NEW YORK — In the past month, the New York City Police Department has described alarming crimes involving young men living in the city’s migrant shelters.
A 15-year-old boy, police said, shot at an officer in Times Square and hit a tourist. Two officers were kicked and punched on West 42nd Street. A Venezuelan man oversaw a ring of criminals who rode mopeds and snatched purses and cellphones from more than 60 people, most of them women walking alone.
During an early-morning police raid last week in the Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams, dressed in a bulletproof vest over a Fendi scarf, joined officers as they arrested five people accused of perpetrating the robbery spree. “A migrant crime wave is washing over our city,” Police Commissioner Edward Caban told reporters hours later.
Some of the crimes were captured on videos that have since gone viral, leading Republican politicians and their allies to say that migrant criminals are besieging New York.
Quantifying crimes committed by migrants is nearly impossible, because the police are not allowed to ask about a suspect’s immigration status, said Kenneth Corey, a former chief of the department who retired in 2022. But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy.