States That Cooperate With ICE Are Getting Results. The Others Are Getting Moral Credit.

What Cooperation Actually Produces

Memphis, Tennessee sits in Shelby County, a jurisdiction that has maintained active partnerships with federal law enforcement. In 2025, the city recorded a 27% decrease in overall Part I crimes, a 26% drop in murders, and a 48% reduction in carjackings [4]. Police Chief CJ Davis was careful not to attribute all of this progress to any single program — but the direction of travel is unambiguous. Memphis is measurably safer than it was a year ago. Now consider the alternative framework. Illinois has one of the most comprehensive sanctuary policies in the country. The Illinois Attorney General's guidance explicitly prohibits local law enforcement from allowing ICE agents even telephone access to individuals in custody [3]. The policy is coherently designed and sincerely implemented. It also correlates with an ICE arrest rate roughly one-fifth that of Texas. The question is not which approach is ideologically purer. The question is which one actually removes dangerous individuals from American communities — and on that measure, the data does not require interpretation. It requires acknowledgment.

The Washington Fight, Translated

What Democrats are negotiating for, stripped of the legal framing, is this: they want immigration enforcement to become slower, more documentable, more subject to pre-enforcement court review, and more geographically restricted. Warrant requirements for home entries would route routine enforcement through a judicial gatekeeping process that currently runs on administrative authority. Banning roving patrols would freeze agents in pre-approved locations while individuals they're looking for move freely. The body camera mandate — defensible as a standalone proposition — is bundled into a package architected to generate litigation material after the fact. Republicans are making the simpler argument: these agents are operating under existing law, and the political fallout from a fatal incident in Minneapolis should not rewrite the legal architecture of federal immigration enforcement wholesale. That is not an unreasonable position. It is, in fact, the position that a functioning government bound by duly enacted law is supposed to occupy. The two-week DHS extension was the right move. A full shutdown would have kept TSA agents working without pay while enforcement continued — a political mess with no policy dividend. But what comes next carries real consequences. If the Democrats' reform package passes in anything close to its current form, the federal government's practical ability to enforce immigration law in non-cooperative states essentially dissolves. The red-state, blue-state enforcement gap — already fivefold in some pairings — becomes a structural feature of federal law rather than a political accident. We will have written a de facto two-tier immigration system into statute while congratulating ourselves for defending civil liberties.

What Conservatives Should Actually Want

Here is the honest version of the conservative position: consistent standards, operational effectiveness, and accountability mechanisms that don't paralyze the agencies they regulate. If ICE agents need clearer use-of-force training, that is a legitimate policy conversation, not a Democratic talking point. If body cameras are going to be required — and there is a reasonable case for them — the footage should be available to the public, not just to plaintiffs' attorneys building civil cases. But the baseline — that federal law applies uniformly across all fifty states, that local cooperation with enforcement is a legal obligation rather than an optional civic gesture, and that a prior criminal record does not evaporate because a jurisdiction has declared itself a sanctuary — is not on the table. That is not a partisan position. It is the constitutional order. The data makes the argument. States that enforce the law are producing results. States that resist enforcement are producing policy positions. Both can be true simultaneously, and only one of them is doing the work. We just have to be willing to cite the numbers out loud.