Conservative take on sanctuary cities, ICE detainers, and a telling CNN moment where Ana Navarro, without meaning to, described how cooperation with ICE actually works.
Television panels can do weird things to smart people and also let not-so-smart takes slip into plain sight. Sometimes someone says something offhand and it lands as a precise description of a problem conservatives have been pointing out for years. This piece walks through that CNN moment and explains why the detainer system matters, and why sanctuary policies are the real policy choice driving the chaos.
We all know how debates can get tangled when participants pretend not to know basic facts. As one observer put it, “It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.” That line captures the pattern perfectly: obfuscation instead of honest policy discussion.
On a recent CNN panel Ana Navarro was talking about ICE, immigration, and the unrest in Minnesota when she made a blunt, accurate point about how detainers work. She described speaking with a police chief and laid out how ICE could be at county jails and take custody of undocumented people when they finish their sentences. The simplicity of the fact is precisely the point conservatives make: cooperation makes removals straightforward.
“I spoke to a police chief, a very experienced, respected police chief today. And I asked him, could ICE be at the county jail, because the state prisons we all agree is doing, is putting a detainer, is handing them over to ICE. Could ICE agents be at the door of the county jail? And when an undocumented immigrant has served their time or is released, could they grab him? Yes, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that,” Navarro said.
New York City Council Republican leader Joe Borelli reacted as any clear-thinking person would, saying exactly what this system is designed to do: “That’s what a detainer is … That’s what we’re talking about.” His exasperation is what many voters feel when city leaders act like detainers are some new, mysterious weapon instead of a routine administrative tool.
Navarro went on to note that detainee names in county jails are public, and that media or anyone could find out who is scheduled for release and whether they have immigration issues. She argued that placing a couple of ICE agents at a jail door would be far cheaper than citywide chaos. That logic is plain and practical: follow the paperwork and the system works.
“The names of the people who are detained in a county jail are public information,” Navarro said. “Anybody in the media can get them. Any of us can get those names. So they could run those names, know who is here illegally, if there’s anybody illegally, know when their sentence is up. And yes, you know what? It would be a lot less costly to the businesses in Minneapolis, to the city of Minneapolis, to us as taxpayers if they put two ICE agents at the door of the county jail than if they have 3,000 agents terrorizing and occupying an American city.”
Her words nailed the conservative argument: sanctuary policies are an active choice to block removals, not an accidental side effect. When local officials refuse to honor detainers, criminals who should be deported are released back into neighborhoods, creating a real, predictable public safety problem. That is not complicated policy jargon; it’s basic responsibility and law enforcement coordination.
ICE has existed since 2003 and prior administrations routinely worked with local jails to process detainers and deportations. That cooperation used to be a bipartisan, routine administrative task. The sharp change is political: many Democratic-run cities now resist that routine, and the resistance explains why ICE and CBP must track people down later, often at greater cost and danger to the public.
Where sanctuary policy exists, the practical consequence is simple: law-abiding residents see the breakdown in enforcement and adjust. Gun stores reporting higher sales when officials side with mobs over the rule of law is an unsurprising reaction. People prepare to defend themselves when political leaders choose not to protect neighborhoods.
The larger political choice is obvious to voters: either cities honor detainers and let ICE do its job, or they create a vacuum where crime and disorder grow. The former is orderly, legal, and cheap. The latter is chaotic and expensive, and it forces federal agencies to resort to the kind of large-scale operations Democrats loudly complain about while refusing the straightforward fix that would avoid them.
This is not some esoteric debate about rare exceptions. It is a clear trade-off between enforcing immigration law and shielding people from federal custody for political reasons. Saying detained criminals should be protected from deportation requires contortions of logic that most voters will reject when they see streets deteriorate and businesses pay the price.
When a commentator like Ana Navarro inadvertently explains how detainers work, she undercuts the sanctuary narrative by admitting what conservatives have been saying all along: cooperation prevents a lot of downstream trouble. That admission should change the political calculus for anyone who cares about safety and fiscal common sense.
The debate is settled in practice even if it isn’t in rhetoric: honoring ICE detainers is the simplest, least disruptive path to removing criminal noncitizens from the streets. Pretending this is complex won’t make it so, and voters notice when policy choices have easily foreseeable consequences that affect their daily lives.
Conservative critics will keep pushing this plain reality: restore cooperation, follow the law, and avoid the preventable turmoil that comes when cities put politics ahead of public safety.
