By Steve Thompson, Emma Uber, Dana Munro · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Before the Trump administration this week directed federal prosecutorsto investigate and potentially prosecute state and local officials who don’t cooperate with mass deportations, nearly 250 letters warning of such prosecutions were sent in late December to local officials across the country.
At the time, the letters from a nonprofit group called America First Legal that warned of “long prison sentences”were widely dismissed, with some officials saying they inaccurately characterized their governments as “sanctuary” jurisdictions, in a sense that they actively harbor people in the country illegally and resist attempts to deport them.
“‘Sanctuary city’ is very much a make-believe term,” said Justin Wilson (D), the former mayor of Alexandria in Virginia, a state where 80 such letters were sent to local government officials. “It is defined by a lot of different people in different ways based on whatever goal they have on both sides of this issue, honestly.”
But former leaders of AFL – founded by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller – are now at the center of power in the White House.
Miller, who could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, serves as President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, directing immigration enforcement and other key elements of the president’s agenda. AFL’s former vice president and general counsel Gene Hamilton – who wrote the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025’s chapter about the Justice Department – has also left for a job at the White House, where he is senior counsel.
Meanwhile, the America First Legal attorney who signed the letters, James Kenneth Rogers, is trying to start a new religion that, among other things, decries “Wokism” and prohibits the consumption of gluten.
“When Troy, Rome and Constantinople fell, their olive groves burned and their vineyards were trampled underfoot, the fruits of their past labors kept out of reach,” says a prescription for Easter ceremony rites laid out in Rogers’s self-published book, called “The Triple Path,” echoing a Judaic rite for Passover when instructing adherents to eat gluten-free crackers with grated horseradish. “All they had to eat were the bitterness of poverty, humiliation and subjugation. Let us eat bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of those times.”
Miller, a chief architect of the first Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies, began organizing America First Legal within weeks of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s departure from office, even as other Republicans were temporarily distancing themselves from Trump.
The idea behind AFL was to challenge Biden administration policies as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union. That March, former aides to Trump met during an “investors meeting” at his Mar-a-Lago Club to woo wealthy donors, The Washington Post previously reported.
The nonprofit group that hosted the event, the Conservative Partnership Institute, for which former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows was a senior partner, was looking to launch spin-off groups to push conservative causes during Joe Biden’s presidency.
With America First Legal, Miller would pursue the sort of “lawfare” that liberal groups had effectively employed during Trump’s presidency, according to CPI’s 2021 annual report.
AFL scored an early win that year with a successful challenge to the Biden administration’s debt relief program for minority farmers. In 2022, AFL took in $44 million in contributions, including $27 million from the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised conservative philanthropy based in Milwaukee, according to tax filings made by the organizations.
AFL continued its struggle against government and corporate diversity programs by filing numerous Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints against companies’ racial equity initiatives. “When did racism against White people become okay?” said a television ad in Georgia sponsored by AFL.
The late-December letters foreshadowed the creation this week of an office or working group of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement inside the Justice Department, part of Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.
In six heavily footnoted pages, the letters point to various federal laws that officials in sanctuary jurisdictions are alleged by the letters to be violating, with an emphasis on potential criminal prosecutions. Such violations, the letters say, may expose those officials to “long prison sentences.”
In an interview Wednesday, AFL’s senior vice president, Reed Rubinstein, acknowledged some of the letters’ legal theories were untested. But it’s time to test them, he said. “Ultimately, a court’s going to decide.”
Rubinstein said the letters were an attempt at “agenda setting.” They were “partly to expose, partly to message to the Department of Justice, partly to message to local law enforcement and local prosecutors, partly to message to the public,” he said.
The letters’ assertions include that officials in so-called sanctuary cities are violating a federal law that bars people from attempting to “conceal, harbor or shield from detection” illegal immigrants “in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.”
Such legal assertions contradict long-standing constitutional understandings, said Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s law school.
“The understanding is that local authorities are better positioned to know what is best for their communities. Not federal immigration enforcement authorities,” Gilman said. “So it is really a unique intrusion by the federal government on local decision-making to suggest that local authorities could be criminally prosecuted for making decisions they believe are appropriate for their local communities.”
Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, called the letters’ application of the harboring law to sanctuary cities “preposterous.”
“It has no basis in law or fact,” Fleming said.
The letters’ claim appears to rest on the misnomer of calling a locality a “sanctuary” jurisdiction. Standard sanctuary policies, while limiting help given to federal immigration authorities, don’t actively hide immigrants or obstruct immigration authorities from doing their work. Many localities work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to facilitate the removal of serious criminals but refuse to keep those convicted of less serious crimes beyond the end of their jail sentences to allow federal agents time to retrieve those people.
Proponents say such policies promote public safety by allowing those in the country illegally to cooperate with local police as victims and witnesses without fear that those officers will take steps – such as notifying federal authorities or holding a detainee on their behalf – aimed at getting a person deported. Opponents of sanctuary policies say they undermine public safety by not helping federal immigration authorities deport people who are in the country illegally and have committed crimes.
Both sides understand that Trump will need help from local officials to execute his campaign promise of deporting millions of immigrants in the country illegally. Among a raft of executive orders signed by Trump this week is one aimed to persuade local officials to enter into what are known as 287(g) agreements with ICE that would allow local law enforcement to function as immigration agents.
Fleming said that while he doesn’t think a prosecution of the kind suggested in the letters would be successful, he would be wary if he were a local official. Trump administration officials “don’t need to win a prosecution to cause real damage,” he said. “All they need is to put someone through hell to have at least some of the intended effect that they want.”
Local officials have reacted with a mix of confusion, dismissal and outrage to the threats in AFL’s letters.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said he didn’t feel personally threatened by either the letters or this week’s moves by the Justice Department, despite the warnings of lengthy prison sentences. “They don’t get to define ‘cooperating’ any way they want to,” he said. “Whatever cooperating means has to be legal.”
Rubinstein said he is among few AFL leaders left now that Miller and Hamilton have gone to the White House. He declined to say when Rogers, the Harvard-educated lawyer who signed the letters, joined the group. Legal filings show that in late 2022, he was working in the Arizona attorney general’s office. For more than a decade, Rogers has been writing and revising his book, which details his proposed new religion and church, called the Church of the West.
Rogers, reached by phone, did not answer questions about “The Triple Path” or his work for AFL. Rubinstein said Rogers’s book “has zero, absolutely zero” to do with his legal analysis for the group. Rubinstein called The Post’s reporting on Rogers’s book “a gratuitous attempt to discredit the work of the foundation, to discredit what he’s doing, to make him look ridiculous.”
The book includes a section on “Unity, Diversity and Identity,” a central thrust of which is that diversity is detrimental to communities. In footnotes, Rogers cites various studies he says support this view, including a famous study by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, published in 2007, that concluded that diversity lowers social trust. (Putnam has spoken extensively about his view that, overall, diversity is to society’s benefit.)
Rogers wrote that people should “seek to become part of communities where we fit in and where we can easily perceive other members as being part of an ‘us.’ Communities should restrict admittance of new members to those who will easily assimilate into the group.”
Rogers’s book includes musings on other aspects of society and history, as well as detailed rules governing his new church. It includes a “creed” – a description of rituals, holidays and practices that adherents must observe. It calls for showing love for all people and living by the Golden Rule of treating others as one would want to be treated by them. It also calls for accepting as scripture “The Triple Path” and two companion books Rogers wrote.
“The Triple Path” describes the church as Christian, although it says Jesus was born to two human parents and then adopted by God, rather than being born to a virgin. The book lays out various aspects of Rogers’s worldview. He sees “Wokism” as a sort of “modern simulacrum of religion,” compared to which “old traditional religions are far truer.” He also writes that heredity is “strongly related” to “personality traits” that include political and social attitudes about things like gay rights and immigration.
“As for the foreigner or the resident alien,” he writes, “it is his duty to attend strictly to his own concerns, not to pry into other people’s business, and under no condition to meddle in the politics of a country not his own.”