A former senior law enforcement adviser to the Obama-era Department of Homeland Security says sanctuary city policies are "creating the perfect storm" for dangerous, sometimes fatal encounters between ICE agents and the people they are trying to arrest.
Charles Marino, who served as a DHS Senior Law Enforcement Adviser under the Obama administration, appeared on NewsNation's "Elizabeth Vargas Reports" on Monday and laid out a blunt case: when local politicians bar their police departments from cooperating with federal immigration agents, they strip away the visible, uniformed presence that keeps volatile encounters from turning deadly.
The result, Marino argued, is a growing number of enforcement scenes where ICE agents arrive in unmarked cars, wearing no uniforms, carrying no marked police vehicles, and the subjects of those operations have no idea who is confronting them. That confusion, he said, is getting people hurt.
Marino's comments came during a segment that touched on several recent ICE-related shooting incidents, including cases involving individuals identified as Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as shootings in Maine and Texas. Host Elizabeth Vargas raised those cases before turning to Marino for analysis. Specific details of each incident were not discussed at length during the segment.
Marino connected them all with a single thread: sanctuary city policies. He pointed to Austin as one of the locations at issue and told Vargas that every example she cited fell within a sanctuary jurisdiction.
"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."
That absence matters operationally, Marino explained, because uniformed officers and marked squad cars serve as a built-in deterrent. Without them, ICE agents work alone in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles. Suspects do not know whether the people approaching them are federal officers or someone else entirely.
"So, what does that do? 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."
Marino also took aim at what he described as a contradiction in the sanctuary cities' posture. After declining to participate in ICE operations, those same jurisdictions now want to investigate the use-of-force incidents that follow.
His assessment was direct: cities that refuse to put officers alongside ICE have forfeited their standing to second-guess the outcomes.
"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 also pointed to what he called "a lack of transparency" from the federal government on uses of force, suggesting the problem runs in both directions. He did not name specific reports or data that the government had withheld, and no further detail on that claim was provided during the broadcast.
Marino's argument rests on a straightforward chain of cause and effect. Sanctuary policies prohibit local and state law enforcement from working with ICE, even in a support role that does not involve directly enforcing immigration law. That prohibition removes uniformed officers, marked vehicles, and the deterrence they carry from the scene. ICE agents then operate alone, in plain clothes, approaching people who may not recognize them as law enforcement. Confrontations escalate. Force gets used.
He did not cite specific statistics on how many use-of-force incidents have occurred or how sharply they have risen, relying instead on the general claim that deadly force is "being used more and more." No specific ordinances or pieces of legislation were named during the segment.
But the framework Marino described is not complicated. Local leaders chose to keep their officers away from federal immigration enforcement. The foreseeable consequence, federal agents operating without visible police backup in tense, fast-moving encounters, arrived. And now those same leaders want oversight of the results.
Sanctuary cities wanted no part of the work. They should not be surprised they got no part of the safety net that comes with it.
