An interim staff report released October 26 under House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, accuses New York City's five district attorneys of giving noncitizen defendants "preferential treatment" so that they can avoid deportation, citing office training materials and policies that steer some plea deals toward charges that do not carry immigration consequences. Brooklyn's written policy frames it differently. Issued in 2017, it says that "when possible," an alternative plea for a noncitizen "should be similar in level of offense and length of sentence to that offered to a citizen defendant," while also stating, in the line the report cites, that "in certain instances, it may be appropriate to offer a non-citizen defendant a plea for a lesser offense." It acknowledges that many felony convictions, "especially for violent felonies," carry "inevitable – and often appropriate" immigration consequences. The Staten Island district attorney's office called the report "flagrantly false and patently political." The Manhattan, Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn offices did not respond to requests for comment from the New York Post, which reported the document as an exclusive on October 26, or from Fox News. On Thursday, at a news conference on gun seizures, a Post reporter asked Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and state Attorney General Letitia James whether any of them had ordered prosecutors to downgrade gun charges to keep immigrants without legal status in the country, citing the report. None directly answered; Katz shrugged and made a brief remark that did not address the question, before someone asked for "any other on-topic questions," the Post reported. A spokesperson for Katz later contacted the paper and said, "We charge any defendant with an illegal firearm with the highest possible charge under the law."
What the report cites
The report's central charge is that the chief prosecutors of the five boroughs "treat illegal aliens differently than similarly situated American citizens." Its sharpest allegations concern Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. Bronx training materials, which the committee says it obtained in September and which the report quotes and partly reproduces, tell prosecutors in some cases to "[k]eep the firearm out of the record of conviction," to "[k]eep the domestic relationship out of the record of conviction," and, for "crimes against children," to "[o]ffer something that does not have the child's age as an element of the crime." The report's footnotes attribute those lines to a 2019 prosecutor's guide and an undated guide for supervisors. The committee argues that such omissions also hide a defendant's conduct from future courts and police.
The report also accuses Clark's office of training prosecutors to "concoct nonexistent, legally impossible charges," such as attempted reckless assault, which it says requires two contradictory mental states because a person cannot intend to be reckless. The report does not call such pleas unlawful. The Bronx materials themselves describe such charges as "[c]rimes that cannot be factually accomplished—legal fictions," and say a defendant "[c]an only plead guilty to a hypothetical crime" and "cannot be convicted at trial to one." The Immigrant Defense Project, an immigrant-rights legal group that advises criminal defense lawyers, says in an April 2026 advisory that New York's highest court "has repeatedly held that a defendant may plead guilty to a legally impossible crime" in a negotiated deal, and calls this charge "one of the most helpful protective pleas available to criminal defense counsel." State data the group cites show 289 such convictions across the city from 2015 through 2025, 130 of them in Brooklyn and 50 in the Bronx.
In Queens, the report says, District Attorney Melinda Katz's office tells prosecutors to "[e]xercise extreme caution when using alternative dispositions to avoid consequences" and to consult an in-house immigration specialist, and it quotes a May 2026 email in which a prosecutor told a police detective that the 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." Katz's office says on its website that the specialist helps prosecutors "navigate through plea options and assist in framing dispositions that will prevent unwanted immigration consequences."
In Manhattan, a January 2022 memo from District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the office "will seek dispositions that avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors, and all felonies for which non-carceral outcomes are the presumptive outcome." Bragg's office told the committee in June that the policy is "outdated" and has been replaced by guidance to judge cases individually. A 2022 job posting from Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon's office, cited in the report, describes a unit whose duties include contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement "to postpone removal proceedings against defendants, witnesses, and victims for the interest of justice." His office told Fox News it "has and will continue to ask ICE to let us prosecute and convict criminals before they deport them because Congress has failed to secure our borders."
Brooklyn's rationale and Queens' objection
Brooklyn's policy, announced by District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, says prosecutors weigh immigration because a conviction, "especially for a minor offense," can lead to deportation, which "can be unfair, tear families apart and destabilize our communities." It applies to all noncitizen defendants, including green-card holders and people on valid visas, who the office notes can be deported for some convictions. Gonzalez said at the time that the office was "not seeking to frustrate the federal government's function of protecting our country by removing non-citizens whose illegal acts have caused real harm." Weighing immigration consequences in plea bargaining is not unique to New York. In Padilla v. Kentucky, a 2010 decision holding that defense lawyers must tell noncitizen clients whether a guilty plea carries a risk of deportation, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that "informed consideration of possible deportation can only benefit both the State and noncitizen defendants during the plea-bargaining process." California law directs its prosecutors to "consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences in the plea negotiation process as one factor in an effort to reach a just resolution." Neither addresses the report's central charge, that the city's district attorneys "treat illegal aliens differently than similarly situated American citizens."
Katz did not turn over the records the committee requested in May. In a June letter quoted by the committee, she wrote that its requests "cross over into the exercise of police powers of local jurisdictions, reserved by the Tenth Amendment to the States." The committee replied in August that it might "resort to compulsory process," and Katz's office produced documents on September 1, according to the report.
Detainers and legislation
The report also says the New York Police Department received 20,255 immigration detainers, requests that local officials notify ICE before releasing a person or hold the person briefly, from July 2018 through June 2026 and honored none, including nearly 10,000 in the most recent year, and that the city's Department of Correction declined all 2,852 it received in the same period. Every mayoral administration in that period has limited city agencies' cooperation with ICE, Fox News noted. The report closes by pointing to the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act, H.R. 7640, which the committee approved on March 5; Fox News reported that the bill has stalled in the House. Profoundd found no response to the report from the committee's Democratic members, either on their website (checked Thursday afternoon) or in news coverage (checked Friday morning).
This article reflects reporting through the morning of Friday, October 30, 2026. Sources: the House Judiciary Committee's interim staff report, October 26, and its August 24 letter to Katz; the Brooklyn District Attorney's 2017 policy announcement; the Manhattan District Attorney's January 2022 memo; the Queens District Attorney's Appeals and Special Litigation page; the Immigrant Defense Project's April 2026 practice alert; Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010); California Penal Code section 1016.3; the New York Post, October 26, and October 29; Fox News, October 27.
