The sanctuary-state experiment has finally produced a headline so grotesque that even its architects cannot spin it: a criminal illegal alien who sexually assaulted a dead man’s body on a New York City subway, and the Democrats whose policies keep releasing people exactly like him. The Department of Homeland Security is now publicly demanding that Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani honor an ICE detainer and hand the convict over rather than turn him loose, Fox News reports.
The man at the center of it is Felix Jeronimo-Rojas, 44, a Mexican national in the country illegally who pleaded guilty and was sentenced this week to five years in prison and 15 years of supervised release. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the victim — 37-year-old Jorge Gonzalez — boarded an R train on the night of April 8, 2025, lost consciousness, and died. Minutes later Jeronimo-Rojas boarded the same car, and just before midnight began sexually assaulting the dead man and rifling his pockets for whatever he could steal. Let that sink in.
This was not his first brush with the border. Jeronimo-Rojas had illegally entered the United States four times between 1998 and 1999, returning to Mexico after each encounter, before slipping back across a fifth time at a date and place the government cannot even pin down. ICE lodged an immigration detainer on April 30, 2025 — and now, with the end of his sentence one day closer, federal authorities are asking New York to do the bare minimum: not release a depraved predator back onto the same trains he hunted.
“This sicko robbed and raped the corpse of a dead man on a New York City subway,” said Lauren Bis, DHS’s acting assistant secretary for public affairs. “ICE lodged a detainer asking Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this criminal illegal alien after his prison sentence. We need cooperation from sanctuary politicians to ensure depraved criminals like this are not released into our communities.”
For the family, the politics are an afterthought to the grief. Gonzalez had come to America roughly two decades ago to support relatives back in Mexico. “He wasn’t just a random person, he was a father, he was a family man, he cared about his family in Mexico,” his wife Teresa said. “He did construction, he worked in kitchens, he worked as a waiter, he was a busboy. You know, anything you really could do to try to get ahead.”
DHS says New York released 6,947 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes in a single year. That is the window into what sanctuary policy actually buys: not compassion, but a revolving door that treats a federal detainer as optional and the safety of ordinary riders as negotiable. Hochul and Mamdani will call cooperation with ICE cruel. The corpse of Jorge Gonzalez, and the predator their city’s policies would happily set free, are the real measure of whom that cruelty serves.
Source: foxnews.com