Records obtained by America First Legal show Fairfax County, Virginia rejected 615 requests to transfer illegal immigrants to ICE custody over roughly 16 months, releasing just 11 back to federal agents instead.
The numbers come from a Freedom of Information Act request filed by America First Legal against the office of Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, and they put a hard figure on a policy Republicans in Congress have been hammering for months. Fox News confirmed the records: 615 declined transfers, 11 completed, spanning a period that includes all of 2025 and the first four months of 2026. During those first four months alone, Fairfax turned away 167 more requests and handed over only two.
Fairfax County declared itself a sanctuary jurisdiction in 2021, when its Board of Supervisors adopted what it calls the Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy, known locally as the Trust Policy. The policy bars county police and sheriff's deputies from honoring ICE detainers, the requests federal agents file asking a jail to hold an inmate up to 48 hours past release so ICE can take custody. Kincaid has said she requires ICE to produce a judicial warrant signed by a local judge before she will turn an inmate over, a standard ICE detainers do not meet.
The case Republicans keep returning to is Stephanie Minter, a 41-year-old Fredericksburg woman found stabbed to death at a Bailey's Crossroads bus stop in February. The man charged in her killing, Abdul Jalloh, is an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone with a lengthy arrest record. ICE held Jalloh for 702 days starting in 2018 before a judge's ruling forced his release, and the agency says it filed a detainer with the Fairfax County jail in February 2023. Fairfax jail officials have disputed that account, telling reporters ICE never lodged a detainer or came to pick Jalloh up during nine separate jail bookings between 2020 and 2025. Email records show the Fairfax County Police Department warned Commonwealth's Attorney Stephen Descano's office about Jalloh months before Minter's death, asking why he had been released.
America First Legal, the group led by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, said it pursued the Fairfax records as part of a broader push to document sanctuary policies county by county across the country. In a statement accompanying the release, the group argued that the gap between 615 refusals and 11 handovers shows local officials are "actively obstructing" federal immigration enforcement rather than simply declining to help. The organization has filed similar public records requests in jurisdictions in Maryland, California and Illinois, and has signaled it plans to use the data to support litigation arguing that sanctuary policies conflict with federal law.
Sheriff Kincaid's office has defended the Trust Policy as a public safety measure rather than an obstruction tactic. In prior statements, her office has said that requiring a judicial warrant protects the county from civil liability, pointing to court rulings in other jurisdictions that found holding inmates on ICE detainers alone, without a warrant signed by a judge, can violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable seizure. County officials have also argued that cooperating openly with immigration enforcement discourages immigrant crime victims and witnesses from contacting police, undermining public safety in immigrant-heavy communities like Bailey's Crossroads and Annandale.
ICE has pushed back hard on that framing. Field office officials in the agency's Washington area jurisdiction have said detainer refusals force agents to conduct more arrests in the community rather than in the controlled setting of a jail, increasing risk to officers and the public. The agency has cited Jalloh's case specifically as an example of what it calls the cost of noncooperation, noting that a jail transfer would have kept him in custody pending removal proceedings rather than back on the street.
The dispute has also become a flashpoint in Virginia politics. Republican members of the state's congressional delegation, including some who represent Northern Virginia, have called for state legislation that would preempt local sanctuary policies, similar to laws already on the books in Florida, Texas and Georgia. Virginia's Democratic-controlled legislature has shown no appetite for such a measure, and Governor-elect transition officials have not commented on whether the issue will be part of the incoming administration's agenda when the General Assembly reconvenes in January.
Commonwealth's Attorney Stephen Descano, whose office has faced scrutiny over the handling of Jalloh's prior cases, has not addressed the FOIA numbers directly. His office has previously said charging and bail decisions are made independently of immigration status, a stance consistent with Virginia law barring most local officials from considering immigration status in charging decisions.
For now, the Fairfax numbers stand as one of the more detailed public accountings of how a major sanctuary jurisdiction handles ICE requests in practice, and they are likely to feature prominently as Congress debates renewed funding fights over sanctuary city grants this fall. America First Legal has said it intends to seek similar records from other Northern Virginia jurisdictions, including Arlington and Alexandria, both of which maintain comparable non-cooperation policies. Whether the disclosures translate into policy change in Fairfax remains uncertain, but the political pressure on Kincaid's office, and on Descano, shows no sign of easing.
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