Jason Miyares served as the 51st Attorney General of Virginia from 2022 to 2026, and served as Chairman of the Protecting Americans Action Fund Advisory Board from 2022 to 2025.
Read the full op-ed here.
It took a congressional subpoena to get Steve Descano, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Fairfax, Virginia, and a proud social justice warrior, into a hearing room. It took cameras and questioning under oath to get him to look Cheryl Minter in the eye and apologize for the death of her daughter, Stephanie, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant previously arrested multiple times on rape, robbery, and violent assault charges—nearly all of which Descano’s office had dropped.
Think about that for a moment. A mother buries her child. The Commonwealth’s Attorney whose charging decisions contributed to that tragedy offers no apology until Congress compels him to face her. That’s the bare minimum extracted under duress, and it tells you everything you need to know about the man and the office he ran.
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Descano’s office maintained impressive-sounding statistics. Fairfax County is a safe community, his staff said. Of course, it looks safe on paper when you’re consistently pleading felonies down to misdemeanors and declining to prosecute serious charges. But creative bookkeeping is not public safety. Meantime, the actual danger—the actual person—walked free to harm someone else. The reality: violent crime is up 92 percent under Steve Descano’s criminal-first, victim-last policies.
Real safety is built on accountability. Descano built an appearance of safety by avoiding accountability at every turn.
Descano claims his policies build “community trust.” The reality is that the catch-and-release of violent criminals destroys communities. You don’t build trust by releasing violent criminals back into the neighborhoods where they commit violence. The immigrant families living in Fairfax County—the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, hardworking people—deserve to be protected from predators.
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The real message Descano’s catch-and-release approach sent to the community was this: if you are victimized by someone we’ve decided not to prosecute fully, that’s the price of the policy. It’s a price that his office never had to pay—but the victims did.
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Cheryl Minter deserved an apology long before she had to sit in a congressional hearing room to receive one. She deserved accountability long before cameras arrived. She deserved a Commonwealth’s Attorney who took the dangers in his community seriously enough to prosecute them fully—not one who needed congressional intervention to acknowledge the human cost of his decisions.
The consequences of Steve Descano’s tenure—the dropped charges, the released criminals, the families left to grieve without explanation—will far outlast his time in the office. The lights are on now. They should have been on a lot sooner.