President Trump called for the end of cashless bail after two illegal immigrants with numerous arrests shot an off-duty border officer in New York City during a failed stickup.
The Republican president took to his virtual bully pulpit to argue that crime in major American cities spiked after cities eliminated cash payments for pre-trial releases.
“The worst criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers,” Mr. Trump wrote Monday in a Truth Social post. “It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, immediately!”
Mr. Trump’s post came in light of the Saturday shooting by two suspects with lengthy rap sheets that left a Customs and Border Protection agent wounded. The 42-year-old agent is expected to survive after trading gunfire with one of the thieves during the botched robbery.
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said accused shooter Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, 21, had prior arrests for domestic violence in New York. He was also wanted for robbery and assault in the Empire State as well as for gun-theft charges in Massachusetts.
The Dominican national crossed illegally into Arizona in 2023, she said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said suspected getaway driver Christhian Aybar Berroa has been arrested eight times since he came to the U.S. illegally in 2022. The fellow Dominican is also a suspect in four other open cases, she said.
While Ms. Noem criticized city leaders for the “sanctuary” policies that boxed out federal immigration enforcement, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, took aim at the state’s bail laws and court systems for allowing the criminal migrants to roam the streets.
In 2019, New York eliminated cash bail and ended pretrial jailing for nonviolent felonies and most misdemeanors.
Judges can still set bail for certain “qualifying” offenses, such as the most-serious violent crimes. But in the two years after the new law took effect, state data showed that more defendants were being rearrested following their cashless release from jail.
A deadly shooting in Rochester last month exposed the law’s weaknesses.
Police said Edison Estremera-Cohen was out on a drug charge when he gunned down a man and mugged him. Officers eventually tracked the suspect down, who fired one bullet at an officer just before police responded by firing back.
The wounded suspect now faces charges of murder, robbery and attempted murder of a police officer.
Police leaders said Estremera-Cohen had two felony drug convictions in 2023 and 2024 but skipped sentencing. A month before the June 22 shooting, he was arrested on yet another charge and let out again despite his having jumped sentencing.
“Clearly another example of a conversation that needs to be had about how someone who was convicted by a judge or a jury for two felonies, was then allowed to go and told you can just come back for sentencing. And then when he was arrested again, was let go again,” Rochester Police Chief David Smith said.
But an analysis of the cashless bail law in Illinois, which took effect in 2023, showed little change in how many people skipped their court hearings in the law’s first full year of being implemented.
David Olson, the co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice from Chicago’s Loyola University, told WLS-TV that about 17% of defendants were no-shows in court when cash bail was allowed. After the cashless bail law became active, about 15% of defendants missed their scheduled appearance.
He added that the overall effect on jail populations, which opponents to the changes said would be dramatic, were much less pronounced.
“Jail populations did go down a bit, but nowhere near as much as some people were predicting, and the research suggests that the rate at which people are being released from jail pretrial likely hasn’t changed dramatically,” Mr. Olson told the station.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.