Tom McClintock chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. It is one of the most powerful immigration posts in Congress, and he has spent 2026 using it the same way over and over: sending letters to city and county officials across the country demanding their records.
Philadelphia. Boston. New York City. Arlington County, Virginia. California.
None of them are in his district. His district is in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Central Valley.
What the Philadelphia letters asked for
On May 6, 2026, McClintock and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent letters to three Philadelphia officials: District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported what they wanted: up to six years of immigration communications between those agencies and federal immigration officials, due back by May 18 — twelve days later.
That part is at least about government. This part isn't.
From the sheriff specifically, the committee also demanded her correspondence with a list of named private organizations:
- No ICE Philly
- Juntos
- CAIR Philadelphia
- Asian Americans United
- the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition
- New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia
Read that list again. These are immigrant-rights groups, a civil-rights organization, an Asian American community group and a faith-based coalition. A congressional committee asked an elected sheriff to hand over everything she has ever written to them.
The committee's stated justification, in its own words: "The shielding of criminal aliens from immigration enforcement in Philadelphia undermines public safety and thwarts the efficient enforcement of federal law."
Bilal's office declined to comment. Krasner, Bethel and the mayor's office could not immediately be reached.
The same letter, city after city
Two days earlier, on May 4, McClintock and Jordan sent the same kind of demand to Arlington County, Virginia — to Commonwealth's Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Police Chief Charles Penn and Sheriff Jose Quiroz.
On May 27, they gave Boston officials two weeks. The Washington Times reported that Jordan and McClintock demanded Police Commissioner Michael Cox turn over, by June 10, all Boston Police Department communications touching on immigration from January 2022 forward — plus detainer counts, criminal histories, and his communications with the district attorney, the sheriff and the mayor's office. They called the city's approach "pro-crime sanctuary policies."
To be fair to the letters, they aren't argument-free. The Boston letter cites three cases from the previous two years in which people released by the Suffolk County sheriff were later arrested by ICE and charged with serious crimes against children. That is a real thing to raise. It does not require four years of every email a police department wrote about immigration.
They have also gone after New York City officials and, with Rep. Darrell Issa, California officials.
The pattern is the point. This is not oversight of a federal agency, which is what a congressional committee is built for. It is a standing federal investigation into the internal communications of local prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs — the same local law enforcement officials the party running the committee spends most of its time promising to back.
It's a fight he's been building toward
McClintock isn't just sending letters. He wrote the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act (H.R. 7640), which cleared his committee in March 2026. By his own description, it pre-empts sanctuary jurisdictions from interfering with immigration enforcement and redirects federal law enforcement funding away from them and toward jurisdictions that cooperate with ICE.
So: a bill to defund them, and a document campaign to investigate them.
There is a broader version of this move going on right now. Claudia Tenney's bill to let one federal official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status — without showing it the evidence — was quietly reintroduced in December 2025. Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil-rights group a terrorist organization on reasoning that Texas Monthly traced to an anti-Muslim think tank's report. The common thread is government power pointed at the organizations that represent immigrants and Muslims, and at the local officials who work with them.
McClintock's letters put a congressional subpoena power's worth of pressure behind the same idea, without a subpoena.
Meanwhile, in his district
Here is the contrast that ought to bother the people who elected him.
McClintock has time to write to a sheriff in Philadelphia about her emails. He did not have time for his own constituents.
When people in his district organized their own town hall in Modesto in March 2025, nearly 200 of them showed up and he declined the invitations. They put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. His office dismissed the whole event as "a nationally coordinated campaign by a group called Indivisible."
He has been in Congress since 2009. In that time the things his constituents have actually asked him about — 56% of adult Medi-Cal enrollees in his district at risk of losing coverage under the work requirements in the budget bill he voted for, the Caldor Fire that burned 221,835 acres across three counties — have not produced this kind of energy.
Six years of records from a sheriff 2,700 miles away did.
Source
House Judiciary committee criticizes Philly law enforcement over sanctuary policies, demands immigration records and correspondence — Jeff Gammage and Sam Janesch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 6, 2026. Committee letters and dates from judiciary.house.gov and the Washington Times.
