In 2023, the Manhattan District Attorney initiated just one hate crime prosecution based on national origin. Last year, that number spiked to 10, with anti-migrant sentiment as the alleged motivation for six of the 2024 incidents. This early in 2025, there are already three anti-national origin cases this year, tied with antisemitism for most of any hate crime category.
“We’ve seen an increase in incidents pertaining to migrants [and] unprovoked attacks against people that the defendants perceive to be migrants,” said Manhattan D.A. hate crimes unit chief Hannah Yu in an interview over the phone. “And a large [number], if not all, of our migrant cases involve a victim or victims from the Latino community.”
The increase lines up with the recent arrivals of asylum seekers from the southern border. Anti-migrant rhetoric is well-documented, with politics seeming to follow the most targeted groups.
Yu pointed to recent staffing of the office’s Survivor Services Bureau toward assisting Jewish and Muslim victims after the Oct. 7 attacks. She added that the office provides access to interpreters and does not ask about immigration status.
The groups targeted for hate crimes in Manhattan have also shifted since D.A. Alvin Bragg took office — back in 2022, anti-Asian incidents led all categories of new hate crime cases stemming from pandemic-related scapegoating due to the discovery of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China (the number declined significantly over the past two years). Meanwhile, 11 antisemitic hate crimes prosecutions were initiated in 2022 compared to 33 last year. However, anti-LGBTQIA incidents are consistently one of the highest in frequency.
This month, 148 hate crime cases remain open and pending — 11 under the category of anti-Black. Yu attributed the uptick to a “rising tide” of hate against all marginalized groups. More hate crime prosecutions also coincide with the office’s expansion of the unit handling them along with an increase in offenses that can be charged as hate crimes — last April, an amended version of the Hate Crimes Modernization Act championed by Bragg was passed in the state budget, adding 23 new chargeable offenses to the hate crime statute, including gang assault and false incident reporting.
However, there are still gaps.
“The Hate Crimes Modernization Act certainly provides us with a greater ability to charge more offenses as hate crimes and, to some degree, it has been helpful in allowing us to hold perpetrators accountable,” said Yu. “The inception came from a feeling that any and all penal laws should be chargeable as a hate crime. There are still offenses that are being committed [that are] motivated by some sort of bias that we can’t charge as a crime.
“[For example,] endangering the welfare of a child is an offense we’re seeing repeatedly happen in a hate crime context, but that was not one of the penal law offenses included in the action, so we’re still unable to charge that as a hate crime.”
An earlier version of the bill proposed 31 new chargeable offenses. Proponents pointed to the seemingly arbitrary logic for an offense’s exclusion in the hate crime statute — for example, first-degree rape could be charged as a hate crime but other forms of sexual assault, like forcible touching, could not (although the modernization act ultimately included it).
“While these changes have long been in the works, they are unfortunately newly urgent,” said Bragg in 2023. “The current surge in hate crimes reported to the NYPD follows a pattern — a pattern that we have sadly seen many times. Bias-motivated crimes often spike following high-profile events — from anti-immigrant hate crimes in 2016, following xenophobic rhetoric during the presidential campaign, to anti-Black hate crimes following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, to anti-AAPI hate crimes during the COVID pandemic, to more recently, antisemitic, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic incidents.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.