After being presented with piles of evidence showing his office systematically allows violent criminal illegal aliens back on the street, Steve Descano, the George Soros-backed Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney, continued to claim his office does everything in its power to prosecute them properly.
Descano testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement in a hearing titled “Fairfax County, Virginia: The Dangerous Consequences of Sanctuary Policies,” alongside Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, former Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, Cheryl Minter, the mother of a woman murdered by an illegal, and others.
In a heated exchange with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, regarding Descano’s preferential treatment of illegals in sentencing — requiring that their immigration status be considered in a way that will protect them from deportation — Descano claimed the promise to shield illegals was merely an empty campaign promise.
“I didn’t realize people were so obtuse that they could not realize what the difference between a campaign statement and an actual office policy is,” Descano said. “We’re not protecting undocumented individuals, we prosecute people who commit crimes in Fairfax County regardless of their status.”
However, a since-deleted portion of Descano’s website, which had been up for six years until last week when he was asked to testify, stated, “Our office will take immigration consequences into account when making prosecuting decisions. … If two people commit the same crime, but only one’s punishment includes deportation, that’s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of the values of Fairfax County.”
Descano refused to answer how many times his office took immigration status into account when reducing the sentences of violent illegal aliens, but maintained that there was a difference between what his campaign website said and his office’s official policy.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, confronted Descano with his office’s official policy, which reads nearly the exact same way.
The guidelines for plea bargaining, charging decisions, and sentencing, signed by Descano himself, state, “Although not outcome determinative, prosecutors shall consider: (i) the collateral immigration consequences of the specific crime(s) the defendant is charged with, and (ii) the detrimental impact that deportation/removal has on the families and communities those removed or deported leave behind.”
That policy is in line with the county’s “public trust and confidentiality policy,” which allows illegal aliens in Fairfax to “access county benefits and services without fear that the information they share will be disclosed to federal immigration officials.”
Shielding illegal aliens is necessary, Descano argued, because 30 percent of residents of Fairfax County are immigrants, and their testimony is needed to obtain convictions. David Bier of the Cato Institute said that 20 percent of Fairfax’s residents are “here illegally or lives in a household of someone here illegally.”
Descano’s lack of prosecutions makes Fairfax a coveted location for illegal aliens to live and commit crime, Miyares said, adding, “transnational gangs understand that they are in a sanctuary. They can operate with impunity.” That is why sanctuary county Fairfax has about 200,000 illegal aliens, and next door Loudoun only has about 25,000.
Of the seven homicides in the county last year, three were committed by illegal aliens, according to subcommittee chairman Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
Descano kept stressing the “not outcome determinative” part of his policy as proof his office does not give preferential treatment to illegal aliens, but he was presented with an endless litany of cases where his office dropped charges and reduced sentences of violent illegals for inexplicable reasons.
One such case was the stabbing death of Stephanie Minter by Abdul Jalloh, an illegal alien from Sierra Leone. Jalloh, who had been illegally in the United States since 2022, had a long criminal history in a relatively short period of time, including trespass, disorderly conduct, drugs, theft, larceny, and multiple malicious wounding arrests. In a three-year span between 2023 and 2026, he had been arrested 18 times.
Descano dismissed nearly all of the charges against him, allowing him to roam free, and Jalloh ultimately kill Minter, whose mother also testified before the subcommittee.
“Stephanie Minter is not an isolated tragedy,” Miyares said. “She is the most recent and visible name and a documented and ongoing pattern of preventable crimes, a pattern with a single common cause, the sanctuary policies of Fairfax County.”
He called Descano’s policies “a deliberate choice to put a violent criminal back on the street” and listed numerous other examples:
In December 2025, a man was shot and killed inside his own home in Reston — one day after Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, a criminal illegal alien from El Salvador, was released from jail despite an active ICE detainer. He had prior arrests for aggravated assault of a police officer. Fairfax refused to hold him. He killed a man the very next day. A single phone call from Fairfax to ICE would have saved that man’s life.
In November 2024, a woman was raped on a hiking trail in Herndon — days after her attacker was released from jail following a felony assault charge reduction made without consulting police. The ICE detainer was ignored. She became his next victim.
A four-year-old girl was nearly abducted in the middle of the night by an illegal alien who broke into her bedroom. Charges were reduced progressively over eighteen months — down to a misdemeanor — and then dropped entirely.
In July 2024, two illegal aliens stabbed a man to death at a park in Oakton. ICE had lodged multiple detainers on one of the suspects that Fairfax County refused to honor. He was released back into the community. Then he killed.
In the last several weeks — girls as young as thirteen were groped repeatedly in the hallways of a Fairfax County high school by an illegal alien enrolled as a student. ICE asked that he be held. Fairfax refused.
Gill mentioned a case where an illegal alien raped a child and Descano’s office reduced felony charges to the misdemeanor of consensual sex with a child 15 years and older.
“It’s not just the failure to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, it is a conscious decision by Steve Descano to under-prosecute crimes over and over again,” Miyares said.
Kincaid, for her part, claims she does not have it in the budget to make a simple phone call to ICE when she has an illegal alien in her custody.
When asked by Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., whether Kincaid or Descano will honor ICE detainers, both refused to answer definitively, and Kincaid said it would have to come in the form of a judicial warrant, which is not the legal standard, Cline noted, having worked in another Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office.
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Descano for preferential treatment of violent illegal aliens.
