For 15 months, Daniel Davon-Bonilla sat in the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, accused of raping a transgender woman in a migrant shelter.
Then, on June 24, Mr. Davon-Bonilla stood before a judge in a Brooklyn court. The victim in the case had refused to testify, and now prosecutors were offering him a deal: He could plead guilty to a felony assault charge and be released that day.
The judge, Donald Leo, warned Mr. Davon-Bonilla, a 24-year-old from Nicaragua, that he could be deported.
“Do you still wish to proceed with your plea of guilty?” asked Justice Leo, according to a transcript of the hearing.
“Of course,” Mr. Davon-Bonilla replied.
In fact, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, had informed the city that it intended to deport Mr. Davon-Bonilla when he was first charged with rape, the agency said. But neither the city nor the Brooklyn district attorney notified federal officials when he was released that day in June.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla did not show up for his sentencing on Aug. 9. Two days later, the police say, he raped a homeless woman under the Coney Island boardwalk.
New York is a so-called sanctuary city, one of several across the United States that try to minimize the deportation of migrants. In practice, this means that local law enforcement officials limit their coordination with federal immigration authorities. Those policies infuriated Donald J. Trump when he was president. He painted sanctuary cities as crime-ridden dystopias and threatened to withhold federal money from them.
Now the Coney Island case has renewed attention on those policies and brought a fresh round of criticism — not just from Mr. Trump, who is running for his old office, but also from New York police officials and Mayor Eric Adams. They say the sanctuary system, enshrined in city law, safeguarded the rights of a violent criminal at the expense of a vulnerable woman. The mayor called Mr. Davon-Bonilla “the poster child of what’s wrong with not doing that coordination.”
To what extent sanctuary laws enabled Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s release remains unclear. They are meant to protect immigrants from deportation if they are convicted of low-level crimes, but not serious offenses, including the assault charge to which he pleaded guilty.
But something went wrong with Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s case. Records and interviews with officials revealed that at a minimum, a failure of coordination and cooperation between local and federal authorities made it more likely that he would slip their grasp.
ICE said that after Mr. Davon-Bonilla was arrested, it sent a so-called detainer request asking that the city not release him. In practice, that should have led the Correction Department to hold Mr. Davon-Bonilla so that ICE could pick him up for eventual deportation, even after his plea deal. But the department said that it had no record of a detainer request. And the district attorney’s office said that notifying ICE was not its responsibility.
The victim in the attack this month, a 46-year-old woman interviewed near the Coney Island boardwalk two days after she was assaulted, said she had stopped expecting accountability.
She said she has been raped repeatedly during her life. A cut was visible on her cheek, where she said her attacker had pressed a knife.
“It happens to women every day, and we never get justice, and we end up dead,” she said.
For ICE officials, the case is their “worst nightmare,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of the agency. “This is something that you want to avoid at all costs.”
Since spring 2022, more than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City, and roughly 64,000 are currently living in shelters. A vast majority have blended peacefully into the fabric of their new city; there is no data to suggest that the infusion of migrants has led to a surge in crime.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla first stepped foot in the United States on Dec. 7, 2022, when Border Patrol agents found him near Eagle Pass, Texas. They turned him over to ICE, said Marie Ferguson, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, and he was then enrolled in a program that allowed him to stay in the country instead of being detained.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla made his way to New York, where, on April 4, 2023, he was accused of raping a transgender woman the previous night at a migrant shelter in Gowanus, Brooklyn — a La Quinta hotel facing a gas station. He held her down, yanked her hair and sodomized her, according to a criminal complaint.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla was charged with two counts of a criminal sexual act, sexual abuse, forcible touching, sexual misconduct and unlawful imprisonment as a hate crime, the complaint said.
ICE issued an immigration detainer — a notice that it intended to take Mr. Davon-Bonilla into custody once he left jail, Ms. Ferguson said.
Then the prosecutors’ case fell apart. As months passed, the victim refused to talk to investigators, leaving them with two choices: dismiss the case or offer a plea deal that would downgrade the charges, said Oren Yaniv, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez.
“We effectively had no case,” Mr. Yaniv said. “When there is no evidence that can convict someone at trial, it’s not just — and next to impossible — to keep them incarcerated.”
Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s charges were reduced to second-degree assault, a felony. He was ordered to attend weekly counseling for “problematic sexual behavior” for at least nine months, according to a transcript from the June 24 hearing.
Chelsea Jacobi, a prosecutor, told Justice Leo that the district attorney had no objection to sentencing Mr. Davon-Bonilla the following month and releasing him on the strength of his promise to return.
But he did not.
On Aug. 9, Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s lawyer told the judge that she did not know where he was. Justice Leo, with no objection from prosecutors, said he would wait to issue a bench warrant to give the lawyer time to find him.
Prosecutors did not tell ICE about Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s plea deal or his release. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which in 2017 said it would change its practices to protect immigrants, does not generally divulge such information to federal officials, Mr. Yaniv said.
“The status of criminal cases is public record and any person or entity can easily monitor their statuses and outcomes online,” Mr. Yaniv said.
But ICE has thousands of defendants to track and needs help from local authorities, said Mr. Sandweg. “The volume of cases is just too much,” he said.
In the past decade, the New York City Council passed so-called sanctuary laws. The measures prohibit city agencies such as the Correction Department from sharing immigration information about incarcerated people who have not been convicted of serious crimes. However, the laws let them tell ICE about noncitizens who have been convicted of any of 177 serious offenses, including rape and felony assault.
That meant jail officials could have honored a detainer request for Mr. Davon-Bonilla, which would have given ICE 48 hours to take him into its custody. However, there was no record of a detainer in his files, according to a spokesman from the Correction Department.
The immigration agency did not respond to questions about the discrepancy over the detainer for the defendant, whose name had several variant spellings in city and federal records.
A case like Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s would be a priority for ICE, Mr. Sandweg said.
“If ICE got 48 hours, they would have been 100 percent on this,” he said.
Mr. Yaniv said prosecutors had not known that the defendant was subject to deportation, but that immigration was not the district attorney’s responsibility. “Even if we had 20/20 vision, it wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said.
Two days after Mr. Davon-Bonilla was to have been sentenced, the 46-year-old homeless woman told detectives, a man approached her at around 9 p.m. as she was laying out blankets under the Coney Island boardwalk to sleep.
He offered her money for sex. When she refused, he held a knife to her throat, forced her face into the sand and raped her, according to an internal police document. Her 34-year-old boyfriend tried to stop him, only to have the attacker’s lookout hit him with a metal pipe, according to the document.
A person called 911 to report the attack. Mr. Davon-Bonilla and Leovando Moreno, 37, who the police say was the lookout, were arrested soon after.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla, whose lawyer declined to comment, was charged with first-degree rape, assault, sexual abuse, menacing and criminal possession of a weapon. Mr. Moreno was charged with assault, menacing, harassment and criminal possession of a weapon.
A judge sent Mr. Davon-Bonilla back to Rikers Island and the story quickly entered the political bloodstream of the city and nation.
Mr. Trump denounced the attack in an interview and a campaign rally as an example of how uncontrolled immigration threatens public safety, even though crime has fallen nationally.
At a news conference on Aug. 13, Mayor Adams said that the city’s sanctuary policies had prevented coordination with ICE. “That’s the law — and you know I’m not happy about that,” he said.
John Chell, the Police Department’s chief of patrol, complained on social media about the sanctuary laws, which he said prevented officials from telling ICE of violent crimes — even though assault is one of the offenses they are allowed to report. “Failing to act enables individuals like Daniel Davon-Bonilla to continue victimizing women in our city,” he said.
Similar practices are common throughout the city. The Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island district attorneys said they did not inform ICE if they learned a defendant was a migrant.
Whether or not the city’s sanctuary laws or the Brooklyn district attorney’s policies played a role in Mr. Davon-Bonilla’s release, they have effectively stopped many deportations.
In the year leading up to June 30, 2023, the Police Department received 109 detainers for people it held, according to an annual report. None of those people were transferred to ICE.
During the same period, the Correction Department received 201 detainers, according to another report. The department transferred 10 people to ICE who had been convicted of violent or serious crimes.
Immigration rights supporters say jail officials have shared information with ICE despite the sanctuary laws, and that more cooperation on deportation would threaten migrant defendants’ due-process rights as well as undermine trust between the police and people who are often witnesses to crime.
“What happened in Coney Island is a tragedy,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition. But “it is irresponsible for Mayor Adams and N.Y.P.D. leadership to exploit this horrible incident to advocate for denying rights to an entire community.”
However, David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group, said that prosecutors had a responsibility to use “whatever resources they have, including federal resources, to protect people.”
Mr. Sandweg agreed: “If someone is charged with rape, you’re jeopardizing public safety.”
Two days after the homeless woman was attacked, city workers had locked the gate under the boardwalk. The woman sat nearby in a lawn chair in the shade cast by the Brooklyn Cyclones’ baseball stadium.
She said she had told her attacker that “God was watching him.”
“I fought, fought, fought, fought, fought,” the woman said. “I couldn’t fight no more and I was afraid he was going to kill me.”
She and her boyfriend spent 12 hours after the assault talking to detectives and getting her medical treatment. Later that week, investigators gave the woman fresh clothes and put the couple up in a hotel so she could rest before testifying in front of a grand jury.
Soon after she testified, she and her boyfriend went back to the beach. After the day of her interview, the victim did not return, according to others who sleep under the boardwalk.
Mr. Davon-Bonilla was indicted and remains at Rikers.
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