This is a clear civil rights violation, Jonathan Fahey argues

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]The Department of Justice launched a civil rights probe Wednesday into Virginia Democratic prosecutor Steve Dano. His Fairfax County office is accused of giving preferential treatment to criminal illegal immigrants. DOJ releasing this statement. This investigation will undercover whether this prosecutor is putting the community at risk in offering sweetheart deals to illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes. Let's bring in Jonathan Fehee, former federal prosecutor and former acting ICE director. You are also quite familiar with Mr. Disano because we should note you ran against him uh back in what 2019 for the office he now holds, right, Jonathan?

[00:00:39]>> That's right.

[00:00:40]>> All right. So, uh, this Department of Justice investigation says he's essentially giving extra rights to criminal illegal aliens that that, you know, US residents don't get by selectively prosecuting them or, you know, giving them bene benefit of the doubt, I guess I could say, in prosecutions. Am I right?

[00:01:03]>> Yeah, that that's exactly right. what he's accused of doing and it bears out by his own website policies that he treats being in the country illegally as a mitigating factor. So if somebody's in the country illegally, he he crafts plea agreements allegedly and other charging and sentencing decisions to help them stay in the country. Meanwhile, American citizens get more harsh treatments on p, sentencings, and charging. So, it's a clear, if that's the case, it's a clear violation of the civil rights law because you're treating American citizens worse than illegal aliens, which is truly astonishing if you think about it.

[00:01:42]>> Well, and and some American citizens like Stephanie Mter get. She was murdered at a bus stop allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been released time and time again under Disano's um supervision.

[00:01:57]>> Yeah. See, that's the worst part of it all. Not just people are being treated differently, but the leniency leads to horrible things. In this case, it could have been led to a murder because remember the person charged with killing her had been arrested 30 times, had had dozens of charges just dismissed outright. Also had hundred I think over a hundred contacts with police. And remember, you know, the Fox has reported on this. Police were essentially begging Disconano's office to prosecute this person and get him off the street, but he was repeatedly giving him leniency.

[00:02:32]So, it begs the question, why was he being treated leniently? Was it because of immigration status? Was it something else? And that's so important for the civil rights division to look into.

[00:02:42]>> Cheryl Mter is Stephanie's mother. Uh she's obviously lamenting the murder of her daughter and saying that she wishes the Department of Justice had gotten involved earlier. Listen.

[00:02:54]They probably should have got involved a long a lot longer ago. Um, and the fact that it took my daughter to be murdered to get them there. How can you get elected by the people and you're not even taking care of the people?

[00:03:16]>> I don't know. You want to try to answer that question for her, Jonathan?

[00:03:20]>> Yeah. It's really astonishing that he was elected to keep it's a public safety job and instead of doing that he was pro promoting this progressive agenda that was a anti-cop proc criminal and no regard for victims whatsoever. And it wasn't just her case. This is a repeated pattern of conduct. But it is so important that they're going after this because hopefully they can prevent the next Stephanie Mentor case because they are gonna, you know, they're going to talk to all the prosecutors there, the prosecutors that have been there and they're going to look into this. And in addition to these civil rights violations, which are civil v violations, there's also potential criminal violations going on here because there's a conspiracy against rights charge, which is a civil rights charge. It's a criminal charge, which is if you're denying, conspiring to deny people equal protection under the law, that's a violation of criminal law. And there's also things like obstruction and harboring illegal aliens that they may look into. Because what's interesting about this, he had it on his website that he treated illegal aliens better because he said that reflects our values in Fairfax County until Harit Dylan tweeted something about it and now he took it off. So the begs the question, if he was doing nothing wrong, why does he take it down from his website? Is there anything else he's changed, hidden, and other things? So hopefully they will get to the bottom of this and prevent the next horrific tragedy.

[00:04:45]>> He also bragged in a piece in the New York Times that he was not going to enforce abortion law in Virginia. All right, Jonathan Fay wish we had more time. Thank you, Jonathan.

[00:04:56]>> Thank you.

[00:04:57]Be sure to like and subscribe for all the Fox News latest on YouTube and catch full shows streaming now on Fox