New Yorkers are increasingly worried about the scourge of migrant crime, from the heartrending murder of Laken Riley, the Georgia student killed by a man whose first address in America was in New York City, to the brazen robberies tied to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But many are confused about the extent to which migrants are breaking laws and what policy changes will stop them.
The most obvious fix is simply to reduce both the enormous number of migrants flooding into New York City and the social-service largess that attracts them. Since spring 2022, New Yorkers have received a stunning 223,000 migrants and asylum seekers, who represent an enormous drain on the city budget. The city spends $352 daily per migrant for housing, social services, and amenities.
The city plans to close 12 migrant shelters before the end of this year, and New Yorkers can anticipate some further respite under immigration policy reversals promised by President-elect Donald Trump. Already, Trump has pledged to seal the southern border, carry out a monumental deportation effort, and end Biden-era parole programs for illegal entrants, as well as migrants’ ability to apply for asylum while still in Mexico through the CBP One app. He has also nominated the strong-border proponent and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security.
But none of this will end New York’s migrant crime epidemic. Migrants and gang members will continue to flock to the city to take advantage of lax bail, discovery, and “Raise the Age” laws, ideologically progressive judges, and an under-resourced system.
These factors have made the Big Apple a destination for migrants seeking to commit property theft, in particular. For instance, thieves are renting mopeds to ride around in pairs, ping-ponging across the boroughs, and snatching jewelry, phones, and purses. To combat this trend, police now scout for duos on bikes, making traffic stops in hopes of preventing the next spree. Police operations also seize mopeds without license plates; the vehicles can often be seen lined up outside migrant shelters.
NYPD aviation units try to spot getaway mopeds from helicopters (weather permitting), but identification and apprehension are often impossible. It’s also tough to stop migrants from fencing shoplifted property in shelters or shipping stolen cellphones overseas, where they can’t be traced.
Even when arrested, migrant criminals face few consequences, thanks to a decade of criminal-justice policies that have degraded the system’s ability to respond. Since migrants typically have no U.S. criminal history, it’s virtually impossible to detain them for their first non-fatal crime in New York. Statewide bail reform in 2020 made hundreds of infractions ineligible for bail setting, regardless of defendants’ dangerousness or likelihood to reoffend.
As of 2022, the law had been amended and clarified so that judges can detain defendants re-arrested for a felony or Class A misdemeanor involving “harm to an identifiable person or property,” but only if they have a pending case also involving such harm. This applies to theft—unless the theft is “negligible” and not “in furtherance of other criminal activity.” While the recent changes to the law have opened up some avenues for the courts to detain migrants who repeatedly rob people and businesses, the “harm-on-harm” provision is only as effective as judges’ willingness to use it. New York’s progressive-appointed criminal court judges frequently won’t.
New York’s 2020 discovery statute further hampers prosecutors, forcing them to downgrade cases to lesser charges in the hope of getting convictions. Under this pressure, the Manhattan district attorney’s office went from downgrading 24 percent of felony property crimes in 2019 to downgrading 46 percent in 2023. This near doubling has enormous implications for the “harm-on-harm” provision, as new offenses are often reduced below the threshold that makes them bail-eligible.
The discovery law has also helped make New York a city that dismissed 13,651 more misdemeanors in 2023 than in 2019. According to NYPD data, misdemeanor conviction rates dropped from over 13 percent in 2017 to just 4 percent last year. The felony conviction rate fell from 11 percent to 3 percent during that period.
Under pressure, prosecutors are also declining even to prosecute many more crimes. The Manhattan DA’s office declined twice as many theft cases, 243 percent more burglaries, and 189 percent more weapons arrests last year than in 2019.
It should come as no surprise that, in the midtown precincts straddling the large, migrant-filled Roosevelt Hotel, petit larcenies are up 36 percent year-to-date compared with 2019. In midtown south, grand larcenies have increased from 1,671 to 2,038 over equivalent time spans.
Teen migrants are contributing to this surge, as they can exploit the state’s 2017 shift in the age of criminal responsibility to 18. Under New York State’s Raise the Age law, essentially all misdemeanors committed by 16- and 17-year-olds go to family court, where there are generally no consequences, prosecutors and victims can’t learn case outcomes, and future judges are not allowed to know about past arrests. Further, 83 percent of felonies, and even 75 percent of violent felonies, now go to family court, too. No wonder youth arrests for major crimes have risen an astounding 42 percent since 2022.
Young Latin American gang members are increasingly migrating to New York to take advantage of this permissive climate. According to an NYPD source, more and more arrestees have Tren de Aragua tattoos. This is just one of many details that cops have started tracking in recent months, but this data is internal and not readily available to help analysts and policymakers get a sense of how widespread migrant crime really is. No wonder the migrant crime wave has stretched the NYPD thin. It takes a lot of manpower and resources to track moped-driving thieves across a city, and even when officers catch them, they frequently aren’t detained—or, if detained, aren’t convicted.
Fixing immigration policy is only part of the answer. Unless New York also amends its destructive criminal-justice laws, it will remain a sanctuary for criminality.
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