Steve Descano gave Moises Domingo Rico Rosales a break no Fairfax citizen would get. Rico Rosales deals hard drugs — five to forty years in prison for anyone else. Descano made the charges disappear, because Rico Rosales is here illegally.

The difference wasn’t the crime. It was the immigration status — and Descano keeps a written rule that treats that as a reason to go easy.

So Rico Rosales walked. Last weekend, police say, he exposed himself to a woman at Wakefield Park, then tried to drag a second off her bike into the trees.

Both women got away.

This is the system the Justice Department is investigating — not a mistake, a policy. One standard for citizens. Another for the illegal immigrants Descano’s rule protects.

Cheryl Minter has lived where this leads. Her daughter Stephanie was murdered by a man Descano’s office freed over three written police warnings. “It is preferential treatment,” she says — “anybody that is a U.S. citizen that has done these same crimes would be behind bars.”

Stephanie Minter is why the Justice Department opened its civil-rights case — and why Congress hauled Descano to Capitol Hill in May to answer for the policy. He didn’t give an inch.

How many times does this have to happen?

The Discrimination Is in Writing.

None of this is improvised. Since December 2020, Descano has ordered his prosecutors, in writing, to weigh one thing before charging a crime: “the collateral immigration consequences.”

Translation: if a conviction might get an illegal immigrant deported, go easier than you would on a citizen.

It has been Descano’s policy for five years. Fairfax County re-elected him anyway.

He Was Looking at Forty Years. Descano Made It Vanish.

Rico Rosales crossed into Arizona illegally in 2022. Border Patrol caught him and let him go. By 2024 he was on Descano’s desk: two felony counts of dealing hard drugs.

Descano’s prosecutors made both counts vanish — five-to-forty-year crimes, fines up to half a million dollars, gone by their own hand.

A robbery charge, amended to disorderly conduct and dismissed. Driving without a license, public drunkenness — cleared, every one. A citizen’s record that long ends in a cell. Rico Rosales walked.

Had one of those felonies stuck, Rico Rosales spends June 21 in prison. Descano made sure it didn’t.

One Verdict Descano Can’t Drop.

The break Descano gave Rico Rosales is the one his office hands out in your name, in your county, every day the policy stands.

Descano isn’t a judge or a jury. He’s an elected prosecutor who decided, in writing, that the law should land harder on a citizen than on an illegal immigrant who commits the same crime. In November 2027, Fairfax County hands Steve Descano the one verdict he can’t drop.