A former senior law enforcement adviser to the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security says sanctuary city policies are directly responsible for the escalating use-of-force incidents during ICE operations, a charge that puts the blame squarely on local politicians who refuse to cooperate with federal agents.
Charles Marino, who served as a DHS Senior Law Enforcement Adviser under President Obama, appeared on NewsNation's "Elizabeth Vargas Reports" on Monday and laid out a blunt case against sanctuary jurisdictions. Every city where recent ICE shootings have made headlines, Marino said, operates under sanctuary policies that bar local police from working alongside federal immigration agents, even in a support role that has nothing to do with enforcing immigration law.
The result, Marino argued, is a predictable and avoidable pattern: ICE agents roll up in unmarked cars, wearing no uniforms, with no marked police vehicles on scene. The people they encounter have no way of knowing who is confronting them. And with no visible law enforcement deterrence, situations spiral toward force faster than they should.
Marino's comments came after host Elizabeth Vargas referenced several recent cases, including incidents involving individuals named Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as shootings in Maine and Texas, though the broadcast did not provide detailed accounts of those cases. Marino responded on air by connecting them all to one common thread: sanctuary policy.
"All the examples you just gave in terms of locations, including this one in Austin, are all sanctuary cities. So, what's happening, Elizabeth, is, you don't have state or local law enforcement on the scene when these incidents are actually occurring, because they're prevented by local politicians from working alongside ICE, even though they may not be directly enforcing immigration law, they're not there on the scene at all."
He went further, describing the operational vacuum that sanctuary rules create. Without uniformed officers, marked cruisers, or any visible police presence, ICE agents operate in conditions that practically guarantee confusion and confrontation.
"I think, in my opinion, this creates many of the dangerous situations that we see unfolding here, where we've got deadly use of force being used more and more, because there's no uniformed presence, there's no deterrence, there [are] no marked police vehicles, for example, so, many of these subjects aren't sure in the first place who's engaging them from the beginning. These are unmarked cars, unmarked agents, and so, they're not really sure, it's creating the perfect storm."
That phrase, "the perfect storm", captures the core of Marino's argument. Sanctuary politicians strip away every tool that would make an enforcement encounter safer for everyone involved, and then express outrage when the encounter turns violent. Austin, one of the cities Marino singled out, has been the site of a recent ICE shooting that sparked street protests.
Marino also pointed to what he called the hypocrisy of sanctuary cities demanding involvement in use-of-force investigations after the fact. If a city bars its police from cooperating with ICE during operations, he argued, it has no standing to insert itself once something goes wrong.
"Now these cities want to be part of the investigation, but since they're not on the scene and they're not working with ICE, they really don't have any equities in being part of the investigation," Marino said during the broadcast.
That dynamic, refusing to participate in enforcement, then demanding oversight when enforcement gets messy, is a pattern that conservative critics of sanctuary policies have identified for years. Marino's credentials make the argument harder to dismiss. He is not a Trump appointee or a Republican operative. He served under Obama.
Earlier in the same broadcast, Marino also faulted the federal government, saying there is "a lack of transparency" from Washington on uses of force during immigration operations. His criticism cut in both directions, toward local politicians who hamstring enforcement and toward a federal apparatus that does not adequately account for what happens in the field.
Marino's argument gains weight when measured against real cases. In New York City, a Nicaraguan national named Daniel Davon-Bonilla entered the country illegally through Eagle Pass, Texas, on December 7, 2022. After a 2023 arrest for allegedly raping a woman at a La Quinta Hotel that had been converted into a migrant shelter, ICE placed an immigration detainer on him, a formal request that local authorities hold him for federal pickup.
New York City's sanctuary laws blocked cooperation. Davon-Bonilla spent a year at Rikers Island, but after his charges were downgraded to second-degree assault through a plea deal, reportedly because the victim did not want to testify, he walked free in June 2024. ICE was reportedly unaware he had been released, the New York Post reported.
He was later accused of raping another woman under the Coney Island boardwalk. Even Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged the system had failed.
"Laws do not allow us to coordinate with ICE, that's the law. I'm not happy about that," Adams said. "I think he's the poster child of what's wrong with not doing that coordination."
A DHS source was more direct: "They just won't honor detainers. ICE probably didn't know that the guy was released. The city council has made it absolutely impossible."
Cases like Davon-Bonilla's illustrate exactly what Marino described on NewsNation. Sanctuary policies do not just create dangerous conditions for ICE agents and the people they encounter during operations. They also create a revolving door that puts violent offenders back on the street, sometimes without federal authorities even knowing it happened.
The pattern Marino identified extends well beyond any single city. In Chicago, ICE operations have faced organized resistance from Illinois Democrats who have prioritized shielding illegal immigrants from federal agents over cooperating with law enforcement.
In Arizona, state officials have gone further still. The state attorney general privately coordinated with activist groups opposed to border security measures that voters had overwhelmingly supported, as reporting on AG Kris Mayes's coordination with an "Abolish ICE" organization revealed.
At the federal level, the Justice Department has responded to the cooperation gap by launching a $3 billion grant program designed to incentivize cities willing to partner with ICE on enforcement operations. The program's existence is itself an admission that voluntary cooperation has collapsed in dozens of major jurisdictions.
Marino did not discuss the grant program during his NewsNation appearance, but his argument tracks with the logic behind it. If local police were on scene, even in a non-enforcement support role, the visible presence of uniformed officers and marked vehicles would change the dynamic of every encounter. Subjects would know immediately that law enforcement was involved. The ambiguity that leads to resistance, flight, and force would diminish.
Sanctuary city defenders have long argued that cooperation with ICE chills immigrant communities' willingness to report crimes and interact with local police. Marino's rebuttal does not engage that argument on its own terms. Instead, he points to the operational reality: when local police are absent from the scene, ICE agents operate alone, in plain clothes, in unmarked vehicles, engaging people who may not understand what is happening. The conditions for deadly force multiply.
That is not a theoretical concern. Vargas's broadcast referenced multiple recent shootings across at least three states, Maine, Texas, and the Austin incident specifically. Marino tied every one of them to sanctuary policy. No specific casualty figures or detailed case narratives were discussed during the segment, but Marino's characterization that "deadly use of force" is being "used more and more" went unchallenged on air.
His demand for federal transparency on use-of-force data is worth noting. If the numbers bear out what Marino described, a rising trend of deadly force concentrated in sanctuary jurisdictions, the political implications are significant. Sanctuary advocates would own not just the policy, but the body count.
When politicians strip away every safeguard that makes law enforcement encounters safer, they do not get to act surprised when those encounters turn deadly, and they certainly do not get to blame the agents left operating alone in the dark.
