At 2 a.m. on November 17, a 38-year-old resident of Hell’s Kitchen, near Times Square, was just getting home when a man followed her through her front door. After he demanded cash and motioned that he might have a gun in his pocket, she tossed him her phone, ID, and debit card. Before fleeing, he masturbated for “several moments,” according to prosecutors, while the woman stood terrified, cowering in the corner of her stairwell.
While stories like this have become commonplace in New York City as of late, this thief was no ordinary criminal. He is 25-year-old Brandon Simosa, a Venezuelan migrant with links to the violent cartel Tren de Aragua, which is disrupting cities across America. And the woman he robbed was no ordinary victim. She is a New York City prosecutor who works to put guys like Simosa behind bars.
But the victim, who has not been named, works for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who has downgraded 60 percent of felony cases to lesser charges, while declining to prosecute 14 percent of all arrests last year. In progressive circles across America, Bragg is celebrated as the “anointed one,” in the words of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, for convicting Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. But to many in New York, he’s better known for his track record of freeing criminals like Ramon Rivera, a homeless man who had two decades of arrests on his rap sheet, plus time in prison and two stints at a psychiatric hospital, when he recently stabbed three New Yorkers to death. Prostitution, resisting arrest, and jumping the turnstile all get a pass under Bragg, who instructed his office not to prosecute those charges in his infamous “Day One” memo from when he first took office on January 3, 2022.
Simosa is one of the nearly 215,000 migrants the city has absorbed since spring 2022, when Biden’s border policies allowed record numbers of foreign nationals to cross the southern border and head toward “sanctuary cities” like New York. Hannah Meyers, the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, told me there’s “been a shift in the initial wave of migrants who came here looking for a better life.”
“Now that word has fully gotten back that the ground is so fertile for crime, gang members are coming here explicitly because why wouldn’t they? It’s a great place to set up shop for a criminal,” said Meyers, who spent five years investigating terrorism at the New York City Police Department.
She said that in 2019, the state legislature passed a justice reform law that “made hundreds of offenses no longer eligible for bail.” That means most perpetrators like Simosa, who had six prior offenses including domestic assault, grand larceny, and fare evasion, get to walk free “even if a judge thinks you’re dangerous.” Even then, many cases get dismissed—a problem made worse by the same statewide law mandating that prosecutors collect “every single piece of information” related to a case. As a result, Meyers says the district attorney’s office often can’t meet the deadline to submit evidence, leading to an automatic dismissal. In 2021, after the implementation of the policy, nearly 70 percent of cases ended up dismissed, up from 44 percent in 2019.
On November 19, police arrested Simosa outside The Row, a former hotel that has been converted into one of the largest migrant shelters in the city. The 27-story compound, which costs the city more than $5 million a month to rent, is only a block away from the home of the assistant to Bragg who was robbed earlier this month. As officers walked Simosa to a cop car in handcuffs, he grinned at photographers.
“I’m all over the news, I’m famous, my friends told on me,” he reportedly told cops, according to a prosecutor.
When Simosa was arraigned later that day, the judge, Janet McDonnell, reprimanded the defendant, saying, “He arrived here in New York in June and has managed to get arrested at least seven times since June.” She added that even in the courtroom, she’d caught him “smiling” and “laughing during the proceeding.”
Meyers called the ordeal a “a striking parable of how completely we’ve ceded law and order in this city.”
“No wonder he’s smiling,” she said. “He’s gotten away with it so many times.”
When I recently visited The Row, it was quiet on the surface. A group of men, layered in hoodies and neck gaiters, waited on the curb for their next order while wearing giant Uber Eats bags on their backs. A mother bounced a newborn baby in one hand while waving off her husband on his e-bike. Yet the more I spoke to residents and workers in the area, the more I heard about a rising sense of disorder and danger. A security guard at the Duane Reade next door told me that two to three times a shift, he catches someone trying to walk out of the store without paying.
“Usually it’s just the mothers trying to steal milk,” he told me. “They put it in their strollers and pretend like I don’t see it. But I do.”
Across the street, outside of a residential building, I found Arsenio Felix, a 60-year-old street sweeper, picking up a Modelo can left in a flower bed. He said he cleans outside The Row most mornings and often finds “weed buds and cigarette butts.”
“I used to find money when I first started 15 years ago,” Felix said. “Now I just find needles.”
Nearby, a theater actor in his 60s named Lawrence is walking his Pomeranian. Though he said he’s lived in the neighborhood for the past 25 years, it’s been “night and day” since the pandemic, with the streets full of “the mentally ill and homeless.”
“Once all those buses started coming from Texas and Florida, we were just overwhelmed with people coming from all over,” said Lawrence. “I’m very cautious when I walk by the end of the street—that’s where they all gather, whole families. And they’re not always treating their kids very well. And shouldn’t they be in school?”
Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s most violent gang, is now operating in at least 16 states, including New York, according to a Homeland Security document obtained by the New York Post. “As the population of Venezuelan nationals continues to increase, the potential for violent TdA migrants is highly probable,” the memo states, using the shorthand for the gang. In Houston, the criminal organization made headlines for attempting to recruit middle schoolers into its ranks. The man who murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley—and reportedly showed no remorse on the stand for his crime—is a member of the group. To Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, the lone Republican representing New York City in Congress, these crimes are not “random acts.”
“On a regular basis we read or hear about crimes being committed by migrants that the Biden administration let in unvetted, and the mayor and the governor are forcing we the people to provide all sorts of benefits to them,” she said. “It’s unfair to New Yorkers who are struggling—they’re being asked to shell out this money to house people who are wreaking havoc on our city.”
Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, said she doesn’t know how deep Tren de Aragua’s network goes because the New York City Police Department won’t tell her. Since last January, she has been pressuring the force to hand over data on how many criminal perpetrators are migrants, which she said they are “stonewalling” her on. When asked for comment on the migrant crime rate, The New York City Police Department told The Free Press, “police officers are prohibited from asking about the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses, or suspects.”
But there are signs the city has a problem on its hands. Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had removed 38 “criminal noncitizens” from New York City since early August, including an MS-13 member who had already been booted twice from the U.S., a 51-year-old citizen of El Salvador with a history of sexually abusing minors, and a Guyanese criminal previously convicted in a murder-for-hire scheme.
“We have our own criminals that we have to deal with—we shouldn’t be importing criminals from all over the world,” Malliotakis added.
When I asked Lawrence, the actor who lives within a block of The Row, the 1,331-room hotel-turned-migrant shelter, if he’s changed any of his behavior over the past few years, he stared down at the pavement.
“I used to leave my door unlocked if I was just stepping out to walk my dog,” he said. “Not anymore. Even if it’s just for five minutes, I’m locking the door behind me.”
Is it enough to make him think about moving? I asked him, and he paused before saying, “I do.”
“As much as I love Broadway, this is scorched earth down here.”
Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold, and watch the exclusive video about another New York crime story, “What Really Happened Between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely.”
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