Biden-Era Border Failure Comes Home as Illegal Immigrant Convicted of Groping Virginia Teens

Twelve teenage girls stood in a Virginia courtroom Thursday and told their stories. They described being groped, touched, violated by a classmate who never should have been in their school to begin with. After an all-day hearing that forced these young women to relive their trauma, a judge found Israel Flores Ortiz guilty on nine counts of assault and battery. He walked on three others. One charge got tossed entirely.

Flores Ortiz is 18 years old. He’s an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: he was released into the United States under the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policies. The same policies we were told were humane, compassionate, necessary. The same policies that prioritized everyone except American citizens and their children.

Now the Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into Fairfax County Public Schools. You know what that tells you? It tells you the school district knew they had a problem and didn’t do enough to protect these girls. Title IX exists to ensure students can learn without fear of sexual harassment or assault. These girls couldn’t.

But the failures here run deeper than just border policy or school administration. Steve Descano, the Democratic Commonwealth Attorney for Fairfax County, managed to bungle what should have been a straightforward prosecution. Critics say he didn’t subpoena witnesses until the day before the hearing. The day before. When you’re dealing with a dozen victims and multiple counts of sexual assault, you don’t wait until the eleventh hour to get your ducks in a row. That’s not just incompetence. That’s negligence.

Descano’s campaign received significant funding from groups backed by George Soros, the billionaire progressive activist who’s spent millions installing soft-on-crime prosecutors across the country. These prosecutors talk a good game about criminal justice reform and racial equity. What they deliver is chaos, victimization, and communities less safe than they found them. Fairfax County parents are learning this lesson the hard way.

The broader picture here is impossible to ignore. We have open borders that allow people to enter illegally and get released into communities with minimal vetting. We have schools that apparently lack the backbone to protect their students from predators in their hallways. And we have prosecutors more interested in ideology than justice, more concerned with their progressive credentials than the safety of the people they’re supposed to serve.

Those twelve girls who testified Thursday deserved better. They deserved a border policy that kept criminals out. They deserved school administrators who took their complaints seriously the first time. They deserved a prosecutor who treated their case with the urgency and professionalism it required. Instead, they got a system that failed them at every level.

Flores Ortiz is guilty on nine counts now. That’s something, but it’s nine misdemeanors. For assaulting more than a dozen girls. The message this sends to other predators isn’t exactly fear-inducing. And those three not-guilty verdicts? That’s what happens when prosecutors don’t do their jobs properly. Justice delayed becomes justice denied, and sloppy preparation means guilty people sometimes walk.

This is what happens when feelings replace policy and virtue signaling replaces common sense. We were told that questioning border security made us heartless. Turns out letting everyone in without proper vetting makes us reckless. These girls paid the price for someone else’s political philosophy.

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