Inside the N.Y.C. Immigration Crackdown: Show of Force Yields 39 Arrests

New York Times

30-01-2025

At around 3 a.m. on Tuesday, dozens of Immigration Customs and Enforcement officers gathered at their Lower Manhattan headquarters for an early-morning briefing on the immigration arrests they were soon to conduct in New York City.
The ICE officers routinely target undocumented immigrants with criminal records in their homes or workplaces, but this operation, the first and most visible display of force by ICE in New York since President Trump returned to office, was clearly different.
This time, ICE agents teamed up with dozens of officers from other federal agencies as part of Mr. Trump's growing immigration crackdown. This time, Mr. Trump's top immigration official, Kristi Noem, who was confirmed as Homeland Security secretary three days before, showed up to give agents a pep talk. She then joined them in body armor as agents arrested a Venezuelan man in the Bronx suspected of being a gang member.
The public show of force — 29 teams with officers from several federal agencies — resulted in the arrests of 39 people, mostly in New York City and some on Long Island, according to Frank Tarentino, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's office in New York, one of the federal agencies involved in the raids.
Mr. Tarentino said that the teams worked off a target list developed by the Department of Homeland Security, which ICE is a part of. He said that agents prioritized people charged with violent crimes, believed to be connected to gangs or involved in drug trafficking, and then worked through a tiered list of less serious offenders.
The 39 arrests on Tuesday were higher than ICE's average number of daily arrests over the past two years in the New York City area, but it remains to be seen if the agency will be able to maintain or significantly accelerate that pace. Mr. Tarentino said the multiagency collaboration in New York would continue.
'This happened to be a more concentrated effort this week, but this will be an ongoing effort in the days, weeks and months ahead,' he said in an interview.
The focus on criminal activity connected to recent immigrants resurfaced on Wednesday, when city law enforcement officials announced the indictment in Queens of 10 people charged with being members or associates of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that has bedeviled the police. The men were accused of participating in a sweeping gun trafficking operation that stretched from the East Coast to Texas and Colorado.
But far less was known about those taken in custody by federal agents a day earlier.
D.H.S. and ICE officials have declined to say how many people were arrested in New York on Tuesday. The backgrounds of the arrested individuals in New York — nationality, immigration status, criminal history — also remain unclear, except for a few cases.
A spokeswoman for the ICE field office in New York City said that the agency does not confirm or discuss ongoing operations to protect the safety of its law enforcement personnel, and that the agency would announce the results of its operations on its website 'when appropriate.'
Mr. Tarentino said he witnessed four arrests on Tuesday, including that of a man from the Dominican Republic, who was wanted by Interpol for a double homicide and was seized in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
At least three people were arrested in the Bronx, including Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, who had an arrest warrant in Colorado for his suspected involvement in Tren de Aragua. (The New York Police Department assisted in that arrest, and Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat seeking to collaborate with Mr. Trump on parts of his immigration agenda, spoke with Ms. Noem the night before to coordinate efforts.)
A Mexican man who was previously charged with three counts of sexual assault was also arrested in the Bronx, according to a law enforcement official who shared details under the condition of anonymity. Federal agents also arrested a Mexican man in Queens who had been previously charged with attempted murder, the official said.
Some reporters and television crews were invited to document the efforts, and photos and videos of immigrants being apprehended were quickly posted on government social media accounts. The public messaging reinforced an unmistakable message from the Trump administration: The president's immigration crackdown had arrived in the nation's largest sanctuary city.
'When they commit crimes in this country, we have to not release them again,' Ms. Noem told Fox News on Tuesday. 'Working with the mayor of New York City was fantastic.'
The covert nature of the operation left immigration lawyers trying to figure out on Wednesday who ICE was targeting, how its tactics were shifting under Mr. Trump and whether immigrants without criminal records were also being picked up — a growing concern among activists as Mr. Trump emboldens ICE to go after more people.
'You're going to exhaust these targets pretty quickly,' said John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of ICE under President Obama. 'It'll be interesting to see who is targeted next. That is a very important question. What population are they going to try to focus on next?'
Jodi Ziesemer, the co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said her group was particularly interested in whether those arrested were 'going into regular ICE custody in detention centers or if they are being rapidly deported expeditiously, or a combination of those two.'
Juliana Perez Calle, an immigration lawyer at UnLocal, a legal services provider, said that ICE officers arrested one of her clients in her apartment in the Bronx on Wednesday morning.
Her client, a 44-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic, was arrested in 2010 for a crime Ms. Perez Calle did not specify, but she said that her client's guilty plea was being appealed because she had not received proper counsel. She was deported, but re-entered the country illegally because she feared for her life in her home country, she said.
Ms. Perez Calle said that, during the Biden administration, ICE had informed her client that she was not a priority for deportation, despite having an order for her removal from the country. But that seemed to change on Wednesday, when ICE showed up at her home, where she lives with her daughter and husband, both of whom are U.S. citizens.
'She was not seen as a danger to society under the Biden era, so she was allowed to stay,' said Ms. Perez Calle. 'Until now that everything has changed.'
ICE contends that arrests in the community — and any collateral arrests that may arise from them — could be avoided if New York City worked more closely with ICE to directly transfer immigrants in local jails to ICE custody after they have served their time. City sanctuary laws enacted in 2014 greatly limited that practice; the city is only allowed to transfer people convicted of a list of 170 serious crimes, including rape and murder, and only if ICE presents a judicial warrant, which it says is difficult to obtain.
That policy has caused ICE to pursue at-large arrests, a resource-intensive effort that takes time, planning and may put officers and the public at risk, agency officials say.
'The difference is now you're looking for the person,' said Tom Decker, who served as the field director of the ICE office in New York City from 2017 to 2022. 'You're coming to the street to find them, to target them.'
Even so, the city's sanctuary laws do not bar the police from arresting undocumented immigrants who break local and state laws.
'If you're a migrant in New York City, you can go about your life, no problem,' Joseph E. Kenny, the Police Department chief of detectives, said on Wednesday at a news conference announcing the indictment against the gang members. 'The minute you break the law, you become a criminal, then you become a problem.'
The arrests tied to Tren de Aragua stemmed from the first wide-scale indictment in New York City that charged the gang's members with an 'organized and purposeful' conspiracy to distribute illegal firearms, said Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney. Investigators seized 34 illegal guns, including two assault weapons, and 48 grams of Tusi, a pink, powdery synthetic drug that is often laced with ketamine, MDMA or fentanyl, according to a 120-count indictment.
All the defendants were from Venezuela and had entered the country illegally, Chief Kenny said. The case is unrelated to the other raids this week.
On Wednesday, as news of the Dominican man's arrest began to circulate throughout Washington Heights, residents there said the raids this week have fueled a growing fear of law enforcement.
'Everybody's scared,' said Maria Collado, 56, who lives on West 191st Street, around the corner from where the man was arrested on Audubon Avenue. 'The immigrants, they're in the house. They're afraid to come out.'