Longest-serving NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly cautioned Sunday that New York City’s quality of life “has really deteriorated.”
Migrant crime is a major reason.
Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang and El Salvador’s feared MS-13 — what retired FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker calls “prison-spawned gangs” — are threatening to take over American cities.
They’re the “most dangerous gangs on the planet,” warns Swecker, who speculates that Latin countries are emptying their prisons deliberately.
Gang leaders setting up crime rings in America “come out of the muck and the slime of the South American prisons.”
While law-enforcement officials here are warning us about the collapse of public safety, left-wing pols deny there’s a problem.
Ana Maria Archila, co-director of New York’s Working Families Party, says people are feeling a “false sense of chaos and insecurity,” The New York Times reports.
She blames it on racism and xenophobia, not reality.
Open your eyes, Ms. Archila.
Public safety is visibly spiraling downward: migrants beating cops in Times Square, migrants running prostitution rings, migrants on mopeds robbing pedestrians, migrants shoplifting and stripping retail stores.
And now a migrant who recently left New York has been arrested for killing a Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley.
Not everyone violating the border is a hardened criminal, but President Biden’s open borders are allowing the worst to get in.
When Mayor Adams was asked last week about stabbing incidents and violence against cops at the Randall’s Island shelter, he said that “even the most peaceful person, being confined to an area with 3,000 people, . . . there comes a time where it just irritates you.”
Irritates?
Adams is downplaying a serious threat.
New York’s misguided “sanctuary city” policy makes the danger worse.
If a migrant is arrested in the Big Apple, the NYPD is barred from communicating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine whether the migrant should be deported, jailed or allowed back on the street.
Adams stated clearly Monday that sanctuary status must be changed so migrants who commit felonies can be picked up by ICE and deported.
He’s said it before. Now it needs to happen.
Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, entered the United States from Venezuela illegally in September 2022, was granted “parole” under Biden’s policy and came to New York on a bus.
While here, he was arrested once but not detained.
Now he’s charged with murdering Riley, who was out jogging on the University of Georgia campus.
FBI’s Swecker suggests that “this man did not burst spontaneously into a criminal overnight. This is someone who has committed crimes before.”
Athens put out an arrest warrant for Ibarra in December when he skipped a court appearance in a shoplifting case.
Athens is also a sanctuary city, and he was merely cited for shoplifting.
At CPAC Saturday, Donald Trump likened “migrant crime” to the deeds of fictional killer Hannibal Lecter, who eats victims.
Not such a stretch in Ibarra’s case, considering he’s also charged with aggravated battery for bludgeoning Riley’s body until her skull was disfigured.
The vicious gang MS-13 is resurging and may join forces with Tren de Aragua.
In 2016 and 2017, an MS-13 gang hacked and beheaded four Long Island teens, using machetes, knives and a chisel. Gruesome.
The left denies migrant crime is a problem.
The public knows better.
A new Pew Research Center report says 57% of Americans believe the huge influx of migrants is leading to more crime.
Adams stood Saturday in Times Square, boasting that it’s safe.
But saying it doesn’t make it so.
Just two days earlier, a teenager visiting the “Crossroads of the World” for the first time was knifed by a gang of masked attackers, including several migrants.
He was taken to Bellevue Hospital with a collapsed lung.
Migrant gangs pose the biggest danger, but pervasive sex trafficking is also a scourge.
Watch at about 6 p.m. as women exit shelters and get picked up in cars, leaving their kids behind for the night.
It’s happening in all five boroughs, according to Homeland Security Investigations Deputy Agent in Charge Darren McCormack.
Are neighbors who criticize what’s happening xenophobic and racist?
No. They just want a decent life, and they see it disappearing fast.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey
