The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced on Monday that agents apprehended illegal alien Jose Barajas-Diaz after a sanctuary city refused to comply with federal immigration policy and released the Mexican national back into the streets of North Carolina. Barajas-Diaz was arrested last Friday after Mecklenburg County failed to acknowledge an ICE detainer request despite the illegal alien having recently been convicted for felony death by motor vehicle with drunk driving.

Here's what caused this sequence of events:

Mr. Barajas-Diaz was initially arrested January 29, 2019, by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department for driving while impaired and felony death by motor vehicle. ICE lodged an immigration detainer against him with Mecklenburg County the following day. Along with the detainer form, ICE provided Mecklenburg County with an administrative arrest warrant. [...] Mr. Barajas-Diaz was convicted of felony death by motor vehicle in North Carolina Superior Court for Mecklenburg County on October 24, 2019, and given a five-year suspended sentence with credit for time served. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office then refused to honor the ICE detainer and instead released him back into the community.

"By releasing an illegal alien with a serious felony criminal offense resulting in death, Mecklenburg County chose to release a serious public safety threat into the Charlotte community where he was free to potentially harm others until his capture by ICE," the agency said in a press release.

"ICE is willing to work with local partners on ways to fulfill our shared goal of ensuring community safety," ICE Atlanta Interim Field Office Director John Tsoukaris said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, elected law enforcement officials who chose not to collaborate with ICE and try to justify their actions by stating they are protecting their community are placing politics above public safety and are actually failing in their most basic duty of protecting their communities," Tsoukaris continued.

"It defies logic how a sheriff would release dangerous criminals to the street instead of to a federal law enforcement agency that has an outstanding warrant of arrest," Tsourakis added. "Uncooperative jurisdictions such as Mecklenburg County should be on notice that as long as criminal offenders are being released, they should get used to seeing a lot more ICE at-large enforcement activity in their communities."

As Townhall has previously reported, Mecklenburg County has recently been in the news for its dangerous policies of releasing criminal aliens despite federal immigration requests: