Protecting Predators, Forgetting Victims — The Left’s War on Criminal Law Enforcement

Summary

 Progressive activism has evolved into complicity with violent criminal immigrants by obstructing law enforcement, securing lenient sentences, and blocking deportations. In Colorado, the Colorado Rapid Response Network tipped off convicted child rapist Jose Reyes Leon-Deras, allowing his escape. In Minnesota, serial rapist Abdimahat Bille Mohamed received probation for multiple assaults before reoffending. UK grooming gangs exploited human rights laws to delay deportation for years, leaving victims in fear. Similar patterns shield Rohingya criminals in India despite their documented atrocities against Hindus. This ideology dissolves distinctions between law-abiding immigrants and predators, inverting priorities to protect offenders while ignoring victims. Solutions require expedited removal of serious criminals alongside genuine asylum protections.

There is a strain of progressive activism that has not merely strayed — it has rotted into something that can only be described as active complicity in evil. When organized networks tip off convicted child rapists about incoming arrests, when county officials construct sweetheart plea deals for serial rapists to avoid “politicizing” cases, and when human rights lawyers deploy every available legal instrument to keep violent foreign nationals on streets already stained by their crimes, the ideology has curdled into something dangerous. The victims are real. The pattern is documented across continents. And the excuses are running out.

The Colorado Case: Tipping Off a Fugitive Child Rapist

Let’s start with the most indefensible exhibit on record. On the morning of June 20th, 2025, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI converged on a neighborhood in Longmont, Colorado, with a warrant for a man named Jose Reyes Leon-Deras — a Salvadoran national who was in the United States illegally and who had, in a court of law in Italy, been convicted of child rape. [1] This was not a man accused or suspected. He had been tried, convicted, and sentenced in a court of law for one of the gravest offenses a human being can commit against another.

The operation was, by the standards of modern immigration enforcement, straightforward: a fugitive, a warrant, a team. What happened next was not.

Within minutes of the agents’ arrival, members of the Colorado Rapid Response Network [2] appeared on the scene. They came with bullhorns. They posted real-time alerts to social media, noting the make of the agents’ vehicles and their precise location on Longs Peak Avenue. The fugitive pedophile, most likely keeping an eye on social media, fled. The agents left without their man. [3]

The organization is known for protesting with bullhorns to warn illegal aliens and shouting profanities at ICE law enforcement officers attempting to arrest dangerous criminal illegal aliens. [4] DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin stated: “The Colorado Rapid Response Network and its 760 members disrupt ICE operations targeting dangerous criminal illegal aliens. In this case, they helped Jose Reyes Leon-Deras, an international fugitive and convicted child rapist, flee law enforcement — this dangerous monster is on the loose on American streets and could harm more innocent children.” [5]

ICE ultimately arrested Leon-Deras on June 27, 2025, and he was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on October 30, 2025. But for seven days, thanks to an activist network that positions itself as a community protector, a convicted child rapist was free to reoffend. [6]

The network’s own defense was remarkable in its audacity. It posted on social media: “Documenting and telling people their rights is not the same as obstruction.” [7] That is a legalistic sleight of hand designed to obscure a moral reality: they helped a man convicted of raping a child evade the agents sent to remove him. No amount of rights-language circumlocution changes what that action was.

Imagine it: a convicted child rapist loose in an American city, because an activist group decided its principles required his freedom—and justified it with a social media post claiming that ‘documenting rights’ is not obstruction.

The problem is that this logic — in which the enforcement is always the crime and the target is always innocent — does not accommodate the existence of Jose Reyes Leon-Deras, a man whom no one disputes was convicted of child rape. The left-liberal ideology has no category for him, and so it slotted him, absurdly, into the category it had available: community member in need of protection.

There is a phrase, repeated with the fervor of liturgy at immigrant-rights rallies from Los Angeles to London, that has always contained within it a quiet logical problem: “no human is illegal.” As a statement of dignity, it is unimpeachable. As a policy position — as a framework for deciding who may remain in a country and under what circumstances — it collapses the moment it encounters a person who has used his legal or illegal presence to harm others. The slogan has victims it cannot see. They are, in the grim irony that runs through every case examined here, frequently the most vulnerable people in the communities the activists claim to be protecting.

Minnesota: Serial Rape, No Prison Time, Community Politics

Consider what happened in Minneapolis — a city whose mayor, Jacob Frey, has declared publicly and without apparent embarrassment that his city will do “anything in our power” [8] to protect undocumented residents, and that cooperation with ICE is simply “not our job.” In a move bordering on sedition, he signed an executive order blocking federal, state, or local agencies from using any city-owned parking lots, ramps, garages, or vacant land to stage civil immigration enforcement operations.

The case of Abdimahat Bille Mohamed in Hennepin County, Minnesota, reads as a prosecutor’s nightmare and an ideological success story — which is precisely the problem. Mohamed, 28, was charged with kidnapping a minor and kidnapping. As detailed in the federal complaint, he kidnapped and raped a 15-year-old girl in 2017 and an adult woman in 2025. In between, he raped at least three other women. [9]

The state-level response to this record was staggering in its leniency. A plea deal in state court with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in May 2025 allowed Mohamed to avoid prison time in connection with the 2017 case and the rape of an adult woman in May 2024. He was sentenced to five years of probation for the 2017 incident and a stayed sentence for the 2024 incident, resulting in his release. [10]

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office offered a classic bureaucratic euphemism: “Due to circumstances that cause difficulty in many criminal sexual conduct cases, these charges were the available and appropriate ones to secure a felony conviction.” [11]

Predictably, he reoffended. Mohamed used Snapchat to pick up a woman from her home and drove her to a hotel in nearby Bloomington, Minnesota, in September 2025, where he held her against her will and sexually assaulted her. This occurred less than four months after his sentencing on two previous rape cases. [12]

Federal authorities were scathing. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, whose instinct for political theater frequently outpaces her instinct for nuance, nonetheless landed on something real when she described Minnesota’s handling of the case [13] as the product of “left-wing soft-on-crime policies.” While her prosecutors charged Mohamed as a serial rapist whose attacks spanned eight years, the Hennepin County Attorney’s response was not remorse. It was deflection — accusing federal prosecutors of making “a clear attempt to politicize” a prosecution in order to harm the Somali community.

The 15-year-old girl who was kidnapped and gang-raped at gunpoint received no such vigorous defense from these advocates. She is not a political constituency. She generates no fundraising emails. The ideological architecture that screams “racism” at every federal intervention has nothing to say to her — or about her. A commentary from the American Experiment think-tank described the multiple failures as “systemic,” noting that the list of criminal justice system partners who dealt with Mohamed was long — including the Hennepin County Attorney, multiple judges, the public defender’s office, probation units, and sentencing guidelines commissioners — and that all of them “played a role in our criminal justice system’s collective failure to incapacitate Mohamed, a violent offender who should not have been free.” [14]

The Broader US Pattern: Sanctuary Politics Meets Criminal Records

The scaffolding of progressive immigration politics rests on a solid foundation. The fear that ICE operations generate in law-abiding immigrant families is real, documented, and deserving of serious policy attention. More than two hundred cities and counties across the United States [15] have adopted sanctuary policies in recognition of these concerns. The argument that mass immigration enforcement corrodes the relationship between police and communities is not frivolous.

The difficulty is that this architecture was never designed to accommodate a distinction that most ordinary people regard as obvious: the distinction between an undocumented worker who has committed no crime and a man who has raped five women. The left-liberal ideology deliberately dissolved that distinction — “no human is illegal” is a statement with no exceptions — and, having dissolved it, found itself unable to reconstruct it when circumstances required it. When Minneapolis Mayor Frey declares that his city will protect “anyone who is undocumented,” he is not, presumably, consciously intending to protect serial rapists. He is, rather, operating within a framework that has no mechanism to exclude them. The Department of Justice sued Minneapolis, St Paul, Hennepin County, and the State of Minnesota [16] over their sanctuary policies in September 2025. A federal court denied the state’s request for a restraining order in January 2026. The legal question remains open. The moral one, in the Mohamed case, does not.

The UK: Grooming Gangs, Human Rights Delays, and Decades of Deflection

Cross the Atlantic, and the mechanism changes, but the moral failure is identical. Between 1997 and 2013, a staggering one million underage British girls were raped by Muslim grooming gangs [17], most notoriously in Rochdale but also in other British towns like Oldham and Derby. The gangs were predominantly Pakistani men. The victims were predominantly white working-class girls, some as young as eleven. What the subsequent investigations established — and what made the scandal something more than an ordinary, terrible crime story — was the extent to which institutional fear of appearing racist had functioned as a structural protection for the abusers, for years, while the abuse continued.

After the convictions came another chapter. Three Rochdale gang members—Abdul Aziz, Adil Khan, and Abdul Rauf, convicted in 2012 of rape, trafficking, and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children—spent years fighting deportation to Pakistan. They invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: the right to family life. [18] Adil Khan, appearing before an immigration tribunal, referred to his convictions as “allegations,” described them as “a laughing matter,” and suggested his prosecution had been racist. [19] One of the ringleaders of the Rochdale gang, Shabir Ahmed — described by a judge as a “violent, hypocritical bully” [20] — claimed at his deportation hearing that his convictions had been a conspiracy to “scapegoat” Muslims. He was, at the time, serving a twenty-two-year sentence. Qari Abdul Rauf, another 55-year-old gang leader, remains in the same area where he carried out his horrific crimes — despite a deportation order. He was spotted delivering for a takeaway app, raising concerns among locals that he could encounter one of his victims during his job. Neighbors describe him walking around “like he owns the place.” [21]

What is striking about these appeals is not their audacity, which is merely a function of available legal tools, but the extent to which they succeeded in consuming time, money, and institutional attention for years. Abdul Aziz eventually won his fight to remain in Britain [22] — a fact shrouded in secrecy for years. The victims, who had been told the men would be deported, were living in the same communities as their abusers. The Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham himself called the situation “appalling”, [23] saying victims had been “forgotten in all this.” Member of Parliament Louise Casey, reporting in June 2025, recommended a national police operation and a full national inquiry. [24] It had taken, from the first documented abuse, approximately three decades to reach that point.

India: The Rohingya Question and the Limits of Blanket Victimhood

To understand the particular difficulty that the Rohingya crisis poses for the international human rights framework, it helps to begin not in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar or the detention centers of Jammu, but in a cluster of Hindu villages in northern Rakhine State.

On the morning of August 25th, 2017, terrorists from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army — known by its acronym, ARSA — descended on the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik. [25] Armed men dressed in black and local Rohingya Muslims in plain clothes rounded up dozens of Hindu women, men, and children. They robbed, bound, and blindfolded them before marching them to the outskirts of the village, where they separated the men from the women and young children. What followed was documented in forensic detail. [26] The ARSA fighters killed fifty-three of the Hindus, execution-style, starting with the men. Eight Hindu women and eight of their children were abducted and spared after ARSA fighters forced the women to agree to convert to Islam. The same day, all forty-six Hindu men, women, and children in the neighboring village of Ye Bauk Kyar disappeared; the bodies of forty-five people from Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik were unearthed in four mass graves in late September 2017. The victims from that village included twenty men, ten women, and twenty-three children, fourteen of whom were under the age of eight.

The total death toll across both villages was ninety-nine. [27] The surviving Hindu women — some as young as fifteen [28] — were marched to Bangladesh, where they were held captive by their abductors for weeks, subjected to forced marriage and sexual violence, before Bangladeshi and Myanmar authorities eventually secured their repatriation.

Here is the central problem. The same NGO ecosystem that produces voluminous reports on discrimination against Rohingyas in India has produced almost nothing on what Rohingya militants did to Hindu communities in Myanmar. The Hindu victims of the Kha Maung Seik massacre barely register in advocacy literature. The women who survived, who were force-marched to Bangladesh and held captive by their abductors for weeks before being repatriated, appear in a single LSE blog post and a handful of news reports. [29]

The asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a framework that treats refugee origin as conferring permanent moral immunity, placing group identity above individual accountability—even when crimes are committed in India.

The same NGO lobby that documents genuine abuses tends to treat any enforcement action against Rohingya Muslims as evidence of persecution, regardless of individual circumstance — and to deploy non-refoulement [30] arguments as a categorical bar to removal that admits of no exception based on criminal conduct. This approach effectively places refugee origin above individual accountability. It also places the international human rights community in the morally awkward position of arguing, in effect, that a Rohingya refugee who has committed serious crimes in India [31] must be protected from consequences that any other criminal would face — not because he has not committed the crimes, but because his community has suffered elsewhere. The victims of those crimes, who are from marginalized communities themselves and frequently without recourse to international advocacy networks, receive nothing from this lobby except its silence.

Japan: The Dog That Didn’t Bark

Japan presents a useful negative case — the dog that didn’t bark. The country maintains strict immigration controls, deports without extended ideological resistance, and generates no equivalent of the activist-legal complex that, in Western countries, routinely interposes itself between enforcement agencies and their targets. There are real costs to this approach — Japan’s record on asylum has attracted criticism. But the specific pathology under examination here — the conversion of human rights machinery into a shield for violent offenders, and the conversion of community-protection rhetoric into fugitive assistance — does not yet exist in Japan as a meaningful political phenomenon. It is, in this sense, a distinctively Western production, assembled from recognizable Western materials: civil liberties law, progressive identity politics, and an adversarial relationship with enforcement that was forged in legitimate grievance and calcified into something that can no longer distinguish between a refugee and a rapist.

The Fundamental Moral Inversion

There is a thought experiment that illuminates what has gone wrong. Imagine you are a woman in Minneapolis who was kidnapped, held for days, and repeatedly raped by a man who had already raped four other women and served not a single day in prison for any of them. Now imagine that the primary political energy in your city — the marches, the executive orders, the press conferences, the legal challenges — is directed at protecting the community of which your attacker is a member from the federal agents seeking to remove him. You are not in those marches. You are not the subject of those executive orders. The framework that has been constructed, with considerable moral passion and genuine historical grievance, has a place for him that it does not have for you.

This is the inversion at the heart of the matter. Progressive immigration politics was built on the correct observation that enforcement agencies have historically targeted the innocent and the powerless. It calcified, over time, into something that cannot acknowledge the existence of the guilty — or, more precisely, cannot acknowledge that guilt and marginalization are not mutually exclusive, and that the victim of one injustice may himself be the perpetrator of another. The ideology’s inability to hold both of these truths simultaneously is not a minor intellectual failure. It is a failure with consequences measured in ruined lives.

The solutions are not simple, but they are obvious: expedited removal for serious criminals, rigorous vetting, and real asylum protections for the genuinely persecuted. These are compatible—provided we make the distinctions that parts of progressive ideology fiercely resist. The cases from Longmont to Minneapolis to Rochdale and New Delhi reveal the same hypocritical ideology: one that protects predators while forgetting their victims — with remarkable chutzpah.

The children of Rotherham were betrayed — not by accident, but because the adults sworn to protect them were paralyzed by fear. That fear had a name: not bureaucratic cowardice, but the terror of enforcing the law against a pampered, protected community.

How many other cities, on how many other continents, are still sacrificing their most vulnerable children on the altar of the same toxic silence?

Citations

[1] U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Anti-ICE Activists Help Convicted Child Rapist Evade ICE in Colorado.” Department of Homeland Security, June 25, 2025. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/06/25/anti-ice-activists-help-convicted-child-rapist-evade-ice-colorado

[2] Colorado Rapid Response Network. Colorado Rapid Response Network. https://coloradorapidresponsenetwork.com/

[3] KDVR. “Denver ICE Agents Claim That an Immigration Advocacy Group Prevented the Arrest of a Criminal Alien.” KDVR News. https://kdvr.com/news/local/denver-ice-agents-claim-that-an-immigration-advocacy-group-prevented-the-arrest-of-a-criminal-alien/

[4] ibid

[5] Washington Examiner. “Activist Group CORRN Helped Illegal Immigrant Escape, Child Rapist.” Washington Examiner. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3454894/activist-group-corrn-illegal-immigrant-escape-child-rapist/

[6] U.S. Department of Homeland Security (@DHSgov). “Post on X.” X, https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2019803378033774675

[7] Longmont Leader. “Colorado Rapid Response Network Allegedly Hinders ICE Arrest in Longmont.” Longmont Leader. https://www.longmontleader.com/local-news/colorado-rapid-response-network-allegedly-hinders-ice-arrest-in-longmont-10858369

[8] Patch Staff. “Mayor Jacob Frey Signs Order Banning ICE from City Property.” Patch. https://new-origin.patch.com/minnesota/minneapolis/mayor-jacob-frey-signs-order-banning-ice-city-property

[9] U.S. Department of Justice. “Serial Kidnapper and Rapist Charged Federally.” Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/serial-kidnapper-and-rapist-charged-federally

[10] Minneapolis Media Town News. “Federal Charges Filed Against Abdimahat Bille Mohamed in Serial Kidnapping Case.” Town News. https://minneapolimedia.town.news/g/coon-rapids-mn/n/351656/federal-charges-filed-against-abdimahat-bille-mohamed-serial-kidnapping

[11] FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul. “Convicted Sex Offender on Probation Charged in Bloomington Rape.” FOX 9. https://www.fox9.com/news/convicted-sex-offender-probation-charged-bloomington-rape

[12] Fox News. “Repeat Offender Accused of Kidnapping, Rape after Online Pickup Months after Avoiding Prison Time.” Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/us/repeat-offender-accused-kidnapping-rape-after-online-pickup-months-after-avoiding-prison-time

[13] Star Tribune. “AG Bondi Says Alleged Serial Rapist Struck Because Minnesota Is Soft on Crime.” Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/ag-bondi-says-alleged-serial-rapist-struck-because-minnesota-is-soft-on-crime/601540192

[14] Center of the American Experiment. “Systemic Failure: The Story of Abdimahat Mohamed.” American Experiment. https://www.americanexperiment.org/systemic-failure-the-story-of-abdimahat-mohamed/

[15] “ICE-Free Zones Explained.” Vera Institute of Justice. https://www.vera.org/news-spotlights/ice-free-zones-explained

[16] “Federal Actions Impacting Cities.” League of Minnesota Cities. https://www.lmc.org/resources/federal-actions-impacting-cities/

[17] YouTube. “B7Cj3nyB2cM.” YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Cj3nyB2cM

[18] Daily Mail. “Article.” PressReader, August 9, 2018. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20180809/281818579656038

[19] Manchester Evening News. “Rochdale Grooming Gang Member Battling Deportation.” Manchester Evening News. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/rochdale-grooming-gang-member-battling-24305595

[20] BBC News. “Rochdale Grooming Gang Case.” BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-38909352

[21] The Times of India. “‘This Is Insane’: Elon Musk on Notorious Grooming Gang Leader Roaming Free in UK ‘Like He Owns the Place.’” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/this-is-insane-elon-musk-on-notorious-grooming-gang-leader-roaming-free-in-uk-like-he-owns-the-place/articleshow/117058505.cms

[22] Daily Mail. “Article.” PressReader, June 28, 2022. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20220628/281930251667046

[23] “Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester Call for Rochdale Grooming Gang Deportations to Be Complete.” Greater Manchester Combined Authority. https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/news/mayor-and-deputy-mayor-of-greater-manchester-call-for-rochdale-grooming-gang-deportations-to-be-complete

[24] UK Parliament House of Commons Library. “Deportation of Foreign National Offenders.” Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10613/

[25] Al Jazeera. “Amnesty: Rohingya Fighters Killed Scores of Hindus in Myanmar.” Al Jazeera, May 22, 2018. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/5/22/amnesty-rohingya-fighters-killed-scores-of-hindus-in-myanmar

[26] Amnesty International USA. “Myanmar: New Evidence Reveals Rohingya Armed Group Massacred Scores in Rakhine State.” Amnesty USA. https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/myanmar-new-evidence-reveals-rohingya-armed-group-massacred-scores-in-rakhine-state/

[27] CNN. “Hindu Massacre in Rakhine State.” CNN, May 22, 2018. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/22/asia/rakhine-state-hindu-massacre-intl/index.html

[28] London School of Economics Women, Peace and Security Blog. “Can We Take You as a Bride? The Stories of Eight Hindu Women.” LSE Blog, April 21, 2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2020/04/21/can-we-take-you-as-a-bride-the-stories-of-eight-hindu-women/

[29] ibid

[30] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Legal Guidance.” Refworld. https://www.refworld.org/policy/legalguidance/unhcr/1997/36258

[31] YouTube. “OnWxYVt4N-8.” YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnWxYVt4N-8