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New York's DAs Trained Prosecutors to Scrub Crimes Off Illegal Immigrants' Records, Down to the Age of Child Victims

When a grown man is convicted of a crime against a child, the child's age goes on the record. It's what tells a judge, a parole board and a federal immigration officer exactly what kind of crime it was.

According to a new House Judiciary Committee report, prosecutors in New York City were told to leave it off.

They were also told to leave off whether a gun was involved, and whether the victim was the defendant's wife or girlfriend. The report says the reason was simple. Those facts can get an illegal immigrant deported, and New York's district attorneys didn't want that to happen.

If the victim was somebody's 12-year-old daughter, the record might not say so.

The 22-page report, "New York City: The Dangerous Consequences of Sanctuary Policies," names all five of the city's elected district attorneys: Melinda Katz in Queens, Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, Darcel Clark in the Bronx, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Michael McMahon on Staten Island. It accuses them of directing prosecutors to give illegal immigrants special treatment for one reason: their immigration status.

According to the report, it was a system. It had job titles, training sessions and memos in writing.

In the Bronx, Clark's office allegedly trained prosecutors in "Immigration-Conscious Plea Bargaining." Prosecutors learned to offer crimes that don't trigger deportation, to steer around "aggravated felony" charges, and even to plead defendants to crimes that can't legally exist, like "attempted reckless assault." Nobody can attempt to be reckless. The charge makes no sense, and it lands on the record in a form ICE can't use.

ICE never sees what really happened.

In Queens, Katz's office created a job called "Immigration Specialist" to help prosecutors weigh plea options and frame outcomes that "prevent unwanted immigration consequences." The office also allegedly worked to rewrite past convictions. Prosecutors were told to "not get caught up in the label of felonies, misdemeanors," and to "exercise extreme caution" whenever the defendant was a foreign national.

Victims never got that kind of caution. ICE never sees what really happened.

In Manhattan, Bragg put it in writing. His January 2022 memo told prosecutors to "seek dispositions that avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors, and all felonies for which non-carceral outcomes are the presumptive outcome." That's every misdemeanor, plus a whole category of felonies. Bragg's office later said prosecutors were only asked to use their judgment "on a case-by-case basis." The memo said "all."

ICE never sees what really happened.

The math is simple. Under federal law, a felony conviction can get an illegal immigrant deported. A misdemeanor often won't. So when a prosecutor knocks a felony gun charge down to a misdemeanor, the defendant gets a lighter sentence and gets to stay in the country. Congress wrote the deportation law, and New York's prosecutors allegedly built a way around it.

That leaves two different systems of justice in the same courthouse. An American citizen caught with an illegal gun faces the full felony. An illegal immigrant caught with the same gun gets an Immigration Specialist.

The House Judiciary Committee says New York ignored nearly 10,000 ICE detainer requests for known criminals in a single year. The DAs' policies help explain how so many of those criminals never become ICE's problem.

On Thursday, a reporter finally got to ask about it. Katz, Gonzalez and New York Attorney General Letitia James were standing together at a press conference.

The topic was gun safety.

The question was simple: "Did any of you order prosecutors to downgrade gun charges to keep illegal immigrants in the US, per the Judiciary Committee report?"

Katz shrugged. Nobody answered.

Later, Katz's office told reporters it charges anyone with an illegal gun "with the highest possible charge under the law." That's hard to square with an office that has an Immigration Specialist whose job is to help frame pleas that avoid immigration consequences.

Every one of these prosecutors swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and under that Constitution, immigration law belongs to the federal government. The people sworn to uphold the law allegedly sat down and engineered ways around it, charge by charge, with a training program to match.

Three officials stood at that podium. None of them answered the question.

Somewhere in New York, a conviction record is missing the age of a child.

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