You've seen videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers struggling to apprehend illegal immigrants in Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country. Many of those immigrants have criminal records. The reason ICE struggles to detain them is that heavily Democratic jurisdictions, such as Minneapolis, specifically make it hard for immigration authorities to detain criminal illegal immigrants.

That's the point of sanctuary laws — to erect a barrier between the illegal immigrant and federal immigration law. In a more normal world, when a person who is in the country illegally and who has committed another crime is released from jail, local authorities would notify federal immigration officials, who would then pick up the illegal immigrant and put them on the path to deportation.

Not in sanctuary jurisdictions. Their laws, passed by Democratic local and state governments, forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. If ICE wants to deport a criminal who is in the country illegally, ICE will have to find them itself. That is what often leads to the scenes of ICE officers showing up in neighborhoods.

"There's a very simple remedy to [the troubles in Minneapolis]," Republican strategist Matt Gorman said on Fox News Sunday. "Let state and local law enforcement let ICE into the jails to get the worst of the worst out. This is happening because [local authorities] are not cooperating. ... The goal of Democrats is to make all this........

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