NYC DAs Trained Prosecutors to Obstruct Deportation
New York City’s five elected district attorneys give noncitizen defendants plea deals designed to avoid deportation, according to a House Judiciary Committee report released Monday.
The interim staff report, from Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and immigration subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), names Darcel Clark, Melinda Katz, Alvin Bragg, Eric Gonzalez and Michael McMahon.
It says those prosecutors give foreign nationals “preferential treatment” that “similarly situated Americans do not receive” so they “may avoid immigration consequences for their criminality and can remain in the United States indefinitely.”
The committee also found that the NYPD received nearly 10,000 ICE detainers in roughly the past year and honored none. From mid-2018 through June 2026, it received 20,255 and did not honor one.
Over the same period, the city Department of Correction received nearly 3,000 detainers and refused all of them. City law allows compliance only with a judicial warrant and a serious conviction.
Bronx and Queens Training Materials
Bronx training from 2019 on “immigration-conscious plea bargaining” said to “Offer a Non-Deportable Offense,” the New York Post reported, including pleas that do not have “the child’s age as an element.”
The Bronx guidance also told prosecutors to “[k]eep the firearm out of the record of conviction” in gun cases and to “[k]eep the domestic relationship out” in domestic cases.
The report says the Bronx office suggested charges for “legally impossible” crimes, such as “attempted reckless assault,” because such convictions “cannot serve as the basis for” immigration removal proceedings.
In Queens, Katz told prosecutors to “exercise extreme caution” and “not get caught up in the label of [f]elonies, [m]isdemeanors” when noncitizens are charged. Her office employs an “immigration specialist” to help shape pleas.
In a May 26 email obtained by the committee, a Queens assistant district attorney told an NYPD detective the office had “basically made a [plea] deal which is ‘immigration safe.'”
Brooklyn has sought “immigration-neutral” outcomes since 2017, and Staten Island has a unit that asks ICE to delay deportations. Bragg’s office called its 2022 policy “outdated.”
“When did protecting a criminal’s immigration status become a part of a DA’s job description?” asked New York City Council Member Joann Ariola, a Republican. “If that’s not their priority, then they’ve got it backwards.”
The committee first wrote to the district attorneys in May. Katz initially refused, arguing state prosecutions fall outside congressional oversight, and complied only after an August letter warned of a possible subpoena.
Bragg’s 2022 memo had asked prosecutors to seek outcomes that avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors. His office still considers citizenship status case by case, the Post reported.
None of the five district attorneys’ offices responded to the Post’s requests for comment. The committee said it will keep investigating sanctuary policies “to inform potential legislative reforms.”
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