Stabbed Staten Islander lucky to be alive after Italian migrant attack
Nick Pellegrino was attacked on a train Tuesday by a pair of North African migrants, who stabbed him in the neck with a 5-inch knife before making off with his luggage and jewelry — leaving him to die in a pool of his own blood in his family's homeland, which has experienced a surge in criminal migrants over the past four years.
'With these very loose, lefty immigration laws, these immigrants come into these countries and they're running amok, trying to murder people. It's a playground for terror, for the vicious,' said Pellegrino, 29, speaking by phone from his hospital bed in the town of San Donato Milanese.
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'It's f–king crazy,' he said. 'I know America has a big immigration problem, but it is worse here.'
4 Nicholas Pellegrino, left, knows he's lucky to be alive: 'Life is a gift.'
Obtained by the New York Post
Pellegrino — a former teacher at prestigious Monsignor Farrell High School in Oakwood who was visiting friends and family in Italy — recalled looking down at his phone as the train from Melegnano to Milan Bovisa rolled into the San Giuliano Milanese station.
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When the train doors opened, his mid-20s, Arabic-speaking attackers darted towards him, stabbing him in the neck, nicking his jugular vein, Pellegrino said.
'They looked like the 9/11 hijackers,' Pellegrino said. 'I remember looking at the floor in the train and just seeing the blade of the knife, and the most frightening amount of blood I have ever seen.'
Pellegrino was later told by EMTs he lost about a liter-and-a-half of blood, said Pellegrino, who now teaches religion and coaches track at Archbishop Riordan High School in San Francisco.
Before stealing his luggage and leaving him for dead, Pellegrino's homicidal attackers snatched the gold crucifix from around his neck, he said.
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4 Eyewitnesses shared footage on Instagram of EMTs working on Pellegrino.
Obtained by the New York Post
A blood-soaked Pellegrino managed to stumble onto the train platform, where a 16-year-old boy dialed 112, Italy's 911 equivalent.
He was filmed on the platform by bystanders, repeating, 'I don't want to die, Lord,' in since-deleted videos that were posted to Instagram.
'It took the ambulance 15 minutes to get to me,' he said. 'A few more minutes, and I was a goner. I could feel, with every heartbeat, another gush of blood coming out.'
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He was rushed to the emergency room, where surgeons closed the wound with nine stitches. He'll remain under observation until at least Saturday, as doctors wait for a dangerous blood clot to shrink.
4 Pellegrino said the two men who attacked him have been detained.
Nicholas Pellegrino/ Facebook
Italian authorities have arrested the two migrants, but have not yet released their names, Pellegrino said.
Before attacking the bi-coastal New Yorker, the two men smacked an elderly man in the head with a glass bottle and stole an old woman's necklace, Milan investigators told Pellegrino.
Since at least 2021, Italy has seen a surge in migrant arrivals by sea from Nigeria, Sudan, Gambia, Morocco, Eritrea, Tunisia, Bangladesh and Syria.
Over 157,600 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers crossed the Mediterranean Sea to get to Italy in 2023. Last year, 66,000 migrants crossed into Italy. Their arrivals have put a strain on public resources and their presence has become a source of political tension, leading officials to declare a state of emergency.
4 Pellegrino visits Italy on his summer breaks to see family and friends.
Nicholas Pellegrino/ Facebook
Pellegrino said his brush with death has only reinforced his belief in God.
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'I used to doubt,' admitted Pellegrino. 'I don't doubt anymore. This has grounded me in my faith. I know Jesus saved me, and I will always be a believer.'
He's got a July 24 return flight booked, and said he'll make a full recovery from his frightening ordeal. His mother in Staten Island, not so much.
'My poor mother,' he said. 'She's been a basket case.'
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Miami Herald
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Trump boasts of deporting the ‘worst of the worst.' LA raids tell a far different story
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'A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,' said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. 'But it's hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you're going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.' Trump never said he would arrest only criminals. Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally. Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: 'That doesn't mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation's borders are off the table.' As White House chief adviser on border policy Tom Homan put it: 'If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.' Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE's top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record. Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals. 'There aren't enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,' Bier said. 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there's half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It's not millions and millions.' By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants. '70% of ICE arrests,' the agency said in a news release, 'are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.' But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June. In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge. Still, ICE kept insisting it was 'putting the worst first.' As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump's deportation agenda is falling. A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump's handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said 'dangerous criminals.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles. 'The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,' Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. 'They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.' When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law. 'ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,' Homan told CBS News earlier this month. 'We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they're going to be arrested too.' Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety. 'It's a big backtracking from 'These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,' to 'This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,'' Bier said. The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California. It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its 'sanctuary state' law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. 'Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,' the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, 'those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation's safety and security.' As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not 'What does the data say?' Instead, we should ask: 'How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?' 'I don't think it's reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals - or everyone as saints,' Kocher said. 'Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.' The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction. 'If we don't like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,' Kocher said. 'And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.' In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion's pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force. But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole. A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled 'President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won't.' The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder. CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody. But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose. 'It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
