New York City’s Department of Corrections and New York Police Department in 2017 violated the city’s own policy that requires law enforcement to honor federal immigration requests and turn over illegal immigrants who have been convicted of certain crimes, several U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told the Washington Examiner.
Although New York City is a sanctuary city — a place where local lawmakers block law enforcement from handing over illegal immigrants to federal immigration agents — that policy is not without exceptions.
In 2014, the New York City Council passed and Mayor Bill de Blasio enacted two laws that outlined which people would not be protected from deportation. Any illegal immigrant taken into police custody and determined to have been convicted in the past five years of one of 170 felony crimes must be turned over to ICE.
But city data provided by the NYPD and the Department of Corrections, or DOC, indicate only 20 of the more than 2,000 people ICE requested in fiscal year 2017 were handed over. That figure includes 1,526 detainer requests for people in custody of the NYPD and another 536 for people at DOC facilities.
“It’s absolutely higher than that,” said a regional ICE official with knowledge of the DOC arrests. This official said the DOC doesn’t always know when illegal immigrants are arrested every year because of a lack of communication between the two agencies.
“The bigger picture is not the handful they turned over to us, rather the extreme amount they’re not turning over to us,” the ICE official said. He said many of these people may have convictions related to crimes outside of just the 170 that New York has prioritized.
As a result, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said that while de Blasio claims to be concerned about the safety of New Yorkers and immigrants, his city continually releases criminals with some of the most severe records back onto the streets instead of sending them up the legal ladder to ICE.
A DOC spokeswoman said some of the problem lies with ICE. She said illegal immigrants who commit one of the priority crimes will only be turned over to ICE if ICE gives the city the right paperwork, such as a warrant. She said the fact that only 20 were handed over to ICE last year indicates ICE is submitting the wrong paperwork.
The NYPD did not return several requests for comment, but de Blasio’s office agreed with the DOC.
But ICE officials said New York has created its own standards, apart from the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, that determines which kinds of warrants it will and will not honor. One ICE official said his agency is able to submit an arrest warrant or a warrant for removal, and said federal law allows for the arrest and removal of aliens based on those warrants.
“What New York City asks for is a judicial order signed by a federal judge [arrest warrant]. We don’t get that on every single case. We can hardly ever get that,” the ICE official said.
A second ICE official said ICE submits the same kind of documents in other jurisdictions around the country that are honored.
DHS gave the Washington Examiner three specific cases in which the NYPD ignored detainer requests and released criminal aliens who were convicted for one or more of the 170 crimes identified by New York. Those crimes include all felony-level charges like assault, murder, rape, and many others.
One of the cases involved a 36-year-old Chinese man, who was convicted of assault. But city police did not hold him even after ICE issued a detainer request, and policy never told ICE he was released.
Police ignored similar requests to hold a convicted alien from Mexico, and another from Jamaica, DHS said.
Police also released a Mexican man was convicted of felony strangulation who should have been held according to the city policy, and released a Jamaican man.
With an estimated 500,000 people in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx who are illegal residents, DHS said these handfuls of cases are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how many people it believes meet the 2014 laws’ standards.
“The detainers that Mayor de Blasio is proud to have declined and refused to allow ICE to enter jails are for criminals,” the DHS spokesperson said.
As a result of NYC being a sanctuary city, the agency has had to go after criminal aliens — those not convicted in the past five years of serious crimes — in public places or at residences. Those arrests can be misreported as ICE targeting a random person at court or on the street, but immigration officials have had to hit the streets in order to get people not being turned over at jails.
Some of these criminal aliens in New York were arrested in standard enforcement operations that took place in mid-November, according to a press release issued in late that month.
“The city’s failure to honor detainers poses an increased risk to law enforcement officers and the community,” said ICE’s acting Director Tom Homan. “New York City’s current policy releases criminal aliens back onto the streets where they can reoffend, creating a completely avoidable public safety threat.”
