Bronx DA Trained Prosecutors to Drop a Child's Age From Plea Deals So Criminal Aliens Avoid Deportation

If a noncitizen is charged with a crime against a child in the Bronx, the district attorney's own training tells prosecutors what to do: "Offer something that does not have the child's age as an element of the crime."

That line comes from a 2019 Bronx District Attorney's Office guide called "Immigration-Conscious Plea Bargaining: A Prosecutor's Guide," one of several internal trainings the office handed to Congress last month. The House Judiciary Committee and its immigration subcommittee published excerpts Monday in a 22-page interim staff report on New York City's sanctuary policies, issued under Chairman Jim Jordan and subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock.

The point of the playbook is simple. Federal law makes certain convictions, like aggravated felonies, gun crimes, domestic violence, stalking and crimes against children, grounds for deportation or a bar to staying in the country. Leave the key fact off the conviction and immigration officials have nothing to act on.

What the slides say

The Bronx training lays out three "strategies" under the heading "Immigration-Conscious Plea Bargaining": avoid a conviction, avoid an aggravated felony, and "Offer a Non-Deportable Offense." The specifics, quoted in the report:

Guns. "Keep the firearm out of the record of conviction" and "Offer something that does not specify a firearm."

Domestic violence. "Keep the domestic relationship out of the record of conviction."

Stalking. "Offer something that does not involve repeated instances or an intent to instill fear."

Children. For sex crimes, child endangerment, prostitution involving a child and sexual abuse of a minor: "Offer something that does not have the child's age as an element of the crime."

In one 2023 training titled "Crimmigration," the office summed up its goal: "As appropriate, we should strive to ensure that a conviction for certain offenses does not lead to unintended and severe consequences such as deportation that can tear families apart and destabilize communities."

Pleading guilty to a crime that can't exist

The strangest part is what the training calls the "Impossible Crime Rule." Bronx prosecutors were shown a list of charges that make no legal sense, described in the office's own words as "[c]rimes that cannot be factually accomplished—legal fictions."

Take "attempted reckless assault." An attempt means you meant to do it. Reckless means you didn't mean to, you just ignored the risk. Nobody can do both at once, so no jury could ever convict anyone of it. The training admits as much: a defendant "[c]an only plead guilty to a hypothetical crime" and "cannot be convicted at trial to one."

So why use it? Because a federal appeals court that covers New York ruled in Gil v. INS (2005) that removal "based on a crime that, because it is legally impossible, demonstrates no clear mental state" is unlawful. The slide spells it out in bold: "Legally impossible crimes cannot serve as the basis for removal proceedings."

The examples on the list include attempted reckless murder, attempted felony murder and attempted resisting arrest. Think of it as a plea to a crime that exists only on paper, built so it can't follow the defendant into immigration court.

Queens: an 'immigration safe' deal

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz's office employs an "Immigration Specialist" who, by the office's own description, helps prosecutors "navigate through plea options" and frame "dispositions that will prevent unwanted immigration consequences." A Queens training told prosecutors to "[e]xercise extreme caution when using alternative dispositions to avoid consequences" and to "not get caught up in the label of [f]elonies, [m]isdemeanors[,] and violations."

The report quotes a May 26, 2026 email in which a Queens prosecutor told an NYPD detective 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 own annual reports supply the numbers. In 2021 she personally "authorized 27 applications" to re-plead convictions "that had significant immigration consequences." In 2020 her immigration specialist assisted with more than 30 cases, including 21 in which noncitizen defendants "had their convictions reduced or vacated entirely" and six in which she recommended a governor's pardon so they could avoid deportation.

The committee found versions of the same approach in the other three boroughs. Brooklyn has sought "immigration-neutral" dispositions since 2017. Staten Island's unit includes "[c]ontacting [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to postpone removal proceedings." Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's office told the committee his 2022 policy of seeking dispositions that "avoid immigration consequences" for misdemeanors and many felonies is "outdated," replaced by case-by-case judgment.

Meanwhile, the NYPD said no 20,255 times

Plea deals are only half of it. City law bars the NYPD from honoring an ICE detainer, a request to hold an arrested alien briefly so federal officers can pick him up, unless it comes with a judicial warrant and involves a serious conviction or a terror-watchlist match. As the report notes, judicial warrants generally aren't available in civil immigration cases, so in practice the answer is always no.

From July 2018 through June 2026, the NYPD received 20,255 detainers and honored zero, according to its own statistics cited in the report. The city jail system turned down another 2,852.

What the report doesn't answer

The trainings show what Bronx prosecutors were taught. They don't show how many child-abuse or gun cases actually ended with the key fact scrubbed from the record, and the report doesn't give a Bronx case count. That is the number the committee should demand next.

There is also a cost nobody in these offices seems to price in. A conviction record that leaves out the gun, the domestic relationship or the child's age doesn't just fool immigration court. It hides the same facts from the next judge, the next prosecutor and the next officer who stops that defendant.

The DA offices in all five boroughs did not respond to the New York Post's requests for comment on the report. The committee first wrote to Clark and Katz on May 27. Its answer on the legislative side is H.R. 7640, the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act, which the committee advanced on March 5 and which would bar state and local policies that block cooperation with federal immigration officers.

An elected prosecutor's job is to put the true facts of a crime on the record. In the Bronx, the training manual says the facts to leave off are the ones that would get a noncitizen deported.