The Legal Aid Society, New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and Covington & Burling LLP filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of eight Latino New Yorkers and the Workers’ Center of Central New York challenging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy and practice of conducting suspicionless stops of New Yorkers based solely on their perceived race and ethnicity and warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause.

Since January 2025, thousands of Black and Brown New Yorkers – the vast majority of whom are Latino or Hispanic – have been unlawfully stopped and detained by agents from DHS’s component agencies, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in an effort to meet the Trump Administration’s sky-high immigration arrest quotas. ICE and CBP agents regularly violate laws that require reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation before agents can detain someone and routinely ignore constitutional and statutory limits on their arrest authority. Federal law also requires agents to have probable cause of both an immigration violation and a likelihood of escape before making a warrantless arrest. This lawsuit seeks to end ICE and CBP’s egregious and illegal tactics of discriminatory surveillance, detention, and family separation.

Legal Aid’s Immigration Law Unit provides comprehensive, direct legal representation to low-income New Yorkers on a wide range of immigration matters. Learn more about our immigration work and what to do if you or a loved one encounters ICE here.