New City Hall report documents explosion of ICE arrests in NYC

Josephine Stratman and Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News on May 22, 2026

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NEW YORK — ICE agents arrested more than 5,000 people in New York City between January 2025 and March 2026, even using deception in pursuit of their efforts to take people into custody, according to a new City Hall audit that documented the extent of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the five boroughs.

The dramatic increase in arrests, up 71% from a similar period under the Biden administration, has sparked Mayor Zohran Mamdani to mandate a range of policy changes designed to toughen the city’s sanctuary laws, including limits on what information city corrections officials can share with federal immigration authorities.

All told, there were 5,567 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, the report found. About half of those arrests took place at Manhattan’s immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, where the agency has concentrated its enforcement efforts in New York during Trump’s second term.

Agents used devious methods to carry out Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown — including by pretending to be firefighters, asking to use the bathroom to gain access to buildings and attempting to conduct a “wellness check” on a minor in Administration for Children’s Services custody, the report found.

“The audit was a critical step towards strengthening compliance with our local laws and reinforcing New York City’s protections for immigrant communities,” Mamdani said in a statement. “I am proud to share key findings and recommendations from the audit that will ensure that we are responding to the changing nature of federal immigration enforcement and protecting the rights of all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status.”

Among the two dozen policy recommendations in the report are changes for the Department of Social Services to revise its protocols on who can access city property and shelters and for the NYPD to establish protocol where higher-ups and legal executives are notified about 911 calls reporting the presence of ICE on city streets,

The Department of Correction will also stop sending daily reports to ICE about noncitizens in their custody who have been convicted of certain violent and serious crimes, as that reporting, which has been done since 2015, is not required by any laws or regulation, per the audit. The report also calls for additional training across multiple city agencies.

The report was a result of an executive order signed by Mamdani in February.

The city’s sanctuary city laws restrict coordination between local and federal authorities on civil immigration enforcement. From July 2024 to June 2025, the NYPD received 3,672 requests for civil immigration detainers, up from just 99 detainer requests from the same time period a year prior. The report said that none of those requests was fulfilled, in compliance with the city’s laws.

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Manhattan granted a stay that barred ICE from continuing to make most arrests at 26 Federal Plaza.

Judge Kevin Castel halted the arrests after ICE admitted that it had wrongly relied on a 2025 policy memo to justify the practice of summarily targeting people attending immigration court hearings to fast-track for deportation. Castel said ICE’s admission warranted a reexamination of his previous decision to let the arrests continue, “both to correct a clear error and prevent a manifest injustice.”

The ruling came in an ongoing lawsuit brought by New York-based immigrant assistance groups that say ICE’s practice of using federal immigration court facilities like a dragnet to sweep up rule-followers illegally denies them their right to seek relief.

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