Rep. Mike Lawler had been asked in a recent TV debate about the shooting of a man in New York City by federal immigration agents when he pivoted to level a serious accusation against Gov. Kathy Hochul.
"I want to make sure that our communities are safe," Lawler said during his faceoff with Democrat Cait Conley on PIX11 News on Oct. 14. "And you know why they're not safe? Because Kathy Hochul has released over 7,000 convicted criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, drug dealers, gangbangers, and drug traffickers back out onto the street."
Lawler, a second-term Republican, had made the same or similar charges at a previous debate on News 12 on Sept. 28 and at a press conference with other campaigning Republicans in Westchester County
on Oct. 6. The numbers he cited were taken from a Trump administration press release in December, which had blasted New York for snubbing requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold people it wanted to arrest for immigration offenses.
Was his accusation accurate? Publicly available data from ICE show that thousands of so-called detainers have indeed gone unheeded in New York since last year, but also that Hochul and state authorities had nothing to do with those rejections. Nearly all were made by New York City's police and jail system under laws adopted by the city to limit cooperation with civil immigration enforcement.
What we know about ICE detainer claims
How many of those 7,000 people sought by ICE were released "back out onto the street," as Lawler charged, is unclear from the data, which says only that ICE's detainers were declined but not what happened next. Those charged by New York City police with serious crimes may well have been sent to the Rikers Island jail complex to await prosecution, not released.
And some may later have been convicted in court and sent to prison to serve sentences before being turned over to ICE for deportation.
The state routinely makes such handoffs and is obliged to do so under state law. In the first nine months of this year, the prison system notified ICE each time before releasing 342 people who finished their terms and were sought through detainers, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision told the USA TODAY Network. Federal authorities collected all but four of them.
The law requiring ICE notification applies to state-run prisons and not New York City's jails, which are barred by city law from honoring detainers except in certain circumstances. It's unclear if it has any handoffs similar to what the state prisons reported.
“Governor Hochul has been clear: New York State is not and never will be a sanctuary for violent criminals," Alexia Nizhny, a spokesperson for Hochul, told the USA TODAY Network in a statement. "By law, New York State always notifies federal immigration enforcement of any non-citizen serving a State prison sentence."
"Any assertion otherwise is a blatant mischaracterization of the facts meant to distract from the cruelty and violence we saw from Secretary Mullin’s ICE agents earlier this month,” she added, referring to the Oct. 8 shooting by an ICE agent in New York City and to Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary.
The detainer claims are part of a larger debate over the Trump administration's deportation push and the extent to which local police and jails should help federal authorities with immigration enforcement. In New York, that clash has been stoked most recently by the shooting and a new state ban on formal cooperation pacts between local police and ICE, which only 12 agencies throughout New York had opted to sign.
In a statement, Lawler's campaign defended his blaming Hochul for New York City's detainer refusals by arguing she could "make cooperation with federal immigration officials a statewide priority," but hasn't.
"Instead, she has done the exact opposite by mandating that local police end immigration-enforcement partnerships whether they want to or not," said Chris Russell, a Lawler campaign spokesman. "That has undeniably made New York less safe, and it means Hochul owns every criminal act committed by an illegal immigrant released back into local communities."
Here are more details on what the Trump administration says about New York's detainers and what available ICE data shows.
DHS goes after "sanctuary" states
The Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency that encompasses ICE, sent letters last year to the attorneys general of New York, California and Illinois to demand they force compliance with its detainers, accusing the three states of being sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants who committed crimes.
That was followed on Dec. 1 with a press release taking aim at New York's detainer refusals, reeling off statistics about alleged criminal activity by the 6,947 people that police agencies and jails had declined to turn over since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025. Among them: charges or convictions for 29 homicides, 2,509 assaults and 199 burglaries.
The department fired another salvo with updated statistics this month, one week after the ICE shooting in New York City that had reignited anger at the conduct of federal immigration agents. The detainer rejections in New York now totaled 16,070 as of Oct. 6, and the charges and convictions had grown to include 131 homicides, 132 kidnappings and 1,017 sexual offenses.
“While sanctuary politicians continue to release dangerous criminals onto their streets, our brave law enforcement officers will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make America safe again," Mullin said in that Oct. 12 announcement. "Illegal aliens have no sanctuary in America.”
The announcement drew no distinctions between charges and convictions or between the State of New York and its multitude of law enforcement agencies, each of which may set its own policies on how to respond to detainer requests.
Federal officials were accusing New York of setting dangerous criminals free by refusing their detainers. But one of the egregious examples they listed in their release actually illustrated how a refusal doesn't necessarily signify a release.
Immigration authorities in that case had asked New York City to turn over an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had just been charged with an appalling crime: the rape and robbery of a corpse on a subway in May 2025. But the city instead held and prosecuted Felix Rojas, who was convicted and sentenced in June of this year to five years in prison.
Rojas, 45, is now serving his time at Gouverneur Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison near the Canadian border in St. Lawrence County, according to state records. He becomes eligible for release as early as August 2029 and state officials must alert ICE before he gets out.
Some 3,530 of the more than 34,000 people held in New York prisons as of Oct. 1 were non-citizens or had unknown citizenship status, state officials say. ICE had a warrant or order of removal for about half of them.
Public data points to rejections by NYC
The Department of Homeland Security didn't respond to a request from the USA TODAY Network for the data used for its claims this month about New York's detainer rejections.
But much can be gleaned from ICE records obtained and posted online by the Deportation Data Project, an academic research group. They list almost 13,800 detainers declined by law enforcement agencies in New York from when Trump took office in January 2025 to Aug. 5 of this year, according to an analysis by the USA TODAY Network.
The vast majority — 95% — had been issued for people with pending criminal charges, which are not identified in the records. (Their omission makes it impossible to verify the crime tallies cited by federal authorities.) But the data does list crimes committed by 666 people said to have had prior convictions, including seven homicides, eight sexual assaults and five aggravated assaults.
Some 99% of those rejections were made by New York City police and Rikers Island, the jail complex in the East River that holds about 7,000 people awaiting court action or serving short sentences after being convicted.
When asked about those refusals, the police department referred the USA TODAY Network to city laws restricting when three departments — police, corrections and probation — may honor immigration detainers. They may do so only when those sought by ICE have been convicted of "violent or serious crimes," which are defined in city codes, or if their names appear in a terrorist database.
A department spokesperson said those parameters were "meant to balance public safety with the City's commitment to being a welcoming and safe place for immigrant families."
Last week, a federal judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to overturn New York City's sanctuary laws, ruling that the city has no legal obligation to participate in immigration enforcement. The administration already had lost similar court cases against Los Angeles, Chicago and Minnesota.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA TODAY Network. Reach him at CMcKenna@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Is NY releasing criminals sought by ICE? Here's what the data shows
