Virginia Dems Treat Criminals Like Constituents And Constituents Like Criminals
By Breccan F. Thies
Virginia Democrats have been in total control of the state for less than a week and one of their primary focuses has been to protect criminals generally and illegal immigrants specifically, even illegals who commit crimes in addition to being in the country unlawfully.
One of the first things Gov. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., did when she took office in Richmond was to repeal an executive order from her predecessor, Republican Glenn Youngkin. The order had directed state and local law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration enforcement agencies. “State and local law enforcement should not be required to divert their limited resources to enforce federal civil immigration laws,” Spanberger said about signing Executive Order 10.
While Spanberger characterized the decision as being driven by “limited resources,” her actions — and those of other Democrats — indicate that they want Virginia to be overrun with even more illegals. But Virginia Democrats also appear bent on pursuing a policy of helping aliens get away with crimes.
“We know how it is in Northern Virginia with some of our prosecutors out there who want to look the other way and coddle criminals,” Virginia House of Delegates Minority Leader Terry Kilgore said. “Folks need to be able to walk their street at night without fear of being either shot or kidnapped or raped. It’s a wrong way to move with public safety in Virginia. When Gov. Youngkin had the agreement, we were able to catch all those MS 13 gang members up in Northern Virginia. If we’re not cooperating with ICE, folks are going to get harmed in Virginia.”
There is only one county in northern Virginia — Loudoun — that acts on ICE detainers, and it is something Sheriff Michael Chapman said he plans to maintain despite the Democrat takeover in Richmond.
“We’re still going to honor ICE detainers,” Chapman told ABC 7 News earlier in January. “I can tell you this because, as you know, in Fairfax, they let somebody out who had an ICE detainer, and within a day, committed a homicide or allegedly committed a homicide. We don’t want that to happen in Loudon County. We want to do everything we can in Loudon County to keep our citizens safe.”
Spanberger’s executive order repeal is hardly the only Democrat move upending law and order. A bill from Democrat Del. Katrina Callsen would go even further than the catch-and-release style “law enforcement” practiced in Democrat-run counties by banning the civil arrest of illegal aliens attending unrelated matters at courthouses.
While not explicitly mentioning illegals or Third World imports hellbent on defrauding American taxpayers, like the Somalis in Minnesota, Democrat Del. Jessica Anderson introduced a bill that would block state agencies from requiring nonprofits to prove eligibility for receiving taxpayer dollars. In other words, the measure effectively removes any barrier to fraud and ensures such fraud is untraceable.
In another suspect piece of Democrat legislation, those who make frivolous “hate crime” accusations in Virginia could be protected under a bill from Del. Laura Jane Cohen. The legislation would allow the accuser to hide his identity at all levels of legal proceedings, a concerning development in light of the numerous hate crime hoaxes perpetrated in recent years.
For Virginians, the brutal reality is that all criminals are going to have it easier under the new Democrat regime. As The Federalist reported, one bill introduced would remove all mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting law enforcement, the possession and distribution of child pornography, and repeat violent felonies.
Another bill, offered by Del. Vivian Watts, would reduce punishment and sentencing for robbery and retroactively make it easier for those already in prison for robbery to get out of prison. Not only that, but the act would consider certain types of robbery somehow nonviolent by “limiting the types of robbery that are included in the definition of ‘acts of violence’ to the two higher degrees of robbery.” It would also limit “the application of the three-strikes law to the two higher degrees of robbery and making persons convicted under the three-strikes law eligible for parole if one of the three convictions resulting in the mandatory life sentence would constitute one of the two lesser degrees of robbery.”
In an apparent attempt to cover up the crime that will almost certainly rise as a result of Democrat policies, a bill from state Sen. Mamie Locke would kickstart a process to transfer juvenile crime from the purview of the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security to the Department of Health and Human Services. In so doing, juvenile crime would seemingly be categorized as a public health issue as opposed to a crime issue, a potentially dangerous move considering the degree to which roving gangs of teenagers assaulting innocent people have terrorized neighboring Washington, D.C.
The “working group” the bill creates to develop a timeline for the transfer would consist of “representatives from civil liberty organizations, organizations engaged in the daily work of youth justice and violence prevention, formerly incarcerated persons and their families, and mental health experts.”
Criminal sentencing may become more lenient in other ways under legislation like Del. Sam Rasoul’s bill that would protect serial criminals by prohibiting the state from mentioning prior convictions to a jury during the “guilt phase” of a trial.
State Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim, a man from Bangladesh who now represents part of Northern Virginia, wants to allow judges to ban all electronic devices of any kind in district and circuit courtrooms. Given the number of judges letting career violent criminals off the hook across the country, resulting in the injuries and deaths of countless people, it is not unlikely that such a measure would be used to shield those judges from public scrutiny.
Even if someone actually ends up getting convicted of a crime and punished for it, Sen. Angelina Williams Graves introduced a bill limiting the time period in which the state can collect court fines and costs, reducing it from 30 or 60 years from the date of the offense to just 10 years, whereafter the debt vanishes.
While Democrats are reducing sentences and generally undermining law and order in Virginia, governments there still need to make revenue from law enforcement. So Democrats seem interested in taking a page out of the playbooks leftist state and municipalities: They tolerate all crime, but still want money, so they become authoritarian in the policing of traffic violations.
To this end Williams Graves introduced a bill to authorize the use of speed, stop sign, and “pedestrian crossing” cameras “in school crossing zones, highway work zones, and high-risk speed corridors for purposes of recording pedestrian crossing and stop sign violations.”
Because Democrats want to ignore most real crimes and reduce consequences for them, they will turn their focus to people who drive five miles per hour above the speed limit instead. Virginia is becoming a microcosm of leftist “law enforcement”: Protect criminals and make passive income from a side-gig of authoritarian crackdowns on upright citizens.
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