relive the event to provide testimony. A thumb and palm print on a window were linked to Baquedano-Rodriguez, but footprints at the scene did not match shoes he was wearing when arrested.
“Prosecutors twice tried to convict the defendant of a felony and secure accountability on behalf of the victim, and we were disappointed with the judge’s decision to reject what we viewed as the best outcome available,” Laura Birnbaum, Descano’s chief of staff, said in an email after the hearing.
Republicans during the hearing tried to connect the case of Baquedano-Rodriguez and others to the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office’s policy of considering immigration consequences during prosecutions.
Other jurisdictions, including California, have adopted such policies, which are aimed at promoting commensurate consequences for citizens and immigrants convicted of similar crimes. “For the noncitizen defendant,” a 2020 advisory from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center says, “the consequences of a criminal conviction may include mandatory deportation, compulsory indefinite detention in an immigration facility, loss of a green card, inability to travel internationally, and preclusion from obtaining future immigration status such as a green card or U.S. citizenship.”
“Under certain circumstances, prosecutors may decide that these additional consequences are merited based on the characteristics of the case or the defendant,” the advisory says, “but often these consequences may be deemed excessive in light of the underlying offense.”
Descano’s office’s policy is that prosecutors must consider such consequences “where possible and where doing so accords with justice.”
In cases of violence or great harm to a victim, consideration of such consequences “will be minimal,” the policy says. It is aimed instead at cases “where the offense is less serious and there is no identifiable victim.” Prosecutors in these minor cases “have greater latitude in negotiating a resolution that takes adverse immigration consequences into account.”
Under the policy, the overall case resolution “will not be better than a resolution offered to a defendant that does not face such collateral issues,” it says.
Those nuances did not find their way into Thursday’s hearing, as Republicans took aim at a line on Descano’s campaign website from before he was first elected in 2019 that his office would “take immigration consequences into account when making charging and plea decisions.”
The hearing was part of a series of Republican congressional inquiries into local policies in Democratically controlled Northern Virginia counties.
Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D), the commonwealth’s attorney in nearby Arlington County, has been subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee over her office’s handling of alleged threats made to White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and his family.
Earlier this month, Dehghani-Tafti determined that there was “insufficient evidence” to conclude the Virginia activist who had shared Miller’s home address on fliers she passed out did so with intent to harass Miller. Proceeding with charges would violate the activist’s constitutionally protected free speech rights and “risk having a chilling effect on others wishing to engage in peaceful political protest,” the prosecutor wrote in a court document.
In Loudoun County, where there has been a backlash over policies related to transgender students, the school system superintendent was recently called to testify in another congressional committee hearing titled “Breaking Trust: Attacks on Parental Rights, Inappropriate Content, and Legal Abuses in America’s Schools.”
At Thursday’s hearing, Cheryl Minter testified about her daughter Stephanie Minter, 41, who was fatally stabbed at a Fairfax County bus stop in February by Abdul Jalloh, a native of Sierra Leone who federal officials say entered the United States illegally in 2012.
Before that incident, Jalloh had been arrested over 40 times since 2017 — including on suspicion of assault and battery, malicious wounding and rape. ICE took him into custody in 2018, but its officials said they were forced to release him after 702 days, following a judge’s ruling that he could not be removed to his home country.
He is now again in jail and faces a second-degree murder charge in Minter’s death.
“We can be a community that is both caring and responsible,” Minter told the committee. “We can have policies that protect people and also keep our streets safe. But that means we must act. We must listen when there are warnings.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle addressed Minter directly, offering condolences and thanking her for her courage in appearing.
“As the father of two daughters, I can’t imagine what you’re going through, what you will go through,” Knott told her. “And candidly, I would not be acting as civilly with some of the people you’re seated with had I suffered what you’ve had to endure.”
Also mentioned was the case of Israel Flores Ortiz, an 18-year-old native of El Salvador who was convicted in April of groping at least nine female classmates at Fairfax High School.
After Flores Ortiz was arrested, the Education Department launched an investigation into how Fairfax County Schools handled the allegations of assault. The school system launched its own inquiry into the incidents. A Circuit Court judge sentenced Flores Ortiz to nearly a year of detention for the misdemeanor charges.
Republicans brought up each case in the context of Descano’s policy, which Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called “unbelievable.”
“The Democrats can say all they want, ‘Well, why are we having another hearing?’ We’re having a hearing on this because this is the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard,” Jordan said.
His colleagues also attacked Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid (D) over a policy in her office that prohibits holding immigrant inmates beyond their sentences for ICE to retrieve them unless ordered to do so by a judge.
Democrats defended both officials, as each side used the county’s policies as a proxy for the broader debate over immigration reform.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York) accused Republicans of trying to distract from the Trump administration’s “reckless, chaotic, and inhumane immigration policies.”
“They want to shine a spotlight on Fairfax County, one of the safest places in the country for a county of its size,” Nadler said, “because they think it’s a good opportunity to engage in their favorite sport of fearmongering and demagoguery.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told the lawmakers they should be focused on broader immigration reform and urging the Trump administration to target serious criminals for deportation, rather than “racially profiling Americans at Home Depots” and “arresting spouses of U.S. citizens at green card interviews.”
“If illegal immigrants in Fairfax were their own city, it would have a lower homicide rate than 90 percent of America’s largest cities and lower than the country’s homicide rate overall,” Bier said. “Nationwide, illegal immigrants are half as likely to commit serious crimes for which they’re serving time as U.S.-born Americans.”
The hearing ended with an invitation for both sides to submit further testimony.
Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.
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