A migrant squatter crew that terrorized a Bronx neighborhood were in federal custody but cut loose because of overcrowded processing centers – allowing them to run amok in the Big Apple.
The Venezuelan migrants evaded justice over and over even after one was set for deportation, another was charged with attempted murder — and eight suspects were nabbed in the Bronx with drugs and guns in their possession, leaving neighbors shaken and the landlord fearing for his life.
Officials have since rounded up all but one of the crew, who remained on the loose Thursday.
“One of the eight Venezuelan citizens remains at large,” ICE Spokesperson Marie Ferguson said Wednesday night, although she did not name the suspect.
Ferguson said the US Border Patrol in Texas detained four of the group — Yoessy Pino Castillo, Yojairo Martinez, Javier Alborno and Yerbin Lozado-Munoz — between September 2022 and May 2023.
But they were released because of overcrowding chaos at the Laredo Sector Enhanced Centralized Processing Center in Laredo, Texas, and the Central Processing Center in El Paso, she said.
Meanwhile, Johan Cardenas Silva was ordered to be deported — but was released seven months later from the Stewart County Detention Center on an order of supervision and told to report to New York.
All five ditched their processing appointments, and elected instead to gather in a house on Hull Avenue in the Bronx, where neighbors claim they ran a drug-dealing operation.
While they were free on the streets, several of the migrants racked up a laundry list of crimes ranging from criminal possession of loaded firearms to burglary — and even assault and the attempted murder charge.
Hector Desousa-Villalta, who illegally entered the country through Texas on May 3, was arrested on Aug. 28 for first degree assault with a weapon and attempted murder, but the charges were dropped after his accuser refused to corroborate, according to NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell.
Despite those charges, Desousa-Villalta was cut loose in Bronx Criminal Court despite the district attorney’s request that he be held on nearly half a million dollars bond.
Identified by neighbors and the apartment landlord as the “leader” of the gun-toting migrant squatter drug ring, Desousa-Villalta sparked the NYPD bust on March 27 after he pulled a a 9 mm CZ pistol and pointed it at someone in an alley near the house, police said.
“A guy in a car with Florida plates pulled up and he was threatening these guys. And they all came out with their guns and somebody called the cops,” said neighbor John Colby, 67.
When cops went in the house, they allegedly found four guns and several bags of drugs that led them to charge each of the migrant occupants.
“Ask any of the neighbors here, all night they’re going back and forth with this delivery service, delivering the drugs and the guns and it’s all out in the open and it’s all non-stop crazy,” Colby said.
But after publicity from the bust, federal agents barged into the multifamily dwelling yet again and arrested Castillo, Martinez and Desousa-Villalta, who had apparently returned to the home after being cut loose following their March 27 arrests, law enforcement sources told The Post.
One of the squatters, still unidentified by authorities, remains on the loose and his whereabouts unknown — leaving the landlord of the Bronx house fearing for his life.
“I am now scared. I can’t even be here. They are out there walking around. I am scared, I am in danger,” the landlord told The Post, claiming the tenants from Hell once threateningly drew their fingers across their necks at him when he called the police.
On the advice of an officer, he has put up plywood across all the windows and doors of the home in hopes that it will prevent the loose squatter from returning yet again to harass him.
“I am still scared, they can still come here, they can still get to me.”