If the federal crackdown comes to New York City

Across New York City, Los Angeles has been on the mind in a far darker way than the usual friendly rivalry between the nation’s two largest cities. Since June, Trump and his anti-immigration architect Stephen Miller have used LA as both testing ground and showcase for their shock-and-awe immigration and speech crackdown, sending teams of heavily armed and masked agents to raid workplaces and homes and then deploying federal agents and the National Guard to tamp down resulting protests.

This strategy has not been a success. Troops themselves have reportedly questioned their deployment and the administration has faced multiple lawsuits and some court losses amid cratering public support for its immigration actions – but it has produced some of the higher arrest numbers that Miller demanded, and the administration seems committed to continuing course. As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement begins receiving appropriations in excess of most of the world’s military budgets and goes on a hiring blitz, other jurisdictions have reason to worry about a franchising of the LA model. New York City is an obvious and prime candidate, with some inside Homeland Security already pointing to pressure to ramp up arrests.

A source familiar with internal discussions inside ICE’s New York City field office said agents are under pressure to increase arrests, with teams of federal agents otherwise assigned to tasks like financial and drug crimes being pulled into immigration enforcement. This has not yet translated to hyper-aggressive operations in New York City like the raids in LA, but within the agency the groundwork is being laid to be able to launch that type of campaign as soon as an order comes down. 

That mounting concern has run up against relative silence from Mayor Eric Adams and his administration, who have largely reaffirmed they will “follow the law,” but stayed away from many specifics about whether and how they’re planning for the eventuality of an LA-style federal response here, alarming some advocates. New York City has faced enforcement, but it’s so far been largely confined to arrests at the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza. “We do still continue to reach out and ask questions, often to hear kind of vague responses,” said New York City Council Member Alexa Avilés, chair of the Committee on Immigration.

West Coast nightmare

In LA, teams of heavily armed and often masked agents have for months set up checkpoints and raided worksites and areas where undocumented immigrants are thought to congregate, including Home Depots, which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Miller infamously implored field agents to to focus on instead of just targeting criminals. The constant presence and apparently random nature of the operations has caused people to pull back from aspects of public life. Parents aren’t dropping off kids at school and once-bustling public areas sit empty.

Multiple federal judges have found that the sweeps are indiscriminate and unconstitutionally profiled people based on factors like race and location, an argument bolstered by the fact that multiple U.S. citizens have been detained in the raids. An analysis of ICE data showed that an average of 88 people were being detained per day in a three-week period before a temporary restraining order came down. In addition to suspected immigration violators, federal agents arrested over 160 protesters, some who’d engaged in violence, but most of whom were not charged with any violent offense. The crackdown has had and probably will have huge deleterious impacts on the city’s economy.

This approach has now spread to Washington, D.C., where Trump recently took over the local police force and began deploying federal officers and soldiers, who’ve reportedly engaged in hundreds of indiscriminate stops, checkpoints and arrests. Unlike the LA deployments, the rationale there has expanded beyond immigration to general criminal enforcement, adding another layer to the possible pretexts for potentially bringing roving federal patrols and troops to New York City. Immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the capital are reportedly deserted as residents fear the indiscriminate enforcement, which has often involved a mix of federal agents at the exits to metro stations asking people for identification.

That approach could be easily ported over to New York City, with hundreds of subway stations that act as congregation points for people of all walks of life. Trump has now explicitly pledged to deploy troops in other cities, starting apparently with Chicago. A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Trump’s use of the military in this manner was an illegal attempt to create “a national police force with the President as its chief,” blocking for now additional deployments in California, though the administration seems poised to move ahead with plans elsewhere. Federal law enforcement entities like ICE and the Border Patrol with their own military-style units, though, are free to keep operating.

Trump immigration coordinator and attack dog Tom Homan came to New York City in July to promise that the agency would “flood the zone.” (ICE acknowledged but did not respond to detailed questions about its planning for New York City.)

Mayor Adams was asked about these remarks and whether he’d had any conversations with Trump about it in an unrelated press conference the next day and answered mostly in terms of why such an operation would be unnecessary. “New York is moving in the right direction in public safety. (If) the federal government wants to assist us in really navigating some of the laws around easy accessibility to automatic weapons… I'm not part of the group that says we don't want to work in coordination with the federal government, but we don't need anyone to come in and take over our law enforcement apparatus,” the mayor said. That framing struck many as incomplete, if only because D.C. – experiencing record-low levels of crime – did not need this intervention either.

This leaves Adams in an awkward position. The former cop with the law-and-order calling card seems inclined to help fellow law enforcement, yet has watched ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol trigger disorder where they’ve focused their efforts.  Public stats show that most arrestees have no criminal record. At the same time Adams, as an incumbent, is the underdog in a mayoral race in which front-runner Zohran Mamdani has gone the complete opposite direction, pledging (perhaps unrealistically) to halt ICE operations in New York City altogether.

So far, the relationship between the city and federal administrations has been something like an uneasy truce with occasional skirmishes. Adams has met multiple times with Homan, once declaring that he and the Trump official had the “same goal.” The Justice Department in February moved to drop pending federal charges against him in exchange for cooperation on immigration enforcement, though he denies the existence of any deal. In April, his administration moved to allow a new ICE office on Rikers Island, a policy since blocked as a result of a City Council lawsuit.

These overtures don’t mean all smooth sailing. Adams was named personally in a long-shot federal lawsuit filed by Trump’s Justice Department late last month seeking to overturn New York City’s sanctuary provisions. City Hall has sued the federal government over the sudden withdrawal of $80 million from the city’s coffers, and filed several legal briefs opposing ICE arrests of New York City students.

The NYPD’s options

Many sanctuary rules are not up to Adams but embedded in city law. In March, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch was reportedly forced to step in and block an operation that Deputy Mayor Kaz Daughtry had planned with Homan, which would have entailed NYPD directly assisting hundreds of ICE personnel in raids on two of the city’s makeshift migrant shelters. Tisch reportedly stopped the raids on the grounds that such cooperation was illegal.

“My impression is that Jessica Tisch has a more normal, traditional attitude toward constitutional law,” mused Daniel Feldman, a professor at John Jay and former Assembly member who’s an expert in administrative law and enforcement. “If, for any reason, she's under pressure to mobilize the NYPD, perhaps in lieu of federal troops, I would assume what they would do is pretty much what the National Guard folks did in LA, which is, yeah, they were there, but didn't really do anything. They just stood there.” Still, even in LA which has its own sanctuary laws, some advocates contended that local law enforcement were de facto assisting ICE under the mission of preserving public order – not slapping the cuffs on immigrants but enabling federal raids by keeping onlookers at bay.

“If and when they decide they're going to send more people here to do an LA-style enforcement action, I think what we're going to see is communities standing up and fighting for their neighbors,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. Awawdeh expressed frustrations over what he described as a relatively muted administration response to their urging for public reassurances. 

“In New York City, we have very comprehensive non-collusion laws on the books. We want to make sure that the City of New York knows that it is not the job of the NYPD to collude with immigration enforcement,” said Awawdeh. “What we would be urging this administration to be doing is ensuring that as New Yorkers are being attacked, that they do what's in their power to defend them.”

How to protect

What would it look like for the city to not just decline to help ICE but actively constrain it and provide help to its targets? Avilés said requiring agents to show their faces is a start. “We see (ICE agents) don't like to follow the law. It doesn't have anything to do with safety. So then the question becomes, can we get these agents to unmask themselves?” said Avilés. In addition to identification, there are pushes to have the city ensure that agents actually have warrants and stay out of sensitive locations, such as schools.

How city law enforcement could or could not intervene would be up to debate and possibly litigation. “The (federal) government can't command the police to help, they can demand that the police not obstruct, or demand that any state not obstruct. Obviously, the line between failure to cooperate and obstruction is one that gets fought over,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at Columbia who’s written about interactions between federal and local law enforcement. “To the extent that warrants are legally required, I can imagine a jurisdiction enforcing that constitutional framework. But beyond that, no, federal officers get to do what is legally appropriate to carry out federal law, and can't be barred from doing so by a state or local government.”

Feldman, the John Jay professor, said it might be feasible for the city to not interfere with immigration operations but engage in other constitutional functions. “Where I think the NYPD can legitimately, practically speaking, operate is protecting protesters. As we know, there have been physical conflicts between ICE and some protesters,” he said. “Planning how to prevent that from happening, and assuring safety and exercise of civil liberties at the same time, that should be the focus of their attention at this point.”

Even if those plans are being developed, Feldman doesn’t necessarily agree with the advocates that the city should be talking about them. “Frankly, if I was the (NYPD) commissioner, I wouldn't reveal my plans either. Why? I mean, there's potentially such a fraught, if not adversarial, position with the federal government, why do you want to tell them in advance what your strategy is, to empower them to figure out a counter-strategy?”

Richman agrees. “If I were in the Police Department, one, I would keep my principles in mind but not think that I can devise a detailed playbook given the number of uncertainties; and two, to the extent that there’s any playbook, I sure as hell wouldn't tell anyone,” he said. He pointed out that despite the signals that Trump and Homan might ramp up operations in New York City, there are still a lot of uncertainties about how they might do that – whether workplace raids or checkpoints or more of the courthouse arrests. Plus, despite the recruitment campaign, beefing up the already overstretched federal law enforcement force “is not going to happen quickly. The city obviously has to prepare for that surge, but they have quite a lot of time to do that.”

Whatever the reason, City Hall is treading carefully with what they say. Often-chatty Adams officials did not respond to questions I sent. 

In a statement, City Hall spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak wrote that “New York City continues to be a place where sensitive locations – like our schools and churches – are safe and free of non-local law enforcement. The Adams administration has also ensured that, at this time of heightened anxiety, New York City provides the largest immigrant legal services and support network in the nation,” pointing to the city’s new Office to Facilitate Pro Bono Legal Services and funding for know your rights efforts and legal representation. She did not address on the record questions about the NYPD’s directives around contending with the possibility of, for example, ICE workplace raids and roving patrols.

While waiting for the city to roll out something more concrete, advocates are focusing more on the ground level. “Communities, institutions, rapid response network, mutual aid groups, and organizations across the city and the state are actually creating their own plans of how they're going to respond to what's happening,” said Awawdeh, though he declined to get into specifics on the record. They’re holding their cards close to the vest, while hoping that behind the city’s silence is a plan, too.