Photo: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
New York Attorney General Letitia James smiled and said nothing when a reporter asked about a House Judiciary Committee report alleging that the city’s district attorneys told prosecutors to downgrade charges against illegal immigrants to shield them from deportation, RedState reports.
RedState frames a post by Scott Mechkowski, a retired deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City, as an explanation for why that question may have been so uncomfortable. Mechkowski says Bronx DA Darcel Clark’s playbook for child sex abuse cases was designed to keep deportable offenders in the country.
In a lengthy X post, Mechkowski pointed to a line in a 2019 Bronx training guide, as reproduced in the House Judiciary Committee report. According to the report, prosecutors were told to “[o]ffer something that does not have the child’s age as an element of the crime.”
“Think about what that means,” Mechkowski wrote. “A grown man commits a sex crime against a child. He pleads to something that, on paper, could have been against an adult. The record that reaches ICE no longer shows a child victim.” He added, “The removal case falls apart, and he stays here.”
The House Judiciary Committee’s interim staff report, released Oct. 26, alleges that the district attorneys in all five boroughs gave “preferential treatment” to illegal immigrants so they could avoid deportation. It said Clark “trains prosecutors in her office to conceal certain facts from the record of conviction and pursue alternative charges,” and that the office endorsed pleas to “legally impossible” crimes such as “attempted reckless assault.”
Fox News reports that data obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project shows 289 convictions for attempted reckless assault across the city from 2015 through 2025, including 50 in the Bronx. When a reporter put the report to James, Queens DA Melinda Katz and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez at a press conference days later, RedState says James did little more than stare blankly, Katz offered what the outlet called an incomprehensible defense, and the event was moved along.
Mechkowski said that two weeks after the report came out, there has been “no outrage from the Bronx DA, the AG or the networks.” Katz’s office told the New York Post it has never offered leniency on gun crimes to “any defendant,” while Staten Island’s DA called the report “flagrantly false and patently political.”
RedState notes that the report does not identify a specific child-victim case in which the Bronx guidance was used, so how often it happened remains unanswered. The outlet argues that James, Katz and Gonzalez had nothing to say on camera when given a chance to clear up the facts.
