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Irresponsible leftists inside and outside the press corps have been working overtime lately to advance the idea that violent law-breaking is justified when a duly elected president implements lawful immigration policies which they oppose. It is not. A related and equally outrageous sentiment—broadcast loudly on the Grammys last weekend—holds that enforcement of U.S. immigration law is per se illegitimate. The great news of the day is that even a sharp critic of White House immigration policy is willing to break from her political comrades and suggest local officials should be doing more to assist federal law enforcement in keeping violent criminals off American streets. In the 2025 photograph at the top of this page, Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton appears at an immigration processing center. She was there to protest ICE activities in the Chicago area. Her differences with Donald Trump are too numerous to count. But thank goodness despite these differences she is unwilling to abandon all common sense for the sake of “resistance.” “Illinois should consider pragmatic tweaks to its sanctuary law,” is the encouraging headline on an editorial today in the Chicago Tribune, which reports: On Wednesday, we hosted Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton to discuss her run to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the first of the three major candidates for that office to meet with the editorial board. During the discussion, Stratton said something that frankly surprised us. We asked her about Illinois’ sanctuary law, the Trust Act signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2017, and how it bars state officials from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to begin the process of deportation of undocumented individuals incarcerated in our prisons for
violent crimes, as they’re being released back out onto the streets. (The existing exception in the law to that prohibition is if ICE has a judicial warrant for the prisoner’s arrest. But that’s a rarity, we’re told.) “I’ve always taken the position that if there’s somebody who’s a threat to public safety and convicted of a violent crime, that’s something that we would cooperate with,” she told us. “So if there needs to be some sort of amendment, I would not be opposed to that.”
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