The Man Who Prosecuted "Many, Many People" Now Wants Their Votes

Ryan Crosswell spent three years doing Trump's immigration dirty work in San Diego. Now he's asking Latino families in Allentown to send him to Congress.

WASHINGTON. — Here is what you need to know about Ryan Crosswell, the former Republican who wants Democrats in Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district to make him their nominee for Congress.

He told you himself. Didn’t bury it. Didn’t whisper it. Said it out loud, in an interview, like a man proud of his résumé.

“I’ve prosecuted many, many people for coming to this country illegally,” Crosswell said in October 2025. “I have a familiarity with all these issues that are front and center. I don’t really need to study for the test.”

Many, many people.

In Allentown and Bethlehem, where Latino families have been living in terror since ICE turned American neighborhoods into a stalking ground, those words land like a fist on a kitchen table.

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Controversial Career

The year was 2018. Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General of the United States, flew to San Diego — Crosswell’s city, Crosswell’s district — to announce that the federal government would separate migrant children from their parents at the border. He told the assembled prosecutors, the federal attorneys who worked those Southwest border cases, that they would “take on as many of those cases as humanly possible until we get to 100 percent.”

Crosswell was in that office. He stayed.

He stayed through the Muslim ban. He stayed through the raids. He stayed through the screaming of children in cages that the whole world heard on the news. He stayed, prosecuting what he himself called “border crimes, including immigration offenses,” until May of 2020 — nearly the entire first Trump administration, beginning to end, in a border district, on immigration cases.

He didn’t resign in protest. He didn’t blow a whistle. He worked the docket.

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Latinos Will Decide This

Now Ryan Crosswell wants to represent a district with one of the largest concentrations of Latino voters in Pennsylvania. He has found, conveniently, that ICE “violated Fourth Amendment protections.” He thinks local officials should decide whether to cooperate with the agency.

That’s a minority position among Democrats.

It is a more complicated position when you spent three years as the man federal immigration authorities called to make their cases stick in court.

Crosswell was a registered Republican from at least 2012 through the 2024 general election — through the chaos of January 6th, through the family separations, through every ugly chapter of it. He voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney for president. He called McCain his “hero.” He never once voted for Barack Obama.

He changed his registration to Democrat after the election that returned Donald Trump to power. The timing, like everything else about this candidacy, is worth sitting with.

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The Bottom Line

There is a woman in Allentown right now who goes to bed every night not knowing if her neighbor will still be there in the morning. There is a father in Bethlehem who coaches his kids on what to do if ICE comes to the door. They are the people who vote in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania’s 7th district. They are the people Ryan Crosswell is asking to trust him.

He wants them to believe he is on their side now.

Maybe he is. People change. Conversions happen.

But when a man tells you — proudly, in his own words — that he prosecuted “many, many people for coming to this country illegally” while working for the administration that gave the world family separation, the least you can do is take him at his word.

He studied for that test for three years.

Primary Day is May 19th.