Eighty days. That is how long Fairfax’s chief prosecutor took to speak with the mother of Stephanie Minter, the 41-year-old woman murdered at a bus stop in late February by a repeat violent offender and illegal alien.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano waited until the cameras were rolling at a House Judiciary hearing investigating the role his policies and practices may have played in Stephanie’s death. He could have called. He didn’t. He could have visited. He didn’t. Descano even avoided the opportunity to meet Cheryl and Stephanie’s brother, Ashton, in private immediately before the hearing. Instead of waiting in the anteroom reserved for him adjacent to Cheryl’s, Descano hid in the Democratic committee offices. When he did emerge minutes before the hearing, he walked right behind Cheryl. He didn’t stop. He averted his eyes, then tapped former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares on the back and shook his hand.

I know because I was there, seated next to Cheryl Minter at the witness table.

He then delivered his opening statement full of crocodile tears but no mea culpa for having allowed Stephanie’s killer, Abdul Jalloh, to go free time after time. Under Descano’s watch, Jalloh had been arrested more than 30 times, faced more than 40 charges, including five separate malicious-wounding charges (Virginia’s equivalent of attempted murder) from 2023 to 2025.

In November 2025, police warned Descano’s top deputy that Jalloh would “maliciously wound (or worse)” someone again if prosecutors let him go free. They did. He killed Stephanie three months later.

The House Judiciary committee’s hearing last week focused largely on the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney’s “immigration consequences” policy, which directs line prosecutors to “consider immigration consequences where possible and where doing so accords with justice [and] … the detrimental impact that deportation/removal has on the families and communities those removed or deported leave behind.”

That policy clearly suggests that illegal immigrants or any deportable alien earns preferential treatment under Descano’s “Plea Bargaining, Charging Decisions, and Sentencing Policy” guidelines promulgated in December 2020, the year he took office.

But under questioning from GOP committee members, Descano repeatedly disputed that, pointing (albeit inarticulately) to the last lines of his policy: “[t]he resolution will be different in a way that avoids or lessens collateral immigration consequences, but will not be better than a resolution offered to a defendant that does not face such collateral issues.”

Different but the same. Got it.

In a heated exchange, House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan interrogated Descano about prior pledges to discriminate in favor of criminal alien defendants. Notably, Jordan waived a printout of Descano’s campaign website (which he deleted before the hearing) that declared “Steve’s office will take immigration consequences into account when making charging and plea decisions … If two people commit the same crime, but only one’s punishment includes deportation, that’s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of the values of Fairfax County.”

The same but different. Again.

Here, Descano withered under Jordan’s questioning, trying to distinguish his campaign promises from his official policies, saying he couldn’t “believe people would be so obtuse that they couldn’t realize what the difference was between a campaign statement and an actual office policy.”

For Fairfax’s chief prosecutor, it went downhill from there. A few of the committee’s Democrats ceded their time to Descano to better explain himself, instead preferring to lean in on anti-ICE rhetoric and their witnesses’ generic pro-illegal immigration arguments.

One theme that emerged as a counternarrative was that Fairfax was the “safest county of its size in the United States.”

Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal also asked Descano if the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) rated Fairfax County “among the safest jurisdictions of its size.” Descano gleefully concurred. Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jerrold Nadler repeated the claim.

But they all omitted the alarming trend that the same data actually shows violent crime has skyrocketed since Steve Descano became Fairfax’s chief prosecutor and hasn’t fallen even as it has plummeted elsewhere.

Overall, Fairfax County’s violent crime — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was up 92% in 2025 compared with 2019. Meanwhile, “crimes against persons,” which includes all violent crimes, sex offenses, and simple assaults, rose 27% according to the Fairfax County Police Department.

So, Fairfax is less safe since Descano became its prosecutor. Meanwhile, in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, which is almost exactly the same size as Fairfax but has a tough-on-crime prosecutor in Democrat John McCarthy, the crime rate has fallen below that of famously safe Fairfax County for both property and person crimes.

Similarly sized Suffolk County, New York (which does cooperate with ICE) has also seen crime drop during the period.

But those abstract figures distract from the deeply personal human tragedy that Descano’s policies have wrought. By shielding criminal aliens from “immigration consequences,” hundreds, if not thousands, of violent and sex crimes could have been prevented, including over a dozen murders.

In addition to extending extreme leniency to Abdul Jalloh, Descano freed Marvin Morales-Ortez, who was previously arrested for murder years before, and released him after dropping charges for malicious wounding and brandishing a firearm in December 2025. Within 24 hours, Ortez allegedly killed a man in Reston. Or Maldin Anibal Guzman, who, despite being arrested nine times, including for at least two prior attempted murders, was freed to kill a man behind a convenience store in 2024. Just last month, Guzman received only five years for that killing.

In all three cases (Jalloh, Ortez, and Guzman), Descano offered the same excuse: witness noncooperation or unavailability. It is never Mr. Descano’s fault, you see. Except in the Jalloh cases, he was caught red-handed lying to the media. In at least two of Jalloh’s prior attempted murders, Fairfax prosecutors never even bothered to subpoena the witnesses.

And Descano’s pattern of lying was on full display at the hearing when he attempted to rebut multiple members who questioned him about the illegal alien pedophile Hyrum Baquedano Rodriguez’s case (my detailed testimony is here).

Descano tried to plea out the would-be kidnapper and rapist of a four-year-old to a maximum of two years, who potentially faced life in prison, saying he “did not have strong evidence.” Two separate judges rejected the plea as too lenient. In a fit, Descano dropped the charges altogether, and Baquedano-Rodriguez, who had an extensive history of child sex crimes, would have walked free if the girl’s grandmother had not herself called ICE to pick him up. He has since been deported — no thanks to Mr. Descano’s policy of thwarting “immigration consequences.”

As damning as the hearing was for Mr. Descano, his implied defense that he engages in unlawful discrimination based on immigration status is persuasive, if unsettling: Fairfax’s chief prosecutor is not soft on dangerous criminal aliens — he is equally lenient toward violent repeat offenders of all backgrounds.

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation to find out the truth. Whatever DOJ finds, one thing is already clear: Fairfax County victims are being re-victimized by the man entrusted with protecting them.

***

Sean Kennedy is the president of Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit public safety and victims’ rights advocacy group, and a member of the Fairfax County Criminal Justice Advisory Board. He testified alongside Descano at the May 14, 2026, hearing on Fairfax County’s Sanctuary policies.

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