House GOP Bill Would Let Victims Sue the Sanctuary Officials Who Freed Their Attackers

House Republicans are lining up a post-election vote on a bill that would let crime victims and their families sue the sanctuary jurisdictions and officials who released the people who hurt them. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told Just the News in an interview published October 12, 2026, that the goal is to pass the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act in the lame-duck session after the midterm elections.

The bill, H.R. 7640, was written by Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, and cleared the Judiciary Committee on March 5, 2026. It has been waiting for floor time since. What Jordan made clear this week is that leadership has not let it die, and that its most potent provision is not a funding cut but a courtroom.

A right to sue

According to Just the News, the bill’s centerpiece creates a private right of action for victims and the families of victims to sue the municipalities and officials who released violent offenders instead of turning them over to federal immigration authorities. It would also strip some of the civil immunity that state and local officials now enjoy; in some jurisdictions that protection is “absolute immunity,” the broadest form of the doctrine.

Jordan described the idea in plain terms. “It allows people who’ve been harmed, where local political leaders tell the local law enforcement they can’t work with federal law enforcement, detainers aren’t honored … to go take that city, take that state to court, and say, ‘look, this was ridiculous. What happened and was so wrong, so tragic,'” he said.

On timing, he was just as direct: “So we got a good deal that we worked long and hard on. We just got to try to get it passed in the lame duck [period].”

What else the bill does

McClintock’s office and Just the News describe a bill that goes well beyond lawsuits. Among its provisions:

• It asserts federal primacy over immigration enforcement and bars sanctuary jurisdictions from interfering with local cooperation with federal agencies.
• It requires state and local authorities to honor Department of Homeland Security detainers on deportable illegal immigrants arrested for criminal or motor-vehicle offenses.
• It lets local governments inside sanctuary states work directly with federal immigration authorities, even if their state objects.
• It protects local officers from lawsuits brought by sanctuary jurisdictions for cooperating.
• It redirects federal law enforcement money away from sanctuary jurisdictions and toward those that cooperate.

McClintock framed it around his own district. “All of the local sheriffs in my district want desperately to cooperate with ICE to enforce our immigration laws,” he said when the bill cleared committee, adding that it “will allow them to work directly with the federal government to keep their counties safe.” Jordan said at the time that “Democrat-run sanctuary jurisdictions protect criminal illegal aliens and threaten public safety.”

The other side

Democrats fought the bill in committee. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, argued, according to the Turlock Journal, that it “goes way beyond sanctuary cities” and amounts to an assault on the Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers to the states. That federalism objection is the core of the opposition: states and cities say Washington cannot commandeer their police to enforce federal immigration law.

That argument has real weight in court, and it is likely to be tested if the bill becomes law. But it is worth noticing what the bill actually targets. It does not order a single local officer to make an immigration arrest. It says that when a jurisdiction chooses to ignore a federal detainer and release a criminal suspect, and that person goes on to harm someone, the jurisdiction can be made to answer for that choice in front of a judge. Most Americans would call that accountability.

The cases behind the push

The renewed push comes as individual cases keep putting faces on the issue. In September, DHS spoke out about the September 8 killing of Shalini Thakur, 38, who was shot multiple times in a Sacramento shopping-center parking lot. Investigators said the suspect, 22-year-old Rohit Rohit, had stalked her for months, including allegedly hiding an AirTag under the hood of her car, and had allegedly violated a restraining order she obtained in May. He later died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound as deputies closed in.

DHS said Rohit was an Indian national who entered the country illegally through Arizona in 2023 and was released. “Sanctuary politicians must put an end to reckless policies that play Russian roulette with American lives,” the department said. A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom disputed DHS’s framing of the case.

Whether any particular case would have ended differently under the bill is a question for each set of facts. The broader point is the one Jordan made: today, when a sanctuary policy goes wrong, the people who wrote it face no consequence at all. The victim’s family carries the entire cost.

What happens next

The bill needs a House floor vote, then 60 votes in the Senate, where Democrats can filibuster it. Lame-duck sessions are crowded with spending deadlines, and a bill like this can easily get squeezed out. Jordan’s comments suggest Republican leadership intends to try anyway, and a recorded vote would put every member on record on whether victims deserve a day in court.

If a politician’s policy turns a violent offender loose, that politician should have to explain it to the family in front of a judge.

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