Roman Ceron Amatitla sipped a beer and watched four people die. That is not a figure of speech. That is not a metaphorical beer. According to the Queens District Attorney, this 38-year-old Mexican national — here illegally, protected by New York’s sanctuary policy — set fire to a Flushing apartment building, then stood in the immediate area and drank a beer while residents burned alive and jumped from windows.
One of the dead was a three-year-old girl. But hey — at least the sanctuary policy is intact.
Let us walk through what New York City’s government considers an acceptable cost of doing business. Amatitla was in the country illegally. ICE had a detainer on him — a formal request from the federal government to hold him so he could be deported. New York City, operating under its own sanctuary ordinance, refused to honor the detainer. They let him go. He went home. Then he went to an apartment building in Flushing and turned it into a crematorium.
Four counts of second-degree murder. First-degree arson. Seven more injured. And the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement that somehow managed to be both restrained and furious, blasted New York for refusing to cooperate with the detainer that would have prevented the whole thing.
“Insanity.” That was the word DHS used. We’d have picked a stronger one but this is a family publication.
Queens DA Melinda Katz described the scene in language you don’t normally hear from prosecutors. He “stayed in the immediate area to watch people burn and jump from the windows while sipping his beer.” That’s not a charging document. That’s a horror movie pitch. And the man at the center of it was walking around free because a city council in Manhattan decided that cooperating with federal immigration law was morally beneath them.
This is what sanctuary policy looks like when you strip away the yard signs and the press conferences and the tearful speeches about “our immigrant neighbors.” It looks like a man with a beer and a lighter standing outside a building full of screaming families.
The sanctuary framework was sold to the American public as compassion. We were told it would protect hardworking families from unjust deportation. We were told ICE detainers were a tool of authoritarian overreach. We were told the federal government couldn’t be trusted to distinguish between a grandmother and a criminal. Roman Ceron Amatitla was not a grandmother.
He was a man with an immigration file, a detainer, and a history that ICE considered serious enough to flag. And every single layer of New York City’s government — from the mayor’s office to the city council to the NYPD’s cooperation protocols — looked at that flag and decided it wasn’t their problem.
It became their problem on a Tuesday night in Flushing, when four people stopped being alive and a three-year-old girl stopped being anything at all.
You. Yes, you. The voter in a sanctuary city. The next time your mayor stands at a podium and tells you the sanctuary policy keeps your community safe, ask him about the beer. Ask him about the girl. Ask him whether “insanity” is too strong a word for a policy that sends ICE home empty-handed and sends a three-year-old to the morgue.
New York still hasn’t changed the policy. New York is not going to change the policy. Four dead bodies and an international embarrassment weren’t enough. The three-year-old wasn’t enough. The beer wasn’t enough.
When the next one happens — and it will happen, because the math guarantees it — the same people will stand at the same podiums and say the same things. And somewhere in the city, a man they refused to deport will be watching.