House Judiciary Report Says Prosecutors in All Five NYC Boroughs Tailored Plea Deals to Keep Noncitizen Defendants From Deportation
The Jim Jordan-led committee focuses on the Bronx, where it says prosecutors were told to leave out firearms and victim details. Bragg's office calls its 2022 policy outdated, and Staten Island calls the report 'flagrantly false and patently political.'
A Republican-led House committee says New York City's district attorneys have given "preferential treatment" to noncitizens who commit crimes so they can avoid deportation, Fox News reports.
The Bronx. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, says nonpublic documents show Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark "trains prosecutors in her office to conceal certain facts" from conviction records. It says internal materials tell prosecutors to leave firearms out of records for "immigration-conscious plea bargaining." In domestic violence and child-victim cases, it says prosecutors were told to omit the victim relationship and the child's age. It also says the office encouraged pleas to "nonexistent, legally impossible" crimes, such as "attempted reckless assault." State data it cites show 289 such convictions citywide from 2015 through 2025, 50 of them in the Bronx. New York's highest court upheld the concept this year.
The other boroughs. The report cites a May 2026 email from a Queens prosecutor describing a deal as "immigration safe." It says Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg issued a 2022 memo urging dispositions that avoid immigration consequences for misdemeanors and many felonies. It says Brooklyn and Staten Island used similar tactics.
The responses. Bragg's office called the January 2022 policy "outdated" and said it has been updated to give prosecutors discretion case by case. Staten Island's office called the report "flagrantly false and patently political" and said it asks ICE to let it prosecute before deportation. The other offices and the mayor's office had not responded when Fox published.
Detainers. The report says the NYPD declined 20,255 ICE detainers from July 2018 to June 2026, and the Department of Correction declined all 2,852 it received. Nearly 10,000 of the NYPD's were lodged between July 2025 and June 2026.
Note for readers: these are the committee's findings from documents we have not seen. Fox notes the sanctuary policies behind the detainer figures have been in place across mayoral administrations. The committee's Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act has stalled in the House.