If it wasn’t for stolen elections, I would still be a one issue voter: immigration.
Utah County is deep-red, LDS-heavy, and run by a GOP supermajority. Yet a CIS records pull found 234 jail bookings with ICE holds there from May 2021 to March 2024.
Charges included 5 manslaughter/murder cases, 50 crimes against children (rape, sodomy, kidnapping, exploitation), 51 aggravated assaults, 46 DUIs, plus identity theft, weapons, and drug distribution. Offenders came from Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere.
Those crimes are not theoretical. They are the predictable result of policies Utah’s Republican legislature and leadership actually passed and kept: driving-privilege cards for people here illegally, in-state tuition and health coverage for their children, a gutted E-Verify regime, and a long pattern of “friendly” statutes that function as a magnet.
CIS has called Utah the reddest and stealthiest sanctuary state for a reason. The label is not media spin; it is the policy record.
The gaslighting is the second half of the problem. Officials and allied institutions treat any attempt to name the pattern as unkind, un-Utah, or “anti-immigrant.” They point to average crime stats, change the subject to compassion, or insist the state is not a sanctuary because it never used the word. That is how you keep a supermajority from being held to the enforcement standard its voters thought they were buying. Zero-sum is the part they will not say out loud; if the people who committed those offenses had been removed or never admitted, the victims in Utah County would not have been victims.
Public mugshots were taken off the table by the same GOP legislature. In 2021 Utah made booking photos protected records until conviction (with narrow exceptions). That law now sits on top of the ICE-hold data. Citizens cannot easily see the faces attached to the bookings. Transparency is not “cruel and unusual.” It is how voters check whether leadership’s rhetoric matches the jail logs.
Restore public mugshots. Then force the legislature to defend the statutes that produced the numbers instead of managing the vocabulary around them.
What they have done to Utah is treason.