How Trump is bypassing Los Angeles's sanctuary city hurdles

Washington Post

12-06-2025

While the media has focused on President Donald Trump's deployment of the California National Guard to quell immigration riots in Los Angeles, there is a much more significant aspect of his crackdown on sanctuary cities and states. The Trump administration has found an innovative way to neutralize California's sanctuary policies, forcing local officials to hand over illegal migrants for deportation despite state and local sanctuary laws and policies that bar them from doing so.
California law enforcement officials can refuse to cooperate with 'ICE detainers,' requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer illegal migrants held in local jails to federal immigration officials. That is because ICE detainers are nonbinding and can be disregarded by the local agency.
But Bill Essayli, Trump's recently appointed U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, has come up with a way to compel California's cooperation. Local officials can 'ignore detainers, but they can't ignore [federal criminal] warrants,' he told me in an interview.
So, in his first weeks in office, Essayli launched Operation Guardian Angel, a federal task force that is scanning criminal databases every day to identify illegal migrants arrested in the Los Angeles area, and then checking their fingerprints against immigration records to see whether they have previously been deported. If they have, Essayli charges them with illegal reentry, a federal crime, and obtains an arrest warrant from a federal judge, which cannot be ignored by sanctuary jurisdictions.
The operation has been underway for less than a month, but already California is being forced to hand over dozens of illegal migrants to ICE each week. Fox News's Bill Melugin reported on one of the first ICE detentions under Operation Guardian Angel of a previously deported illegal migrant, who had just been arrested in a robbery in the sanctuary jurisdiction of Los Angeles. Once the concept is proven there, the Justice Department can deploy Operation Guardian Angel across California — and then nationwide. 'It could be done in every sanctuary city,' Essayli told me. 'Every jurisdiction has access to these databases, and everyone who's booked in a jail has to be fingerprinted.'
His pioneering effort will save lives. Indeed, if Operation Guardian Angel had been in place 10 years ago, Kate Steinle might still be alive today. In 2015, the young California woman was shot in the back on a San Francisco pier by an illegal migrant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who was free because the city refused to honor an ICE detainer. Zarate had been deported five times and thus could easily have been charged with the federal crime of illegal reentry, which would have compelled San Francisco to hand him over to ICE.
According to police, in February an illegal migrant in the Los Angeles area named José Cristian Saravia-Sánchez shot and killed a 48-year-old father of two who interrupted him attempting to steal a neighbor's catalytic converter. Saravia-Sánchez had been arrested 11 times between June 2022 and August 2024, but Essayli says local law enforcement was prevented by state law from complying with an ICE detainer. Saravia-Sánchez was deported in 2013, so had Operation Guardian Angel been in effect, local police could have been forced to turn him over to ICE — and two Inglewood boys might still have their father.
Stories such as this are why, Essayli said, most local sheriffs who have had their hands tied by sanctuary policies want to cooperate with ICE. 'We briefed the sheriffs. A lot of the sheriffs were excited. They were like, 'We've been waiting for this.'' Others, he said, were incredulous when presented with their first federal arrest warrants. 'They looked like they're having a heart attack,' he said. 'A lot of them were like, 'Well, what are these?' I said: 'It's a warrant. You deal with warrants every day. There's nothing different about this.''
So far, he has faced no resistance from local law enforcement, Essayli said. He cautions that anyone interfering with the federal warrants will face serious consequences. I asked him what can be done if the illegal migrants found in criminal databases have not been previously deported. They could be charged with other federal crimes, Essayli said. 'If they have a firearm, it could be possession of a firearm. If they have a drug offense, we can hit them with a drug offense. If they have fraud, we can charge fraud. There's a lot of charges we can take federally other than illegal reentry.'
But gathering evidence for these crimes takes time, during which the suspects could be released. Charging migrants with illegal reentry is the fastest way to obtain a federal warrant. 'It's a very simple case. You're here, you've clearly committed an offense because you're not supposed to be here,' he says.
Essayli says that the politicians behind California's sanctuary policies are not only putting the lives of American citizens at risk but also making things worse for the illegal migrants they are purporting to protect. 'If they had just complied or honored our ICE detainers, a lot of these people would just be processed administratively,' he said. But by forcing him to get federal criminal warrants, 'they are causing these illegal aliens to potentially have to serve prison time before their deportation.'
This much is certain: The riots will be contained, and order will soon be restored to Los Angeles's streets. But Operation Guardian Angel is coming to a sanctuary city near you.