Arlington County prosecutors have given breaks to illegal immigrants who face drunken driving charges, hoping lower charges will help them avoid deportation, according to a congressional report labeling the jurisdiction a sanctuary.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, a Democrat whose jurisdiction covers Arlington County and the city of Falls Church, said her office takes potential immigration consequences into account when handling criminal cases.
That includes domestic violence cases, the House Judiciary Committee said in its interim report on the Virginia county, located just outside Washington.
Arlington has also refused nearly every request to turn over illegal immigrants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation, House investigators said.
Of 310 deportation detainer requests filed by ICE from January 2025 through May 2026, the sheriff’s office honored two. Both were criminal cases involving judicial warrants. No detainers involving only civil immigration offenses — the usual path for deportation cases — were honored, according to data the committee obtained from ICE.
Among those released were a man charged with assaulting a police officer and a second man with three arrests in Arlington, 19 in Fairfax County and pending charges in Maryland.
“Arlington County’s sanctuary policies threaten public safety and undermine the safe and effective enforcement of federal immigration law,” the report concluded.
The committee had Ms. Dehghani-Tafti testify behind closed doors over the summer and obtained her office’s internal prosecution policies. The documents included guidelines for leniency toward “Dreamers” — immigrants in the country illegally under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — who were charged with drunken driving.
The policy notes that the Department of Homeland Security considers a DUI to be a serious misdemeanor that could prevent a migrant from renewing DACA status and lead to deportation.
“Because of this, we must take an individual’s DACA status into account when developing offers to ensure that, while appropriate sanctions and conditions are put in place to protect the public and prevent future similar behavior, an individual is not deported because of their decision to drive while intoxicated,” the policy reads.
It urges prosecutors to determine DACA status early in a case so they can “do our part to prevent the disproportionate collateral consequences of a DUI conviction for a DACA recipient.”
Ms. Dehghani-Tafti told the committee that her office could offer a “lateral charge” with equivalent criminality but one that would avoid consequences from the Homeland Security Department, according to the committee’s 122-page deposition transcript.
In a statement responding to the report, Ms. Dehghani-Tafti said the report did not capture the tenor of her deposition.
“The authors of this report are confident, but wrong. Wrong about Virginia law, wrong about county policy, wrong about our office’s policies and their impact, and wrong about the cases they cite,” she said.
She said “many” of the cases highlighted by the committee were never raised during her deposition, which focused heavily on her office’s handling of the alleged doxing of former county resident Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
“From the start, this was a political sham. The committee refused to hear my testimony in public because open testimony doesn’t let you distort a record,” Ms. Dehghani-Tafti said. “In the end, this process amounts to harassing an independent local prosecutor while providing cover for ICE’s abuses.”
Meanwhile, the Arlington County Board adopted a Trust Policy in 2022 and amended it in 2025 to add a provision that prohibits the county’s police department from “initiating contact with federal immigration authorities.”
“In other words, Arlington County’s new policy protects the worst of the worst of criminal aliens — murderers, terrorists and sex traffickers — from deportation,” the committee said.
The Arlington County Board said the Trust Policy is “grounded in public safety, civil rights and constitutional compliance” and that it is not local officials’ responsibility to assist the federal government on immigration.
“The facts and the law have not changed; immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government and the county’s policies and actions have been compliant with the law,” said the Democratic-led board.
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