New York’s DAs rewrote the law for criminal aliens

OPINION:

I spent 24 years in immigration enforcement, culminating in a role as deputy field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City.

In my line of work, you learn to read the gap between what a man did and what he was convicted of doing. In the Big Apple, that gap did not happen by accident. Now we have it in writing.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee released a staff report built on the New York City district attorneys’ own training manuals, internal guidance and emails. All five borough DAs are in it: Melinda Katz, Darcel Clark, Alvin Bragg, Eric Gonzalez and Michael McMahon.

Start in the Bronx. In 2019, Ms. Clark’s office issued a guide titled “Immigration-Conscious Plea Bargaining,” which directs prosecutors to “keep the firearm” and “the domestic relationship” out of conviction records.

In crimes against children, it orders prosecutors to “offer something that does not have the child’s age as an element of the crime.” You read that right: A prosecutor, paid by the people of the Bronx, was being ordered to make sure that a child victim’s age never appears on paper.

I have reviewed the files myself: child sex abuse cases in which the complaint and witness statements laid out exactly what happened. Yet the certificate of disposition came back stripped of the one element that mattered. Most often, the defendant held a green card and the original charge would have made him an aggravated felon and thus deportable. I could find no other reason for the charge to change.

For an illegal alien, the right plea avoids the bars to asylum or cancellation of removal. For a green card holder, it means being able to stay in the U.S. permanently. The DAs know that.

Ms. Clark’s office even trained prosecutors on “legal fictions,” pleas to crimes that cannot exist, such as attempted reckless assault. Nobody can intend to be reckless, so why offer it? Because a crime that never happened is not deportable.

In Queens, Ms. Katz has an on-staff immigration specialist to help frame dispositions that prevent unwanted immigration consequences. In May, one of her prosecutors told a New York Police Department detective that the office had made an “immigration safe” deal — even though the defendant pleaded to multiple crimes and did jail time.

Brooklyn has done the same since 2017, when Mr. Gonzalez trained his staff on reaching “immigration-neutral” outcomes. Staten Island runs a unit that asks ICE to delay removals.

In Manhattan, Mr. Bragg’s Day 1 memo in January 2022 told prosecutors to avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors and all felonies for which incarceration was not expected. Mr. Bragg now calls that policy “outdated.” He has never called it wrong.

This is the same Alvin Bragg who brought the full weight of his office down on former Marine Daniel Penny, who intervened on a subway car and subdued a man who was threatening passengers. A jury acquitted him.

In Mr. Bragg’s office, the citizen got the indictment. The noncitizen got the memo.

For more than a decade, advocates have pushed New York to engineer deportation away. In 2019, Albany cut the maximum misdemeanor sentence by one day to 364 days so that misdemeanors would not trigger deportation. In May, the legislature passed the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act to gut cooperation with ICE. The DAs did not invent the movement, but they have become its most effective tool.

From July 2018 to June 2026, the NYPD received 20,255 ICE detainers — and honored zero. Jails refuse to hand over people, and by the time ICE finds them, the DA has already made sure the conviction cannot be used against them.

These prosecutors took an oath to the public and the law, not the defendant. The record is supposed to tell the next cop, judge and immigration judge whom they are dealing with. Laundering the record betrays the oath and the victims these DAs claim to protect.

Congress has the fix in hand. The Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act would stop states and cities from blocking cooperation with ICE, pull federal money from jurisdictions that obstruct it and let victims of released criminals sue.

Leadership promises a vote before this Congress ends in January. That is too late. Every week it waits, another detainer is ignored and another plea is written.

Bring the measure to the floor now and send it to the Senate with a deadline. Then demand that all five New York City DAs turn over every plea they shaped around immigration, so that New Yorkers can see who was kept here and what they did.

• Scott Mechkowski is a retired deputy field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City, a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project and a senior adviser and visiting fellow at the National Immigration Center for Enforcement.