DEFUND THE CHAOS: Congress Finally Pulls the Pin on Sanctuary City Funding

Here is a civics lesson your senator apparently cannot grasp: if a city refuses to cooperate with federal immigration law, it should not receive federal money. Enter H.R. 7640, the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act, advanced 22-11 by the House Judiciary Committee on March 6, 2026. Any jurisdiction refusing to honor ICE detainers, blocking jail access, or withholding immigration status information loses federal funding. No waivers. No carve-outs. No exemptions for the sanctuary snowflake circuit.

Democrats cried Tenth Amendment blackmail. Wrong on both counts — the word and the history. This is conditioning, the same mechanism the Supreme Court endorsed unanimously in South Dakota v. Dole (1987). The constitutional rule is elegantly simple: you want voluntary federal cash, then stop sabotaging federal law. Refusing to take the money is always an option. California is welcome to try. Tony Soprano had more constitutional standing than California’s sanctuary mayors, and at least Tony understood the terms of his arrangement.

The numbers are not ambiguous, and they are not spin. Sanctuary jurisdictions ignored 17,864 ICE detainers on criminal aliens in 2025. DHS flagged California for potentially releasing 33,179 criminal aliens from state jails — murderers, sex offenders, traffickers — individuals with active charges or convictions on record. And because local governments refuse to hand off at the jail door, ICE street arrests have surged fivefold in Northern California. That is not compassionate policy. That is operational chaos wearing a humanitarian disguise.

I have watched California implode since 1990, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson ran a state that still resembled a functioning government. Today, my family office clients — patient, sophisticated, long-horizon money — are quietly relocating to states that still believe in cause and effect. Capital flows away from chaos. It always has. It always will. Sacramento has spent three decades making the point empirically.

The humanitarian counterargument deserves a direct response rather than a talking-point dismissal. One can acknowledge that immigration enforcement involves difficult human circumstances while recognizing that shielding convicted murderers, sex offenders, and traffickers from federal law is not compassion — it is a political liability that has been rebranded as a moral principle. The rebranding does not change the underlying facts.

The 287(g) program, which authorizes local law enforcement to partner directly with ICE, now operates in 1,493 jurisdictions across 40 states. GAO program assessments have found no documented crime increase in participating communities. The trust-with-community argument that sanctuary advocates lean on has not materialized in the jurisdictions that have chosen federal cooperation. Cooperation works. Sanctuary produces exactly the operational chaos it claims to prevent.

The fix is straightforward: pass H.R. 7640 and tie every relevant federal grant — justice assistance, homeland security, community development block grants — to full detainer compliance and real-time information sharing. Expand 287(g) nationwide with mandatory enrollment for any jurisdiction receiving federal public safety dollars. Apply DOGE-level forensic scrutiny to every dollar flowing into non-compliant jurisdictions. Add term limits and a congressional stock trading ban so the career politicians who manufactured this dysfunction cannot spend another thirty years profiting from the crisis they refuse to solve.

Three decades advising family offices and ultra-high-net-worth clients has trained a specific discipline: follow the outcomes, not the press release. Sanctuary policy has been a press release for thirty years. The documented outcomes — thousands of criminal releases, fivefold surges in street enforcement activity, populations and tax bases migrating to states that still believe laws are meant to be enforced — are the real data. At some point the data has to matter more than the narrative. H.R. 7640 is the legislation that makes it matter.

Ronald Reagan understood peace through strength. The same logic applies inside the borders as clearly as it does beyond them. H.R. 7640 is the first sensible immigration enforcement legislation of the decade. Pass it. Fund compliance. Defund the chaos. The bake sale circuit will have to carry the sanctuary cities from here.