Over the last few months, THE CITY built a comprehensive database of ICE arrests from five months of emergency lawsuits filed by immigrant detainees in federal courts — offering a first-of-its-kind view into ICE’s tactics in the region since street arrests began to unfold in immigrant neighborhoods last year.
These lawsuits, known as habeas corpus petitions, often include rich details about the circumstances of an arrest. In some cases, ICE responded to the suit with both the arrest warrant and its own account of the arrest.
While the Deportation Data Project has publicly released federal immigration data obtained through lawsuits, the arrest location it provides is often not detailed enough to distinguish arrests on city streets from arrests in immigration courthouses, at ICE check-ins or other settings. THE CITY, for example, found numerous street arrests where ICE marked 26 Federal Plaza as the “apprehension landmark,” even though immigrants were actually detained elsewhere.
To better understand ICE’s enforcement patterns in New York, we reviewed all habeas petitions filed across three federal courts in the region between Oct. 15, 2025 and March 15, 2026. This five-month period covers the raid in Chinatown in late October and the national enforcement surge during the crackdown in Minneapolis. ICE arrests have since slowed nationally.
While the petitions are public, they are not accessible through the online federal court records system known as PACER, under federal rules. So we traveled to federal courthouses in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York and in New Jersey to collect the petitions. Since habeas petitions must be filed where a person is detained, we chose the federal courts where cases challenging New York City arrests were most likely to be filed. This included the New Jersey federal court because many people arrested in New York are detained in Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark.
From there, we built a database that categorized arrests based on trends that emerged from the petitions. We defined “street arrest” as one made by a federal agent who stopped a person while on foot or in a vehicle. We also created categories for administrative arrests that take place in bureaucratic settings, including in immigration court, and during case appointments and routine check-ins. In Long Island and New Jersey, we identified arrests that followed cooperation with local police and categorized them accordingly.
Our database also drew information about a detainee’s arrest location and country of origin from the petitions. But not all petitions included all of these details. In many cases, we contacted lawyers to confirm key arrest details and cross-referenced alien registration numbers included in the lawsuits with federal databases to confirm a person’s country of origin.
We also reviewed the petitions describing street arrests for any descriptions of use of force against a person or their property. This included cases where agents pulled weapons, smashed car windows or allegedly injured a person.
Overall, our database of habeas petitions represented about 10% of all ICE arrests between mid-October and mid-March. That means ICE has likely made more street arrests than what we were able to document from the petitions.
To test our methodology, we spoke with several social scientists familiar with immigration data. They confirmed the volume of petitions we analyzed allows for meaningful inferences about ICE’s tactics in the region.
We identified everyone in the story by only their first name both to respect the privacy of individuals we could not reach or who declined to speak, as well as in response to people’s concerns about the potential impact on their immigration cases.
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The post How THE CITY Investigated ICE Street Arrests in the New York Area appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
