New York’s DAs Rewrote the Law for Criminal Aliens

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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.” {snip}

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.

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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.

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