The illegal aliens busted in Phoenix, Arizona, contrary to reports, are not suspects in the beating of two New York City cops.
Instead, the four thugs are still fugitives, having tricked a church group into giving them a lift to California, the New York Post reported.
Meanwhile, the chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement blasted the city’s sanctuary law that shields illegal-alien criminals from arrest and deportation.
Thugs on the Loose
“Widely publicized images of three handcuffed migrants sitting in the Arizona dirt were not members of the crew who beat up two NYPD cops in Times Square late last month,” sources told the Post:
Those four suspects still apparently on the lam — Darwin Andres Gomez, 19, Kelvin Servita Arocha, 19, Wilson Juarez, 21, and Yorman Reveron, 24 — are believed by New York authorities to have conned a church-affiliated nonprofit into helping them flee the city on their way to California.
Though an ICE spokesman told the Post that the four were, indeed, “believed to be fleeing the state of New York from their suspected involvement in a coordinated assault” on the cops, other sources denied that claim:
It’s not clear who the men in the photo are, but law enforcement sources told The Post that they’re definitely not the state-hopping crooks authorities are looking for on the West Coast — they just had similar sounding names and were arrested on immigration warrants, sources said.
The four thugs on the run are part of a major robbery gang.
Sources told the Post earlier that the thugs steal phones and use “Apple Pay and credit cards to make large purchases back in their home countries.”
“They’re buying cars back in Ecuador and Venezuela,” a police source revealed to the Post. “They’re putting pools in their homes there. All this money is going back and forth. That’s why the larcenies are going out of control. It’s unbelievable what they’re doing.”
And former top cop John Miller told CNN that they’re getting away with it. Their crimes include robbery, attempted robbery, and grand larceny, Miller said. One thug ”migrant” faces 10 charges. The gang began committing crimes soon after arriving in the country, pursuant to Joe Biden’s blanket, open-borders invitation.
The thieves use mopeds and scooters to snatch big-ticket items such as iPads and iPhones, Miller said. Citing detectives, he said the crews “operate in New York, do all their stealing, then go to Florida to spend the money and then come back.”
They don’t do their dirty work in Florida “because there you go to jail.”
Sanctuary Madness
But even if he did import the criminals, Joe Biden isn’t the only culprit to blame for the crimes.
So is New York City’s sanctuary law that forbids cops from cooperating with police. Leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio signed it in 2014. The city won’t, for instance, honor ICE detainers that ask local authorities to hold illegal-alien criminals.
“We want to help. The problem is, due to city policies and state law, cooperation is no longer afforded between NYPD and ICE,” the city’s ICE chief Kenneth Genalo said at a news conference. “There’s hundreds of people a week that are being arrested throughout the city and we can’t determine which are the most violent.”
Genalo said the current laws that limit the NYPD’s cooperation with the feds — including adhering to the detainer system — meant he and other immigration officials only found out about the recent ordeal through media reports.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the way that we have to do our intelligence at ICE is the same way that you find out about cases — it’s through the media. We’re no longer called [by the NYPD],” the ICE official said.
ICE used to have an office at the Rikers Island jail, but the city forced the agency to close it.
“Basically anyone that was foreign-born was vetted by my staff, the immigration officers, to determine whether or not they were amenable to removal proceedings,” Genalo said. “If they were, we took custody of them and we placed them in removal proceedings.”
But that’s no longer possible, and ICE is forced to chase them down, he said:
Instead of being able to take custody of these individuals in the confines of a jail or in the confines of a precinct, we now have to go out into the community and the streets where unfortunately the criminals have the upper hand.
Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island, criticized the city for not cooperating with ICE, most notably, by not honoring detainers.
“This past fiscal year, ICE issued 109 detainer requests for individuals who are dangerous, that committed crimes in our city, and zero have been honored,” she said. And in fiscal 2022, she said, the city ignored 157 detainer requests.
Malliotakis said the Biden Administration has dramatically reduced the number of detainer requests, the Post reported.
She added that the city ignored 1,485 detainer requests ICE in fiscal 2021, the last year of the Trump administration.
But the four thugs on the run had yet another official accomplice. That would be the man who sprung them from jail, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. One of the many prosecutors helped into office by communist Hungarian billionaire George Soros, he freed them without bail.
The latest embarrassing debacle for Biden and his local apparatchiks began last week when more than a dozen “migrants” attacked the two city cops. They had answered a robbery call at a shoe store, where the illegals were known to congregate to steal handbags.
