ICE agents out of the Washington, D.C., field office arrested Shayan Kahhal, an Iranian national living illegally in the United States, this week. Kahhal is a convicted sex offender. The Virginia State Police sex offender registry lists a rape conviction and two forcible sodomy convictions from 2011, with charges that include strong-armed rape, strong-armed sodomy of a woman, strong-armed sodomy of a boy, and strong-armed sodomy of a girl.
His registered address was near the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
The arrest came just weeks after Virginia's new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, signed an executive order reversing the 287(g) agreement her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, had established with the Department of Homeland Security. That agreement allowed Virginia law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities to share resources and information. Spanberger killed it.
The 287(g) program is straightforward. It lets state and local law enforcement coordinate with ICE so that illegal immigrants who commit crimes can be identified, detained, and removed. Under Youngkin, Virginia participated. Under Spanberger, it doesn't.
The governor framed her decision as a matter of priorities, Fox News reported:
"Virginians deserve to have their law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement."
Read that again in light of who ICE just pulled off Virginia's streets. A man convicted of raping and sodomizing women and children was living in the commonwealth while the governor argued that helping federal authorities find people like him was a misallocation of resources.
Lieutenant Governor Ghazala Hashmi backed the move, claiming the reversal "restores clarity and accountability to the role of state and local law enforcement and ensures their focus remains on public safety, justice, and community trust." Public safety. The phrase does a lot of heavy lifting when you're actively severing the tools that keep convicted predators from slipping through the cracks.
Spanberger's executive order isn't the ceiling. It's the floor.
Virginia State Senator Saddam Salim, a Democrat from Dunn Loring, has crafted legislation that would go far beyond reversing a single agreement. His bill would prohibit Virginia law enforcement agencies from maintaining, renewing, or entering into any federal immigration law-enforcement agreement unless the agreement meets certain conditions. But the real teeth are elsewhere. The bill's language explicitly bars any person acting in a law enforcement capacity from assisting, cooperating with, or facilitating any operation executed in whole or in part by federal authorities for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law.
That isn't a limitation. It's a wall between local cops and federal agents, built to protect illegal immigrants from the consequences of being here illegally.
The bill passed the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate 21-19.
Salim, described as a legal immigrant from Bangladesh, won his seat in an upset victory against longtime incumbent Chap Petersen, a fellow Democrat who had voiced support for keeping the Washington Redskins' name and Confederate monuments intact. Petersen's brand of moderate Democratic politics proved insufficiently progressive for the district. Salim's brand, evidently, includes making it functionally impossible for Virginia officers to cooperate with ICE.
Fox News Digital reached out to Salim for comment. None was provided.
Virginia Democrats have settled on a specific rhetorical formula. Every time they dismantle an immigration enforcement tool, they invoke "public safety" and "community trust." The words are doing the opposite of what they describe.
Consider the sequence:
The arrest happened not because of Virginia's Democratic leadership but despite it. ICE did its job. Virginia's government tried to make that job harder.
This is the pattern with sanctuary-style governance. The politicians who enact these policies never have to answer for individual cases because they've built a rhetorical framework where enforcement itself is the problem. Cooperating with ICE isn't "public safety," they argue. It's a distraction from public safety. The circularity is the point. Define enforcement out of the safety equation, and you never have to explain why a convicted child predator was still living comfortably in your state.
Spanberger promised that Virginia law enforcement would continue to honor valid judicial warrants. That's the bare minimum of functioning government, not a substitute for proactive cooperation. Warrants require that someone already be in the system, already flagged, already subject to a judicial order. The 287(g) program existed precisely to catch the people who hadn't reached that threshold yet, or who had fallen through the gaps between state and federal databases.
Kahhal's convictions were on the books since 2011. He was on the sex offender registry. The system knew who he was. The question is why he was still here, and whether Virginia's retreat from federal cooperation made it easier for cases like his to persist without consequence.
Democrats talk about "community trust" as though the communities they represent are uniformly opposed to removing convicted rapists. They aren't. The families in Hampton Roads living near a registered sex offender who was in the country illegally were not served by Spanberger's executive order. They were not protected by Salim's bill. They were protected by ICE agents who showed up and did the work that Virginia's government refused to help with.
That's the part of the story that never makes it into the press releases about "restoring clarity" and "ensuring focus." The clarity is this: Virginia Democrats chose ideology over enforcement, and a convicted predator stayed on the streets until the federal government acted alone.
