A retired senior ICE official is drawing new attention to a House Judiciary Committee report alleging that New York City’s five district attorneys steered plea deals to shield immigrants without legal status from deportation, focusing specifically on child sex abuse cases handled by the Bronx District Attorney’s office.
Scott Mechkowski, who spent 24 years with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City and retired as a deputy field office director, posted a lengthy analysis on X pointing to a 2019 Bronx DA training guide cited in the committee’s interim staff report. According to that report, the guide instructed prosecutors handling certain cases to “[o]ffer something that does not have the child’s age as an element of the crime.”
Mechkowski said that instruction matters because under federal immigration law, sexual abuse of a minor is classified as an aggravated felony, which triggers mandatory detention, deportation, and a permanent bar on reentry for noncitizens. He argued that removing the child’s age from the record of conviction effectively removes the aggravated-felony designation that immigration authorities rely on.
“A grown man commits a sex crime against a child. He pleads to something that, on paper, could have been against an adult. The record that reaches ICE no longer shows a child victim. The removal case falls apart, and he stays here,” Mechkowski wrote.
The House Judiciary Committee’s interim staff report, released Oct. 26, alleges that district attorneys across all five boroughs — Bronx, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), New York (Manhattan) and Richmond (Staten Island) counties — gave what it calls “preferential treatment” to immigrants without legal status to help them avoid deportation. The report states that Bronx DA Darcel Clark “trains prosecutors in her office to conceal certain facts from the record of conviction and pursue alternative charges,” and says her office has endorsed pleas to charges the report describes as “legally impossible,” including “attempted reckless assault.”
Data obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project and reported by Fox News shows 289 convictions for attempted reckless assault citywide between 2015 and 2025, including 50 in the Bronx.
The committee report does not identify a specific child-victim case in which the Bronx guidance was applied, so it remains unclear how often, if at all, that particular instruction was used in practice.
Officials Decline to Answer
When a reporter raised the committee’s findings at a press conference, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Queens DA Melinda Katz and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez did not offer a substantive response on camera. Katz’s office has separately told the New York Post that it has never offered leniency on gun crimes to any defendant. Staten Island’s district attorney called the committee’s report “flagrantly false and patently political.”
Mechkowski noted in his post that, as of Nov. 9 — roughly two weeks after the report’s release — there had been no public response addressing the specific allegation from the Bronx DA’s office, the attorney general’s office, or major news networks.
