WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, Manhattan (WABC) — The shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer in ppper Manhattan over the weekend, by two suspects in the U.S. illegally, is fueling the debate around New York City’s sanctuary city laws.
In the hours after the shooting, federal authorities learned that the two suspects had deportation orders already in place.
The suspected gunman, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, was ordered to be deported in November 2024. His alleged accomplice, Cristian Aybar Berroa, was ordered to be deported in January 2023, but they remained free for months, even years, despite the fact that they were arrested over and over again for a variety of crimes.
The NYPD was unable to hold them for ICE. Mayor Eric Adams told reporters on Monday that was wrong.
“We are not allowed to coordinate with federal authorities unless the person is convicted of a crime and after he served his time,” Adams said. “I think we need to examine that there’s a real pattern here that these, were dangerous people.”
The mayor blamed New York’s sanctuary city laws, which forbid city agencies from cooperating with immigration authorities in all but criminal cases, but supporters insist that there was nothing in the city’s laws that would have prevented ICE from deporting the men.
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“They can do it today; they have done it,” said NYC Council member Alexa Avilés. “They have done it for the past number of years. So, the fact that there was a breakdown between ICE and its operations and capacity and New York City in terms of how it’s managing people who are coming to the justice system, that’s their policy failure. It has nothing to do – sanctuary city policies allows that.”
Border czar Tom Homan says he’s not asking the NYPD to be ICE, he’s asking that if cops arrest someone who has a standing deportation order, give ICE a call.
The shooting took place along the shores of the Hudson shortly before midnight on Saturday, where authorities say the two men attempted to rob an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer. The shootout that followed left both the gunman and the officer wounded.
“His friend took him to a hospital and dumped him down on the sidewalk,” said President Donald Trump on Tuesday, also leaning into the raging debate over sanctuary city laws. “The whole thing was… the whole thing was crazy. But, why would anybody do to our country what these Democrats have done?”
ICE is now vowing to step up enforcement.
Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigration Coalition reacted to the Trump administration’s call to “flood the zone” with ICE agents.
“The Trump administration continues to threaten that they’re going to flood the zone,” Awawdeh said. “They’ve already flooded the zone, and now the U.S. Congress has given them $170 billion to continue their project of cruelty.”
But what if the NYPD was allowed to cooperate with ICE?
Criminal justice experts say right now federal and local authorities don’t have the resources to make it work anyway, and even if they did, there would be other problems.
CeFaan Kim reports from Harlem Hospital.
“You’re going to have to deploy ICE agents to criminal court houses to pick these folks up when they appear for run-of-the-mill misdemeanor arrest cases and it’s going to be difficult for the court officers, for the judges, for all of these systems to work together to manage that,” said Dmitriy Shakhnevich of John Jay College. “You’re going to have a backlog, you’re going to have violence, and you’re going to have difficulty.”
Experts add that because criminal cases take years to play out, what’s already been happening now is that state and federal prosecutions have been interfering with each other, and that would only get worse.
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