On the heels of the shocking news that NYC officials released the accused murderer of a 92-year-old Queens woman just weeks before the murder in defiance of an ICE detainer, acting ICE director Matthew Albence revealed an outrageous statistic about NYC and illegal alien crime.

“Last year, ICE lodged 7,526 detainers by our New York bureau field office,” declared Albence at Friday’s press conference at ICE’s New York City headquarters. “Criminals against whom these detainers were lodged accounted for 17,873 criminal convictions and another 6,500 criminal charges.” Then, Albence revealed that included among those crimes were 200 homicides, over 500 robberies, over 1,000 sexual offenses, over 1,000 weapons offenses, over 3,500 assaults, and over 1,500 DUIs.

How many detainers were honored out of all these requests to notify ICE before these dangerous foreign criminals were released? Just about 10!

These numbers are truly astounding and show the degree of criminality among illegal aliens, as well as the number of needless victims that are created as a result of New York’s civil disobedience against immigration law.

Take homicides, for example. In 2018, there were 289 murders in NYC’s five boroughs and 69 murders in the nine other counties surrounding the city that fall under the area of operation of the NYC ICE field office. That is a total of 358 total murders. Not every murder results in the arrest of a suspect, as clearance rates have hovered around 60-70 percent for murder in NYC. Thus, there are easily under 300 homicide suspects every year in this area of operation. Those numbers might be slightly higher for 2019, but for our purposes they track pretty closely every year. For ICE to have definitively identified aliens with 200 murder convictions or charges in just one years’ worth of detainers is simply astonishing.

Now, obviously this doesn’t mean that illegal aliens commit two-thirds of all murders in the NY area. Some of these individuals likely had a history of murder arrests for previous years, not just for 2019. Also, an unknown number of the detainers are for legal immigrants completing sentences for murder and awaiting deportation after a conviction for removable offenses. But the majority of detainers denied would be for illegal aliens.

How many illegal aliens are in this area of operation? Well, for New York, the Times estimates that there are roughly 500,000 “undocumented immigrants” out of the city’s 8.5 million population. Thus, illegal aliens likely compose six percent of the broader population in the region.

Also, a number of the 1,500 DUIs resulted in vehicular homicides that weren’t charged as murder and are not included in the homicide numbers.

None of this factors in all of those who died in New York as a result of drug trafficking, which is driven primarily by illegal aliens. Over 1,400 people have died every year over the past few years as a result of drug overdoses in the big city. While Albence didn’t offer any data on the number of NY-area detainers for drug trafficking, nationwide, there were over 76,000 drug trafficking charges and convictions among those subject to ICE detainers last year. Sanctuary cities allow the networks to thrive by ensuring that ICE can’t remove a number of their top-level traffickers.

Now consider that these were all people released without notification to ICE, a practice that has gotten worse in recent months since the state abolished the requirement for bail for most crimes. Can you imagine the amount of needless recidivist crime being committed by other countries’ criminals that could easily have been prevented? As Albence said at the press conference, “We’ve seen recidivism rates as high as 50 percent in some of the areas in which we operate.” Albence noted that the number of declined detainers is roughly “50-fold” the number of ICE officers they have in the city. Which means that when dangerous criminals are released rather than being transferred through the safe and orderly process of a jail, it’s almost impossible for ICE to catch many of them before they commit more crimes.