A video showing a group of illegal immigrants brawling with police in New York City’s Times Square has touched off a political furor over a long-standing Democratic policy that limits cooperation between local police and federal immigration authorities.
The surveillance footage, recorded Jan. 27 outside a Manhattan homeless shelter, shows several illegal immigrants kicking officers on a sidewalk and trying to pry them off a man police had taken to the ground.
Police have arrested seven people in connection with the attack, though prosecutors dropped charges against one person they say may not have been involved. All the men were released without bail and reportedly fled the state after.
Take a look —
NEW: Migrant mob beats NYPD officers near Times Square, released days later without bail according to the New York Post.
It's almost as if New York City is *encouraging* people to beat up their officers.
After the beating, police chased down and found the men who were "asylum… pic.twitter.com/IqYg2KhJbs
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 31, 2024
The video of officers being pummeled has prompted waves of public outrage.
Increasingly, New York City officials have aimed dire rhetoric at the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants have swamped the city’s shelters and hotels over the past year.
“A wave of migrant crime has washed over our city,” Police Commissioner Edward Caban said at a news conference Monday about a Venezuelan man being sought in a series of cell phone robberies. He likened the suspect’s accomplices to “ghost criminals,” claiming they had come to New York “with no criminal history, no photos, no social media.”
The NYPD released a video showing Mayor Eric Adams joining officers as they raided a Bronx apartment building in connection with that investigation Monday morning. The video included ominous music and an officer warning of “migrants preying on vulnerable New Yorkers,” while footage plays of a woman being dragged behind a scooter during a purse-snatching.
Alexa Avilés, the head of the City Council’s committee on immigration, accused the mayor and the NYPD of playing into “the same old Trumpian fear mongering and the systematic scapegoating of a diverse and vulnerable group of people.”
In press appearances Monday, Adams noted that many of the 175,000 illegal immigrants who have mobbed the city aren’t committing street crimes.
But in recent days, Adams has also shown a willingness to pull back on a set of laws that often block the city from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Describing the Times Square incident as “an attack on the foundation of our symbol of safety,” Adams, a former police captain facing political pressure from fed up voters, called on the City Council to consider “if there should be more collaboration” with federal immigration officials.
Since 2014, the police department and city jails have been barred from holding illegal immigrants in custody on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless they have been convicted of certain violent crimes and a judge has issued a warrant for their removal.
Responding to public criticism, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said his office was still working to ensure that all the men were correctly identified.
One of the men arrested was not prosecuted because of insufficient evidence of his involvement, a spokesperson for Bragg said.
He said additional people involved in the attack would likely be arrested in coming days. Prosecutors are to present evidence to a grand jury starting Tuesday.
Proponents of the city’s sanctuary laws say they bolster public safety by ensuring immigrant communities are not afraid of interacting with the legal system – not only as criminal defendants, but as witnesses or potential victims of crimes.
A decade ago, New York City held up to 3,000 people in custody each year for the purpose of helping federal immigration authorities initiate detention and deportation proceedings.
At a news conference Monday alongside conservative elected officials, Kenneth Genalo, the field office director in New York for ICE, said the city’s lack of cooperation had made it harder to deport criminals.
“We’re no longer contacted,” he said. “There are hundreds of people being arrested throughout the city, and if we can’t determine which ones are the most violent, we have to find out unfortunately through the media.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article