BREAKING🚨 ICE is threatening to criminally charge and ARREST an elected sheriff, all because her jail won't hand people to ICE without a warrant. Federal agents hand-delivered letters in early July to Dawanna Witt, the elected sheriff of Hennepin County, Minnesota, and Tom Dart, the elected sheriff of Cook County, Illinois. Both are Democrats. One letter said failure to comply with an ICE subpoena "may constitute Tampering with a Witness … and, if convicted, may result in fines and a term of imprisonment." Witt made it public this week, according to The New York Times's reporting. "In the past few weeks, federal officials have served warnings threatening to arrest me personally for what they describe as witness tampering," she wrote. "There is no legal basis for that claim because our office is following the law." Some of the subpoenas served on Witt demanded people who had already been released from her jail. "It makes no sense for them to have served them in the first place," she said. In Cook County, ICE sent four subpoenas ordering the sheriff to bring detainees to ICE's offices in the Loop. Three of those people were already out of custody, a sheriff's office spokesman said. Hennepin County's policy is roughly a decade old. The jail turns someone over to any agency when a judge signs a warrant. ICE largely doesn't bring judicial warrants. Bradford Colbert, a law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said of the tampering theory: "It's an offensive reading of the statute. There is no way anyone could possibly read this as tampering with a witness." Homeland Security says subpoenaing local officials is common practice and that "sanctuary politicians refuse to hand over the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." This is the same crackdown in which immigration agents fatally shot two American citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year. "Threats of prosecution will not cause me to abandon my legal responsibilities or disregard constitutional protections," Witt said. No charges have been filed against either sheriff.