House report says NYC prosecutors tailored plea deals to shield illegal immigrants from deportation
New York City prosecutors from all five boroughs have given "preferential treatment" to noncitizens who commit crimes, all to help them avoid deportation, according to a report from the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said nonpublic documents obtained through its oversight work revealed new details about the extent to which the city's district attorney's offices sought to limit the immigration consequences of criminal prosecutions.
Some of the report's most serious allegations came against Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. The report claims she "trains prosecutors in her office to conceal certain facts" from defendants' conviction records and pursue charges that would not trigger deportation.
Internal materials from the Bronx DA's office explicitly instruct prosecutors to leave references to firearms out of conviction records to maintain "immigration-conscious plea bargaining," according to the report.
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In cases of domestic violence or crimes against children — offenses that are often deportable under the Immigration and Nationality Act — Bronx prosecutors were told to leave out defendants' relationships with their alleged victims and pursue charges that did not specify the ages of child victims.
Clark, who has been the Bronx DA since 2016, was also accused of encouraging prosecutors to charge foreign nationals with "nonexistent, legally impossible" crimes to skirt deportation.
The report's authors offered the example of Clark's staff getting someone to plead guilty to "attempted reckless assault," a crime they described as legally impossible because someone cannot intend to act recklessly. A plea to such a crime, they said, could allow a noncitizen defendant to stay in the country indefinitely.
New York courts nevertheless allow defendants to plead guilty to such hypothetical offenses as part of negotiated plea deals. The Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, upheld the legal concept this year.
The practice is not limited to the Bronx. State data obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project showed 289 convictions for attempted reckless assault across New York City from 2015 through 2025, including 50 in the Bronx.
The House Judiciary Committee also pointed to similar practices within the Queens DA's office, led by Melinda Katz since 2020.
It cited a May 2026 email from a Queens prosecutor informing an NYPD detective that the DA's office had "basically made a [plea] deal which is ‘immigration safe’ while still having [the defendant] plea to multiple crimes and do some jail time."
Queens prosecutors were also instructed to "exercise extreme caution" when resolving cases involving noncitizens and to consult the office's immigration specialist when considering plea deals for them, the report said.
Over in the Manhattan office, the report said DA Alvin Bragg issued a memo in 2022 telling prosecutors to "seek dispositions that avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors, and all felonies" where prosecutors generally did not expect defendants to receive jail time.
Bragg's office responded to the committee by describing its January 2022 policy as "outdated," adding that it had updated it to give prosecutors discretion on individual cases.
The DA's offices in Brooklyn and Staten Island were shown to use comparable tactics when dealing with noncitizen defendants, according to the report.
The five offices referenced in the report did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment. The mayor's office also did not immediately respond.
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Citywide sanctuary policies led the NYPD to decline 20,255 immigration detainers between July 2018 and June 2026, the report said. Detainers are federal requests asking local authorities to hold certain noncitizens briefly so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can take them into custody.
The city's Department of Correction also declined all 2,852 ICE detainers it received during the same period, according to the report.
These figures are not necessarily surprising, given that each mayoral administration throughout that period has limited city agencies from cooperating with ICE.
What stands out, however, is that nearly half of those detainers — almost 10,000 — were lodged between July 2025 and June 2026, an indicator that the second Trump administration has acted far more aggressively in its attempts to scoop up noncitizens arrested by local police than either the Biden administration or the first Trump administration.
The House Judiciary Committee's findings come as House Republicans push legislation that would prevent state and local governments from restricting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
In March, the committee advanced the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act — a bill that has stalled in the House — and the report said lawmakers would continue investigating sanctuary jurisdictions.