“He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.” – Proverbs 17:15
Zohran Mamdani has drawn a hard line against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has called ICE a “cruel agency that does nothing to serve the interests of public safety” and said it should be abolished. In February he signed Executive Order 13, tightening sanctuary rules, limiting information sharing, and barring federal agents from schools, hospitals, shelters, and other city property without a judicial warrant. City agencies were told not to help with civil immigration enforcement. That is the policy he ran on. It is also the policy that pushed the next fight out of the jail intake area and onto the street.
The current operation, first reported as starting in Queens, is aimed at people local jails released after declining ICE detainers. Tom Homan said the point out loud in June: New York took away “the efficiencies of safe arrests in county jails,” so agents would come into the five boroughs instead. City Hall’s own May audit recorded 5,567 ICE arrests in the New York area from January 20, 2025, through March 10, 2026, a 71 percent jump from the comparable stretch at the end of the prior administration. More than half of those arrests happened at immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza. The same audit showed the NYPD received 3,672 civil detainer requests in fiscal 2025 and transferred nobody. The Department of Correction received 895 detainers, up more than 120 percent from 2024, and honored only a sliver under the city’s narrow exceptions.
ICE answers with its own ledger. The agency has said New York’s refusal to honor detainers led to the release of 6,947 criminal illegal aliens statewide since January 20, 2025, and has publicized cases involving homicide, child sex offenses, and other violent convictions. Those figures come from ICE, not an independent court, and should be read as the government’s case, not scripture. What is not in dispute is the mechanic: when Rikers and other jails will not hold someone for pickup, agents look for that person in the neighborhood. Homan has said that search produces “collateral” arrests of other people without status who happen to be nearby. Immigrant groups in East Elmhurst, Corona, Jackson Heights, and College Point report more sightings and pickups through July and August. Rallies have followed. Official citywide arrest totals for this latest wave have not been cleanly published.
Both sides are selling a clean moral. Mamdani, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Attorney General Letitia James frame every enforcement surge as overreach, and on August 25 New York’s ban on 287(g) jail agreements took effect after a federal court refused to block it. That law keeps local cops from doing ICE’s civil work. It does not stop ICE from doing ICE’s work. The White House frames every declined detainer as proof that sanctuary cities prefer process to victims. It does not account for agents using ruses, masks, and street stops that sweep up people who were never the named target. A mayor who wants ICE abolished is not a neutral referee. A federal force that answers a paperwork wall with neighborhood hunts is not a surgical police department. Romans 13 is about rulers who punish evil. It is not a blank check for every tactic, and it is not a veto that a city council can stamp on a statute Congress already wrote.
The people living this are not talking points. Families in Queens are staying inside because a van might stop. Families of crime victims are asking why a conviction plus an ICE detainer still ends at the jail door. Federal law still sits above a mayoral memo. Local law still limits how far city workers can go. Until someone changes one of those, New York will keep getting the same ugly compromise: fewer handoffs in custody, more arrests in public, and a mayor insisting the agency doing the arrests should not exist.
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