Why would the New York City Department of Correction refuse to honor a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer for an illegal Mexican national facing murder and arson charges in Queens?

The same perverted sense of “equity” that drove the Biden administration to open the border to millions of illegal migrants.

On April 9, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced Roman Amatitla would be charged with arson and eight counts of second-degree murder for allegedly setting a fire that killed four in a Flushing apartment building, including a 3-year-old girl.

Katz called it as “an act of mass murder,” and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently revealed Amatitla had entered the US illegally “at an unknown date and unknown time.”

Despite the heinous nature of the crime, the threat posed to the community and Amatitla’s unlawful status, NYDOC still vowed not to cooperate with ICE’s efforts to keep him off the streets.

Amatitla is being held without bail while he awaits trial.

But paperwork released by DHS shows the NYDOC refusing to provide status updates to ICE if he is ever released.

Joe’s policies

And this hostility to the nation’s immigration laws will only get worse if, as expected, Albany passes an even more aggressive sanctuary bill that makes it illegal for local authorities to cooperate with ICE in many circumstances.

All of which should come as no surprise to those who delved into the Biden administration’s justifications for its feckless immigration policies — which continue to be tacitly embraced by the former president’s fellow Democrats.

In September 2021, Biden’s impeached DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, imposed strict restrictions on ICE’s ability to arrest and deport criminal aliens, premised on his “prosecutorial discretion” authority.

Those restrictions required officers to consider irrelevant “mitigating” factors — including any “mental condition that may have contributed to the criminal conduct” — before even launching an investigation.

Why did Mayorkas hamstring immigration officers who were trying to take dangerous aliens off the street?

“In the immigration enforcement context,” an accompanying memo explained, “scholars” had concluded such “prosecutorial discretion guidelines” were “essential to advancing” Biden’s “stated commitment to ‘advancing equity for all including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.’ ”

In other words, ivory tower grandees believe our immigration laws are “Jim Crow,” and complying with Congress’ demands that ICE remove all dangerous criminals from the community is the moral equivalent of aiming Bull Connor’s fire hoses at civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Ala., circa 1963.

The equity argument

Congress, on a bipartisan basis, rejected that argument in January 2025 when it passed the “Laken Riley Act,” a bill honoring a young woman who was herself the victim of such sanctimonious nonsense, but “equity” remains at the heart of all sanctuary laws — including the one protecting aliens like Amatitla.

Their argument goes as follows: if a citizen and an alien commit the same offense, the punishment — arrest, conviction and imprisonment — should be the same.

But because only the alien faces the additional punishment of deportation, “equity” requires the sanctuary to shelter the alien from immigration enforcement to prevent an “inequitable” outcome.

As a Baltimorean, I can assure you the US has enough homegrown criminals and doesn’t need to import more.

Consequently, the argument quickly breaks down under any scrutiny, which is why sanctuary politicos rarely say the quiet part out loud.

One exception is Steve Descano, chief prosecutor in Fairfax County, Va., who argued on his campaign website, “If two people commit the same crime, but only one’s punishment includes deportation, that’s a perversion of justice and not a reflection of” his county’s “values.”

Do America’s “values” now include coddling criminals?

Andrew Arthur is the fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.