New York Charged Him With a Felony — Then Released Him. ICE and the U.S. Marshals Went and Got Him.

On May 24, 2026, officers from ICE Buffalo’s Fugitive Operations Team and deputies with the U.S. Marshals Service arrested Jairo Antonio Molina Moron, a 38-year-old Venezuelan national and, according to ICE, a suspected member of Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan prison gang the United States has designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. They found him in Albion, a village in rural western New York, roughly a year after New York let him walk.

ICE says Molina Moron had already been arrested twice in New York — once by the NYPD in December 2024, and again by the Yonkers Police Department in February 2025 for felony assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon or instrument. After the Yonkers arrest, ICE lodged an immigration detainer asking to be notified before his release. Local authorities, ICE says, refused to honor it and put him back on the street.

The gang affiliation is an allegation, and the New York assault charge is still pending — Molina Moron is presumed innocent on both. What is not in dispute is the sequence: New York arrested him, New York declined to hold him for ICE, and it ultimately took a joint federal fugitive operation to take a man facing a felony weapons-assault charge off the street. This is a record of how that happened.

• May 24, 2026 — ICE Buffalo's Fugitive Operations Team and the U.S. Marshals Service arrest Molina Moron, 38, in Albion, N.Y. · Source: ICE; Orleans Hub
• 2 NY arrests — NYPD in Dec. 2024 (charges later dropped) and Yonkers PD in Feb. 2025 for felony assault with a weapon · Source: ICE; Shore News Network
• Detainer ignored — ICE lodged an immigration detainer after the Yonkers arrest; local authorities refused to honor it and released him · Source: ICE
• Paroled 2023 — ICE says Molina Moron was paroled into the United States in 2023 · Source: Orleans Hub
• FTO since Feb. 2025 — Tren de Aragua was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective Feb. 20, 2025 · Source: White House EO 14157; State Department
• ~7,000 released — DHS says New York's refusal to honor ICE detainers has freed thousands of criminal illegal aliens since Jan. 20 · Source: DHS

In its news release, ICE describes a targeted operation in Albion, New York — a village in Orleans County west of Rochester, far from the New York City where Molina Moron’s criminal history began. On May 24, 2026, ICE Buffalo’s Fugitive Operations Team and the U.S. Marshals Service took him into custody. The arrest was announced publicly on June 14. ICE says he was paroled into the United States in 2023 and, at the time of the arrest, had a pending New York charge for felony assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon or instrument. He is now held in ICE custody pending immigration proceedings.

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The two officials quoted in the release framed the arrest as a fix for something local government would not do. Acting ICE New York Field Office Director Philip Rhoney said the agency would “never waver” in keeping alleged gang members from operating freely in the state. U.S. Marshal Charles Salina called the arrest “the product of teamwork, coordination and a relentless commitment to protecting communities through collaboration” — the collaboration, notably, being between two federal agencies, after the local system had already released him.

“Transnational criminal gang members are not welcome in New York. We will never waver in our resolve to ensure these criminal gang members are not free to terrorize New Yorkers.”

Acting ICE New York Field Office Director Philip Rhoney, ICE news release

The New York criminal record ICE describes has two chapters. In December 2024, the NYPD arrested Molina Moron for assault with intent to cause physical injury; those charges, ICE says, were subsequently dropped. Then, in February 2025, the Yonkers Police Department arrested him again — this time for felony assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon or instrument. That is the charge that remained pending when federal agents finally caught up with him in 2026.

It was the Yonkers arrest that triggered the federal request. ICE lodged an immigration detainer — a formal notice asking the jail to hold a removable noncitizen briefly, or at least alert ICE, before release — and, on ICE’s account, local authorities declined and released him into the community. From there the trail goes quiet until the May 2026 fugitive operation. The through-line the agency is drawing is direct: had the detainer been honored, ICE would have taken custody at the jailhouse door in 2025 instead of hunting for him across the state a year later.

The release did not happen in a vacuum. New York limits, by law and policy, when local police and jails will cooperate with ICE. New York State’s broad sanctuary posture — and Westchester County’s own local policy on immigration holds — generally discourage local police from honoring an ICE detainer without a judicial warrant and a recent conviction for a serious or violent felony — a pending charge does not clear that bar — and the state’s broader posture discourages local-federal immigration cooperation. Under that framework, when a noncitizen makes bail or has a charge deferred, the jail releases on the local clock, not the federal one, and ICE, on its account here, never gets the call.

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That posture has only hardened. New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has backed statewide limits on local police partnering with ICE, and on February 6, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) signed an executive order barring federal immigration agents from entering city property — schools, shelters, hospitals, parking garages — without a judicial warrant. The February 2025 Yonkers release predates Mamdani’s order; it flowed from New York’s longstanding sanctuary posture, not his signature. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and DHS has publicly called on Mamdani by name not to release criminal illegal aliens from city custody.

Tren de Aragua began as a prison gang in the Venezuelan state of Aragua and rode the country’s migration crisis outward across the hemisphere. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14157, directing the government to designate cartels and transnational gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations; Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s designation of Tren de Aragua took effect February 20, 2025. Weeks later, on March 14, 2025, the administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, declaring that the gang was carrying out a “predatory incursion” into the United States.

In New York, the gang stopped being an abstraction some time ago. The NYPD has publicly tied Tren de Aragua to crews operating out of the migrant-shelter system, to gun and prostitution rings, and to the attempted recruitment of minors, per CBS News New York. Federal agents have raided gang houses in the city — in one case tracking a member through his own court-ordered ankle monitor. Some analysts note the group is profit-driven rather than ideological, and argue the “terrorist” label is a stretch; that debate is real, but the FTO designation is now the operative legal fact, and it is the one under which ICE is making arrests like this one.

Molina Moron is one case, but DHS presents him as one data point in a much larger pattern. By the department’s count, New York’s failure to honor ICE detainers has resulted in the release of roughly 7,000 criminal illegal aliens since January 20, a tally DHS says includes homicides, sexual offenses, robberies, and thousands of assaults. Nationally, the Justice Department says it has arrested or charged nearly 350 members or associates of Tren de Aragua under the current administration, per The Washington Times.

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Border czar Tom Homan has made New York a stated priority precisely because of its sanctuary status, telling reporters ICE is “increasing enforcement presence” in the city and vowing to “keep coming” regardless of local resistance — “we’re going to keep doing this until TdA is eradicated from this country,” per CBS News New York. The administration’s argument is that the Albion arrest is what enforcement has to look like when the local system won’t hold people: slower, costlier, and reactive, chasing individuals across the state that a single honored detainer would have handled at booking.

A few caveats keep this honest. Molina Moron has not been convicted of anything. The Tren de Aragua membership is ICE’s allegation, and the felony assault charge is unresolved; he is entitled to the presumption of innocence on both, and the December 2024 NYPD charge was in fact dropped, not proven. His immigration case is a civil removal matter, separate from the criminal charge. And New York’s detainer limits are lawful policy, not rogue defiance — the debate is over whether that policy produces cases like this one, not over whether it exists.

But the load-bearing facts hold, and they come from the government’s own release. Molina Moron was arrested for a felony weapons-assault in Yonkers. ICE lodged a detainer. Local authorities did not honor it and released him. A joint ICE-Marshals operation had to find and re-arrest him a year later, well upstate. Whether that is a sanctuary-policy failure or the price of keeping local police out of immigration enforcement is a legitimate argument — but it is an argument about a real sequence of events, not a manufactured one.

Strip the case to its bones and it is a clean illustration of the sanctuary debate’s central mechanic. A paroled Venezuelan national with a pending felony assault charge and an alleged tie to a Foreign Terrorist Organization was released by New York after ICE asked to be notified — and was recoverable only because two federal agencies went looking for him. New York’s Democratic leadership defends the detainer limits as protecting immigrant communities and public safety alike; DHS calls them a shield for criminals. Molina Moron’s case does not settle that argument. But it is exactly the kind of case both sides are arguing about — and we’ll track his immigration proceeding and the pending New York charge to the finish.

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Last updated July 3, 2026