The documented presence of the brutal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua embedded among migrants in the Big Apple demands that lawmakers repeal state and local laws that stop the NYPD from teaming up with its federal immigration counterparts to take down these criminal aliens.
Evidence of a swelling crime wave stoked by criminal migrants — living in city shelters — is building with each passing day.
Cops say Tren de Aragua is behind the smartphone-snatching moped gang suspected in at least 62 cases of grand larceny across the city since November.
“They’re essentially ghost criminals,” NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban said of the migrants who beat cops in Times Square and others involved in the string of thefts.
“No criminal history. No photos. No cellphone. Sometimes we’re even unclear on name or a date of birth.”
We understand Caban’s frustration that the NYPD may be unfamiliar with these “ghost criminals,” but Homeland Security, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have a database of suspected Tren de Aragua gang members and others.
The Post has learned that Homeland Security and law enforcement in Peru created the Transnational Criminal Investigation Unit specifically to share intelligence on Tren de Aragua.
It’s insane for NYPD and its federal partners to maintain separate gang databases on criminal migrants and their affiliations in Latin America.
Even more so given new concerns about Tren de Aragua teaming up with El Salvador’s MS-13, with its ties to the Mexican cartels.
Today, it’s cellphones.
Tomorrow, it’ll be sex trafficking, drugs and guns.
It is imperative that local law enforcement share intel with the feds, including ICE, to coordinate arrests and facilitate deportation of the thugs embedded among innocent migrants.
Yet the city’s sanctuary law bans notifying ICE or giving it any info on the criminal migrants.
So deportation proceedings aren’t triggered for migrants who break the law.
Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams need to use their bully pulpits to win repeal of laws that make it harder to identify, arrest and eventually expel criminal migrants.
Politicians have already spent years unwinding law and order and undermining the police through disastrous soft-on-crime laws.
Let’s put the new danger in terms even progressives may be able to understand: Don’t give foreign gangs privileges that endanger New York’s most vulnerable and are even worse than those already available to our native criminal class.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
