Brooklyn: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis made egregiously false statements in her Feb. 10 op-ed (“A $12 billion alarm for Mayor Mamdani“). She claimed: “A Freedom of Information Law request that I made last year showed that there were approximately 4,000 criminal migrants in these shelters that were arrested for 16,000 crimes!” The FOIL response she shared publicly actually said, “For the period of January 1, 2023 to October 31, 2024, the number of crimes committed in city-run migrant shelters was 1,049.”
During that period, NYC received 220,000 migrants — because the Republican governor of Texas wanted to cruelly use them as political pawns by sending them here. This indicates that the total crime rate (including nonviolent crimes) in migrant shelters was 4.77 per 1,000 residents, far lower than Manhattan’s rate of 41.6. The 16,371 figure she cited refers to crimes committed within 1,000 feet of migrant shelters — not inside them, and not necessarily by migrants.
Malliotakis has a history of spreading misleading information and incendiary lies tying immigrants to crimes, despite data showing immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than others. We’ve seen the deadly consequences when elected leaders spread such lies: two Americans shot dead in Minneapolis by masked federal agents searching for “criminal illegal aliens” — terrorizing law-abiding immigrants and citizens who become enemies of the state through rhetoric like this....
Dehumanizing rhetoric invites abuses of humans Brooklyn: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis made egregiously false statements in her Feb. 10 op-ed (“A $12 billion alarm for Mayor Mamdani“). She claimed: “A F...