Federal agents have arrested hundreds of immigrants off New York and New Jersey streets in recent months in a stealth enforcement campaign that disproportionately targeted people from Latin American countries, according to an investigation by the City Reporter based on a review of more than 1,200 lawsuits. More than 93% of the people grabbed off area streets who filed suit were from Latin American countries, although Latinos make up only 66% of immigrants without legal status in the region. The arrests have rattled Latino neighborhoods, as people disappear in moments as mundane as buying milk, walking their dog, taking out the trash or picking up their children from soccer practice. Street arrests are different from other types of immigration enforcement in that they unfold in minutes, often on quiet residential streets and out of public view. Many immigrants who had no expectation of being detained were targeted at the sole discretion of agents in the field. In some accounts of the arrests, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents said they stopped people because they looked similar to someone they had a warrant for, then realized they had a different subject, but apprehended the person anyway. The surprise encounters often left immigrants stunned, as they feared they were being kidnapped. Some ran in terror from the masked agents. Other encounters turned violent as officers deployed Taser guns and smashed car windows. Agents at times shouted racial epithets, for example, allegedly calling one immigrant a “maldito Mexicano” – “fucking Mexican” – during the arrest, according to one lawsuit filed this January in federal court. The 430 ICE street arrests identified by the City Reporter from lawsuits filed over a five-month period were clustered in predominantly Latino communities across the region, from Passaic and Plainfield in New Jersey to Brentwood and Hempstead on Long Island. Within New York City, there were 81 ICE street arrests. The Corona neighborhood in Queens had the highest number of street arrests by ICE officers of any New York City neighborhood. Immigration officials separated a father from his family for four months after arresting him in Corona, Queens. Photograph: Ben Fractenberg/The City Such street arrests were rare in New York City before Donald Trump’s second term. As they ramped up in recent months, lawyers have sued the administration, arguing the arrests violate the US constitution, and federal judges have increasingly criticized ICE’s tactics as illegal. The City Reporter’s findings come as a federal judge has now barred most ICE arrests at immigration courthouses in New York City, but the White House “border czar”, Tom Homan, has threatened to “flood the zone” with federal immigration officers, in the way that other Democratic-run cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and others have so dramatically experienced under this administration. A bar chart showing that street arrests were the most common type of arrests found in the immigration petitions across the New York metro area Since the vast majority of the arrests in the New York area have gone unreported and federal immigration data does not distinguish street arrests from others, the City Reporter reviewed every emergency lawsuit filed by immigrants challenging the legality of their detention in three federal courts from 15 October 2025 to 15 March 2026. Known as habeas corpus petitions, the lawsuits have skyrocketed in response to the second Trump administration’s enforcement campaign. Many of them offer rich details about the arrests, including the locations, circumstances and demographics of people arrested. In the database of petitions, the City Reporter identified 430 street arrests across the New York metro area, including parts of Long Island and New Jersey. Difficult to track, these arrests have drawn little public scrutiny compared to the ICE arrests inside the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, which have attracted throngs of court observers, elected officials and photographers. Yet during the period of the review, the City Reporter found that street arrests were far more common than immigration court arrests in the habeas petitions. Within the dataset, Latinos comprised nearly all of the street arrests in the region, while they accounted for just 55% of arrests in administrative settings like ICE check-ins, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) appointments and immigration court hearings. A square chart showing that 93% of street arrests targeted Latino immigrants “The data confirms what all New Yorkers know, which is that ICE engages in racial profiling when carrying out street arrests,” said Elora Mukherjee, a law professor at Columbia University and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, in response to the City Reporter’s findings. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said: “Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the US – NOT their skin color, race or ethnicity.” Not every immigrant who is arrested files a habeas petition; only about one in 10 did so during these five months. The actual number of street arrests is likely much higher than what is captured in the database created from this research. A bar chart showing that immigrants from Latin America were vastly overrepresented in street arrests in the New York metro area As word has spread through some Latino neighborhoods – where ICE agents have been observed showing up again and again – many prepare for the worst. Sisters plead with brothers to share their locations with them, day laborers avoid work and men write the numbers of emergency contacts in Sharpie marker on their arms. On an afternoon last December, ICE agents surrounded Juan and arrested him while he was watching a game of dominoes on Staten Island. At the time, he had lived in the US for nearly two decades and had just visited with his two children, who are both US citizens. “You never know. You could just be heading to the store and get arrested right around the corner,” Juan, who was released after filing a habeas petition, told the City Reporter in Spanish. Like all immigrants quoted in this article, he is not identified by his full name out of fear of retaliation in their ongoing immigration proceedings. A border patrol agent detains a woman after an immigration court hearing inside 26 Federal Plaza on 7 August 2025. Photograph: Ben Fractenberg/The City “The truth is, I walk around in fear,” Juan said. For Florencio, for example, it was already dark when he was coming home to the Corona in Queens after a day of painting an apartment in Manhattan. The following account of Florencio’s arrest is based on court records, ICE records and extensive interviews with the family. When he reached his block, a masked man shouted at him, and as more men emerged from their cars he feared he was about to be kidnapped, he said. At the same moment, his wife, Fidelina, was corralling their three children out the door of their home for a grocery store run before dinner. Their 13-year-old son heard the shouts and tugged at his mother. “Mama, it’s ICE,” he said. Under the dull glow of street lamps, Fidelina wasn’t sure. Her nine-year-old son recognized his father first. “It’s Daddy!” he shouted. Florencio stole a glance towards his children just a few feet away, then turned and ran. Outnumbered, he felt a pair of hands press into his back. The force sent him to the ground so fast that his ankle twisted and his forehead skidded across the asphalt. ICE agents handcuffed him, shoved him into an unmarked car and whisked him away. Florencio’s detention is part of a pattern across the region, where ICE agents stopped and arrested people in majority-Latino neighborhoods based on their appearance while they claimed to be looking for other people, according to internal ICE records. In court filings and interviews, lawyers said that such arrests violate constitutional protections from unreasonable search and seizure and that agents often don’t have enough evidence to make the arrests at all. “As soon as someone is not free to leave, that’s a seizure, and there’s no basis for the seizure in most of these cases,” said Paige Austin, an attorney for Make the Road, an immigrant advocacy organization that has handled dozens of habeas petitions in the last year. Instead, they’re making assumptions based on appearance, what jobs they work and where they live, she said. “It’s just pure racial profiling.” In ICE’s account of his arrest, agents said they’d first approached Florencio because he had “the same build and likeness” as a person they were trying to arrest that day. The agency claimed that Florencio voluntarily admitted he had crossed the US-Mexico border illegally before they tried to arrest him. Corona Plaza vendors in Queens, New York City, sell food and clothing on a late fall day. Photograph: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY But in an interview with the City Reporter and in his court filing, Florencio disputed that account, saying he was already handcuffed when agents drove him to a nearby parking lot, where they rifled through his wallet, took his phone and snapped a photo of his face. They showed him pictures of the man they said they were looking for and told him the man was from Ecuador. “I’m not Ecuadorian. I’m Guatemalan. I’ve been here for almost 13 years,” he recalled, pleading with the agents in Spanish. The agents told him it didn’t matter, Florencio said. “You have to come with us because you’re here without papers, too.” ICE maintains that its stops are legal and consistent with the constitution. “Our agents are properly trained to determine alienage and removability. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions,” the DHS said in a statement. But in dozens of cases, immigrants repeatedly described being surrounded by multiple cars and swarmed by officers, which they say made it impossible for them to leave. “They’re arresting first, then they’re finding the justification later,” said Michael Musa-Obregon, an immigration lawyer based in Queens who frequently files habeas petitions. “It’s all illegal.” In early February, federal immigration agents were in Port Richmond, Staten Island, looking for a 25-year-old man from Mexico named Julio, according to an ICE document. They circled the same residential block again and again, first detaining a 36-year-old from Guatemala named Isaias, then a 21-year-old named Juan, also from Guatemala. In separate arrest reports, ICE officials described each as “a male who was believed to be the intended target”. Juan shows the spot outside a Port Richmond, Staten Island, church where ICE agents arrested him. Photograph: Ben Fractenberg/The City Agents then arrested a 47-year-old man from Mexico named Alejandro because he was leaving the location they were staking out, they said. After their experience of being apprehended, Isaias and Juan both decided to leave the country, federal court records indicate. A judge later ordered Alejandro’s release after lawyers filed a habeas petition. The DHS said that it sought the cooperation of the New York police department (NYPD) to locate Julio, its original target, but the police agency declined because of sanctuary laws that restrict local law enforcement from assisting in federal immigration enforcement. In another case, a 22-year-old from Guatemala was walking to his job as a vegetable grocer in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn when six officers approached him on the street. They pulled out some photos of men for him to identify. “You’re Latino, you look like one of them. Do you know any of these guys?” the agent allegedly asked, according to court documents in the case. When he said no, the officers asked him for identification and asked if he had papers. The 22-year-old gazed at their firearms and felt he had no choice but to respond, he said in filings. Then, they arrested him, too. In ICE’s account of the arrest, agents were driving to arrest someone else when they “noticed a person matching the target’s biographic information wearing a hooded jacket”. Immigrant advocates across the country have been challenging these arrest tactics in court. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued in California and Minnesota, alleging ICE was using racial profiling to make warrantless arrests. In April, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and other immigrant advocacy groups brought a similar class action lawsuit arguing these arrests violate the constitutional rights of immigrants. “It’s an outrageous racial profiling policy of stopping Latino men, primarily,” said Amy Belsher, the NYCLU’s director of immigrants’ rights litigation. “It’s enormously harmful.” Last September, the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in an opinion that race could be one factor when making arrests, following the ACLU’s California lawsuit. The ruling allowed ICE agents to continue using race or ethnicity as one consideration in their immigration enforcement arrests around Los Angeles. While the Kavanaugh opinion applied only to that area, it set a tone for ICE enforcement tactics across the country, said Mukherjee, the Columbia law professor. “The effects of that decision have reverberated across the country, including here in New York, where ICE officers and other federal enforcement officers working with ICE are emboldened to carry out racial profiling,” she said. As petitions describing street arrests increasingly jam up court dockets, some federal judges in New York have condemned ICE’s practices. Advocates shared images of immigration agents making arrests throughout the city. Photograph: Obtained by The City In January, a 24-year-old from Honduras was walking to catch the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) in Hempstead when seven cars full of immigration enforcement agents allegedly surrounded him. The officers arrested him without asking any questions and then later produced a warrant. Officials admitted that they arrested the wrong person, wrote Gary Brown, a Trump-appointed federal judge overseeing the case. ICE agents, he concluded, “grossly abused their authority”. “The abhorrent and illegal practices identified in this opinion are not limited to this case but are seemingly being inflicted on a widespread basis,” Brown continued. “This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America.” Snow was still piled up on the street this February when Diego, from Ecuador, was surrounded by three ICE agents as he sat in his vehicle. “¡Auxilio! ¡Ayúdenme!” he shouted. The pleas for help drew a neighbor to her window, who witnessed the arrest and partly captured what happened on her phone. When the neighbor finally saw Di