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July 10, 2026 12 mins

Buck Sexton sits down with Manhattan Institute fellow Rafael Mangual to discuss the heated debate over immigration, crime, and public safety. They examine why many cities do not collect immigration-status crime data, the impact of sanctuary city policies, and growing concerns about policing in New York City as political leaders push for changes to law enforcement and public safety strategies.  

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's going on with crime in the Big Apple and
elsewhere across the nation. Our friend Raphael mcguial back with
us here and now he is of the Manhattan Institute.
He's got a couple of very interesting pieces. What am
us to do with immigration and looking at it in
the New York City context, but also what this means
for crime, sanctuary policies and all that. I will let

(00:22):
him the expert here on this issue, take this over.
Tell us about this piece. Data people always argue over
the immigrant offender meaning criminal offender data, But we don't
really have good data, de we.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
No, we don't. That's really kind of the crux of
this piece, which I co authored with former NYPD Commissioner
Bill Bratton. This was a follow up from a public
conversation that we had a couple of weeks ago, and
the conversation was in the context of a broader conference
on immigration and when it comes to the enforcement debate, right,
you kind of have these two camps, Right, You've got
the restrictionists, You've got the open borders folks. And it's

(00:59):
interesting because the one thing that they seem to argue
about more than anything else is the public safety issue. Right,
do immigrants. Does immigration, you know, hurt or help public safety?
So on the one hand, you have the restriction is
pointing to cases you know, like Lake and Riley's for example,
right where an illegal immigrant does something terrible and they say, well,
you know, this is sort of proof positive that you know,

(01:20):
there's a real public safety component to this debate. And
then on the other side you have these folks like
from the Cato Institute that are constantly citing these data
out of Texas to suggest that, you know, well, immigrants
actually don't commit crimes at the same rate as natives.
In fact, they can make crimes at lower rates. But
the truth is that we don't really have very good
information because the vast majority of jurisdictions in the United

(01:41):
States don't actually collect data on the immigration status of
the people who go through the criminal justice system. And
in New York City, for example, which is you know,
the biggest police department in the country, cops are actually
legally barred from even asking about immigration status. So one
of the arguments that we make in the piece is like, look,
every single public safety the issue that people like he
and I have tackled over the years. The first question

(02:04):
we've always asked, is what do the data say? And
we've been led by data in terms of making decisions
about what kind of enforcement policy to pursue, and immigration
is really no different. So, you know, the main recommendation
of the piece is that we really ought to be
gathering and collecting and reporting publicly more data about the
nexus between immigration and crime. But the other point that

(02:25):
we wanted to make is like, even in the absence
of those data, there's not really a very strong argument
for the kind of radical sanctuary silly city policies as
Freddy and slipped there for a sanctuary silly, But you know,
there's really no excuse for the kind of policies that
you know, jurisdictions like New York and LA and Minneapolis
for example, are imposing because you know, especially when you

(02:50):
have somebody who's going through the criminal justice system, right
they've been arrested, they've been charged with a crime, the
question is should they be turned over the ice. Now,
on the left, you'll happy will say, well, no, you know,
they shouldn't be turned over because you know their crime
hasn't been adjudicated yet. But you got to understand when
someone's prosecuted, when someone's being prosecuted, they're being charged the jurisdiction.
The city's official position as to that person is that

(03:12):
they are a criminal offender, right, Like, that's what the
city is going into court to argue. That's what the
handcuffs mean. So when that person has a final order
of removal or a detainer placed on them by ICE,
there's really no public safety rationale for keeping that person
in the jurisdiction. Right If you allow ICE to take
that case over, not only do you minimize you know,

(03:33):
the cost to the city of you know, associated with
having to prosecute a criminal case to the end, but
you also enjoy the public safety benefit and associated with
the absence of an active offender. But also, I mean,
if you're someone who cares about these broad based immigration
enforcement campaigns, you also reduce the need for the federal
government to send agents into your city and do street

(03:54):
level immigration enforcement, which they're not really all that well
suited for, right, I Mean, this is not the kind
of operation that you know, agencies like ICE and CBP
were made to undertake. So why not just turn these
individuals over in a controlled setting? And so that that's
kind of the basic argument of that piece.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
I'm going to tell you something I'm wondering if if
you've already seen some of this coming up in the research,
I think municipalities basically every major city which are democrat
controlled almost uniformly across the country and are overwhelmingly sanctuary
city jurisdictions in some capacity, I don't think they want
to have the data on criminal offenders. I think they don't, Right,

(04:38):
you've already seen this, Yeah, they don't want to know.
They want to tell everybody that illegal aliens commit fewer
crimes and the general population of America, but they don't
want to actually have the data. What does that tell you?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
That's exactly right? I mean, I do think that a
lot of this is really driven, you know, by by
these ideological pre commitments to one side of this issue.
And it's a it's a real shame, right, because you're
you're not actually doing public policy the right way right.
Public policy is supposed to be about getting to the truth,
getting to the right answer, and the only way that
you can get to the right answer, aside from guessing,

(05:10):
is having good information upon which to base an informed decision,
and data is really at the core of that. So,
you know, It's a real shame that you have cities,
including like New York, which are kind of at the
vanguard of so many things, you know, keeping citizens in
the dark as to this really important issue. And what
that leaves us with is a dearth of data on
which to have an incomplete debate.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
So you have people who will point to Texas, for example,
which is one of the few jurisdictions that does collect
data about immigration status of criminal offenders. And yeah, sure,
some of that data, you know, can can be used
to show that, you know, immigrants as a whole commit
crime at a lower rate than natives as a whole.
But what those data don't really tell us is what
the different subgroups do, right, I mean, you know, immigrants,

(05:52):
that's an umbrella term that encompasses a very diverse group
of individuals who are going to offend at radically different rates. Right. So,
you know, one question that that open, for example, is like, well,
you know, how often do men between ages eighteen and
forty commit crimes who crossed the you know, Southern border
illegally and are of Hispanic descent versus say, Eastern European

(06:13):
men you know, in the same age group who overstayed visas, right, Like,
you know, it is very possible that there are some
you know, subsets of the immigrant population that are offending
at higher rates than others, but we don't really know
that from the aggregate data. Same goes for the native data, right.
I mean you'll see a lot of these advocates, like,
you know, they compare it to the native data in
the aggregate without really understanding that the native crime rate

(06:35):
is driven disproportionately by one subgroup of Native Americans, native
border Americans, and that's black men, you know. So it
could be, for example, that certain immigrant subgroups are more
criminal than most of the native subgroups, except for say
black men. And you know, Somali immigrants is a good example.
There was a paper done by CATO that they claim
that they committed crimes at a lower rate because they

(06:58):
were incarcerated at a lower and they were using you know,
an imperfect proxy for criminal incarceration anyway. But you know
the problem with that is is that incarceration is just
a snapshot, right, It's a snapshot in time. It doesn't
you know, at one moment, right, Somali immigrants may be
incarcerated at a lower rate than Native born Americans. But

(07:21):
because they're here for less time, and because incarceration is
largely a function of recidivism, right, and very few people
would have prison after their first defense, you have to
adjust for that. And actually, when you do, research shows
that Somali immigrants actually do commit crime at a higher
rate than natives. Right. So there's one example where you know,
the data that we did have was sort of used

(07:42):
to give us an incomplete picture, and then when you
dug deeper, you found that the opposite was true. Right.
So I just think that when it comes to public
discourse about complex issues, more information is always better than less.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
I remember a long time ago having a debate with
someone from CATO. It's probably the same person you're talking about,
and I thought it was interesting. I couldn't get him
to admit that there was any downside to illegal immigration
at all, which I think just goes to the this
is an ideological it's like a religious belief. Illegal immigration

(08:13):
is good for America. Will find a way, this is
how CATO operates. By the way, we'll find a way
to explain everybody how there's no it's not so I
wasn't even saying which by the way, I I with
with whatever good stuff people want to say from com
from immigration, I still think there's a lot of worse
stuff that comes from it. So that's my perspective. But
I was just saying, will you admit there's anything bad?

(08:33):
And the and the the non restrictionists or whatever people
want to call them, the open borders crowd is what
I would call them. They will not admit that there's
any They won't admit that there's a trade off. They
will always say it's not it grows the economy, American dream,
it's great, they offend at a lower rate, there's no
downside to whatsoever, which I think I think that gives
the game away.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think that's absolutely right. I mean, it's it's it's
almost an indefensible position, right, because everything has a downside, right,
of course, there isn't. You know, you need too many
carrots in right, that will make me very very sick,
even though they're generally healthy. So now I think you're
exactly right. I think a lot of this debate is
sort of being had on pure ideological grounds, and I'm
hoping that you know, our piece will break through and

(09:12):
that jurisdictions shill just start collecting more information, right. I
mean the question I have for them is what are
you afraid of? Right? I mean, why not? You know,
we collect so much data about so many other things
we you know, allow for the idea that data should
guide us in every other realm of public policy. Why
not this one.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Let's talk in her a second about your other piece
which is out today, which you can tell everybody about
on crime in New York City and specifically Mom Donnie CAMMI,
Mom Donnie, who's getting more attention as a Democrat I
think than anyone else. That's what I call them. Uh yeah,
well that's what Trump calls them too. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's a good three to it.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Thank you, thank you. Well we'll come back here in
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(10:08):
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Insurance Agency LLC, a license insurance agency. All right, Raphael
piece number two. What's going on, NYC?

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, I mean it's last week. You know, the New
York City budget was finally agreed upon. And what was
interesting is in the lead up to the budget being finalized,
there was a budget line for the hiring of five
hundred n eighty additional NYPD officer so basically a new
academy class. And then at the very last minute, that
academy class disappeared from the budget that was finally approved,

(10:53):
so five hundred Navy officers were mixed. This was the
result of a pressure campaign that was undertaken by Mam
Donnie's allies on the left, you know, groups like the
m y CLU in Legal Aid Society, you know, the DSA.
They have been pushing him really really hard on this.
In their minds, right, any policing is bad, right, so
certainly we don't want to hire more cops. This is

(11:15):
the first time that Zorra Mamdani has actually cracked under
that pressure. And it's a really bad sign, I think,
because if you think about the promises that he made
as a candidate, they were very frightening. I mean, this
is a guy who you know, had to moderate from
an insanely low bar, which was, you know, wanting to
defund and disband the NYPD completely. After the murder of
det Rul Islam, you know, started to kind of distance

(11:37):
himself from his prior rhetoric on the NYPD, but still
wrote into office after having made promises to abolish the
gang database, to get rid of the SRG, the Strategic
Response Group of the NYPD, to take the commissioners authority
to discipline her officers and give it to the Civilian
Complaint Review Board, you know, to close rikers, to replace

(11:58):
the NYPD on mental health response with the Department of
Community Safety. None of those things, interestingly enough, have happened
in the first six months of the Mamdani administration. The
first six months of the Mamdani administration had been characterized
by him generally leaving the MIPD alone. So enforcement is
up in the subways on the street, and it's been
really interesting because you have some groups like Legal Aid
and the MCLU who have been hitting Mam Donnie over

(12:21):
the last couple of months, saying like, hey, you promised
that you were going to scale the MIPD back and
they're doing more and more enforcement
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Buck Sexton

Buck Sexton

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