The federal government has justified its surge of immigration arrests in New York by saying it is going after dangerous criminals. The paper trail those arrests leave behind, in habeas petitions and court filings, tells a different story.
Start with the numbers. Of the 3,191 people ICE arrested in New York City from August 2025 through early March 2026, 76 percent had no criminal convictions or pending charges. More than 800 were swept up as collateral arrests, meaning they were not even the person ICE came for, and 85 percent of those had no criminal history at all. A separate investigation by THE CITY, built from federal habeas filings, found more than 93 percent of 430 documented street arrests targeted Latinos.
The faces behind the data are ordinary. Luis Fernandez waited tables at Tribeca’s Square Diner for seven years and had lived in New York for about 35; ICE detained him and justified it by calling him an illegal alien with two prior convictions, which turned out to be decades-old DWI cases from 2003 and 2014. He has since self-deported to Ecuador. A named plaintiff in a new racial-profiling lawsuit, Rene Antonio Benitez, was arrested without a warrant in February while driving his daughter to school. The crackdown reached City Hall itself when a NYC Council employee was detained at a routine immigration appointment in January, prompting Speaker Julie Menin to demand answers.
Much of this has converged on one building, 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where ICE holds people in cramped cells. In September 2025 a federal court barred ICE from holding detainees there in spaces smaller than 50 square feet per person, and on May 27, 2026 a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan, held a trial over the conditions and openly weighed banning ICE from using the facility at all, as detainees testified that the experience still haunts them.
New York’s legal and advocacy groups have answered with litigation. In April, the Legal Aid Society, the NYCLU, Make the Road New York and the law firm Covington and Burling filed a class action accusing the Department of Homeland Security of unlawful stops, warrantless arrests and racial profiling of New Yorkers. Individual detainees, including a Bangladeshi Uber driver held at 26 Federal Plaza, have filed habeas petitions challenging their detention one by one.
Put the official framing next to the record and the gap is the story. An operation sold as removing the worst of the worst is, by the government’s own arrest data and the city’s own court files, sweeping up people with no criminal record, people doing nothing more than driving a kid to school or showing up to a required appointment, and overwhelmingly people who are Latino.
If you or someone you know is detained or stopped, the groups litigating these cases are also the ones with the resources to help: Make the Road New York, the Legal Aid Society and the NYCLU run know-your-rights programs and legal hotlines for immigrant New Yorkers. The fight over 26 Federal Plaza is live in federal court right now, and those organizations are where to find both representation and the latest on the rulings that could change how ICE operates here.
Featured image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (public domain)
