{"id":218801,"date":"2026-05-04T03:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T03:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/218801\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T03:00:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T03:00:34","slug":"a-lack-of-cooperation-with-ice-to-deport-an-illegal-immigrant-resulted-in-a-family-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/218801\/","title":{"rendered":"A lack of cooperation with ICE to deport an illegal immigrant resulted in a family tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why would the New York City Department of Correction refuse to honor a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer for an illegal Mexican national facing murder and arson charges<\/a> in Queens?<\/p>\n

The same perverted sense of \u201cequity\u201d that drove the Biden administration to open the border to millions of illegal migrants.<\/p>\n

On April 9, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced<\/a> Roman Amatitla would be charged with arson and eight counts of second-degree murder for allegedly setting a fire that killed four in a Flushing apartment building, including a 3-year-old girl.<\/p>\n

Katz called it as \u201can act of mass murder,\u201d and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently revealed Amatitla had entered the US illegally \u201cat an unknown date and unknown time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the heinous nature of the crime, the threat posed to the community and Amatitla\u2019s unlawful status, NYDOC still vowed not to cooperate with ICE\u2019s efforts to keep him off the streets.<\/p>\n

Amatitla is being held without bail while he awaits trial. <\/p>\n

But paperwork released by DHS shows the NYDOC refusing to provide status updates to ICE if he is ever released.<\/p>\n

Joe\u2019s policies<\/p>\n

And this hostility to the nation\u2019s immigration laws will only get worse if, as expected, Albany passes an even more aggressive sanctuary bill that makes it illegal for local authorities to cooperate with ICE in many circumstances.<\/p>\n

All of which should come as no surprise to those who delved into the Biden administration\u2019s justifications for its feckless immigration policies \u2014 which continue to be tacitly embraced by the former president\u2019s fellow Democrats.<\/p>\n

In September 2021, Biden\u2019s impeached DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, imposed strict restrictions on ICE\u2019s ability<\/a> to arrest and deport criminal aliens, premised on his \u201cprosecutorial discretion\u201d authority.<\/p>\n

\tAs of December 1, New York\u2019s failure to honor ICE detainers has resulted in the release of 6,947 criminal illegal aliens since January 20. The crimes of these aliens include:\u00a0<\/p>\n

29 homicides<\/p>\n

2,509 assaults<\/p>\n

199 burglaries<\/p>\n

305 robberies<\/p>\n

392 dangerous drugs offenses<\/p>\n

300 weapons offenses<\/p>\n

207 sexual predatory offenses<\/p>\n

Those restrictions required officers to consider irrelevant \u201cmitigating\u201d factors \u2014 including any \u201cmental condition that may have contributed to the criminal conduct\u201d \u2014 before even launching an investigation.<\/p>\n

Why did Mayorkas hamstring immigration officers who were trying to take dangerous aliens off the street?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the immigration enforcement context,\u201d an accompanying memo explained, \u201cscholars\u201d had concluded such \u201cprosecutorial discretion guidelines\u201d were \u201cessential to advancing\u201d Biden\u2019s \u201cstated commitment to \u2018advancing equity for all including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, ivory tower grandees believe our immigration laws are \u201cJim Crow,\u201d and complying with Congress\u2019 demands that ICE remove all dangerous criminals from the community is the moral equivalent of aiming Bull Connor\u2019s fire hoses at civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Ala., circa 1963.<\/p>\n

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The equity argument<\/p>\n

Congress, on a bipartisan basis, rejected that argument in January 2025 when it passed the \u201cLaken Riley Act,\u201d a bill honoring a young woman who was herself the victim of such sanctimonious nonsense, but \u201cequity\u201d remains at the heart of all sanctuary laws \u2014 including the one protecting aliens like Amatitla.<\/p>\n

Their argument goes as follows: if a citizen and an alien commit the same offense, the punishment \u2014 arrest, conviction and imprisonment \u2014 should be the same.<\/p>\n

But because only the alien faces the additional punishment of deportation, \u201cequity\u201d requires the sanctuary to shelter the alien from immigration enforcement to prevent an \u201cinequitable\u201d outcome.<\/p>\n

As a Baltimorean, I can assure you the US has enough homegrown criminals and doesn\u2019t need to import more.<\/p>\n

Consequently, the argument quickly breaks down under any scrutiny, which is why sanctuary politicos rarely say the quiet part out loud.<\/p>\n

One exception is Steve Descano, chief prosecutor in Fairfax County, Va., who argued on his campaign website, \u201cIf two people commit the same crime, but only one\u2019s punishment includes deportation, that\u2019s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of\u201d his county\u2019s \u201cvalues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do America\u2019s \u201cvalues\u201d now include coddling criminals?<\/p>\n

Andrew Arthur is the fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why would the New York City Department of Correction refuse to honor a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[21470,2300,3410,874,86217,3064,9,24,63,299,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-218801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-department-of-corrections","tag-department-of-homeland-security","tag-illegal-immigrants","tag-joe-biden","tag-laken-riley","tag-melinda-katz","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}