Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner's office is fighting to keep the public from seeing records that would reveal which criminal cases involved foreign defendants who received taxpayer-funded immigration counsel, telling the state it can no longer produce the documents because its recordkeeping practices changed.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, Krasner's staff asked the state to deny a records request filed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The request sought information about charges against foreign defendants who received assistance from the DA's in-house immigration counsel, a position Krasner created in 2018 specifically to help non-citizens avoid criminal convictions that could trigger deportation.
The office's excuse: its "recordkeeping practices differ from those employed previously," and the digital spreadsheets maintained by current immigration counsel Stefanie Costa contain protected information, including "the names and contact information of victims, including minor victims." The office also claimed the spreadsheets could affect fair-trial rights and do not track cases by calendar year. Costa did not respond to requests for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
That explanation may satisfy a bureaucrat. It should not satisfy Philadelphia taxpayers.
Krasner, who took office in 2018 with $1.9 million in campaign support from leftist megadonor George Soros, announced the immigration counsel position as a matter of fairness. His stated goal sounded benign enough.
"Together, we will ensure that all people are treated fairly by the justice system regardless of their immigration status. This is also part of our overall effort to protect the most vulnerable and ensure they are able [to] participate as witnesses or complainants in the criminal justice system."
But previously obtained records told a different story. Documents showed that Krasner's first immigration counsel, Caleb Arnold, consulted on cases involving migrants charged with murder, rape, and other violent crimes. That directly contradicted what Krasner and Arnold had told the media, that the immigration counsel would only assist in low-level cases.
The DA's own website states the office has reviewed more than 400 cases since the immigration counsel role began. That is a significant caseload. And now the office says it cannot provide records about what those cases involved.
Costa replaced Arnold in 2024. Since then, the office has apparently shifted how it tracks these cases, a change that conveniently makes transparency harder. The letter to the state does not explain why the recordkeeping changed, only that it did.
Matthew O'Brien, deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and a former immigration judge and Department of Homeland Security official, did not mince words about what Krasner's office is doing. He told the DCNF that the DA's conduct goes well beyond bad policy.
"Larry Krasner's office has repeatedly and carelessly violated fundamental ethics rules governing the practice of law by purporting to prosecute aliens while actually defending them, at taxpayer expense, from the immigration consequences of their crimes."
O'Brien went further, calling the recordkeeping shift a deliberate effort to hide the scope of the problem. Soros-backed prosecutors have drawn scrutiny across the country for policies that prioritize shielding illegal immigrants from federal enforcement over protecting the communities they serve.
"This kind of blatantly unethical behavior would result in the average lawyer being suspended from practice or disbarred. Therefore, it is no surprise that Krasner's staff is now trying to hide what it is doing [by] engaging in sketchy record-keeping practices."
O'Brien's sharpest assessment framed the entire office as working against its own mandate. He said Krasner has turned the district attorney's office "into a taxpayer funded cartel that facilitates criminal activity by foreign nationals" and accused the DA of "shielding foreign delinquents and deviants from due process of law" rather than protecting Philadelphia residents from crime.
The records dispute does not exist in a vacuum. Krasner has presided over one of the most troubled periods in Philadelphia's modern history. In 2021, homicides in the city reached an all-time high of more than 550, a grim milestone that occurred on his watch.
His office enacted policies ending cash bail for most crimes and reducing incarceration. He drew sharp criticism after downgrading charges against a man accused of fatally shooting a woman on video, reducing the charge from murder to manslaughter in September. The broader pattern of Soros-funded influence in local criminal justice has produced similar controversies elsewhere, including in Norfolk, Virginia, where a Soros-backed DA deflected blame after a mass shooting.
Despite all of this, Krasner won a third term in November against a Republican challenger. Philadelphia's political landscape gives progressive prosecutors a structural advantage that insulates them from accountability at the ballot box.
Krasner has also repeatedly promised to put federal immigration agents in handcuffs if he deems their actions criminal, a posture that puts him squarely at odds with federal law enforcement and the residents who depend on it. The growing network of liberal dark-money operations funding these prosecutors ensures the pipeline of like-minded DAs continues, regardless of outcomes for public safety.
The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records has not yet ruled on whether to grant or deny the DCNF's request. The outcome will determine whether the public learns the full scope of the DA's immigration counsel program, or whether Krasner's office succeeds in burying the details behind a convenient recordkeeping overhaul.
Several questions remain unanswered. What prompted the change in recordkeeping practices after Costa took over? What specific legal grounds, beyond the general references to victim information and fair-trial concerns, does the office believe justify withholding the records? And if the program is as benign as Krasner has long claimed, why fight so hard to prevent the public from seeing what it produced?
The broader pattern of Soros-funded political infrastructure shaping Democratic messaging and progressive political operations makes the Philadelphia case something more than a local records dispute. It is a test of whether elected prosecutors bankrolled by outside money can operate in the dark while claiming to serve the public interest.
A district attorney's job is to prosecute crimes on behalf of the people. When that office spends its energy helping defendants avoid the consequences of their crimes, and then changes its bookkeeping so no one can track how often it happened, the people of Philadelphia deserve to ask whose side their prosecutor is really on.