The Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and Covington & Burling LLP have filed a lawsuit 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.   

Among the plaintiffs is A.M.C., a 36-year-old Latino resident of Brooklyn, who has lived in the state for 14 years. On February 24, ICE agents stopped and arrested A.M.C. without a warrant as he tried to enter his apartment building in Bushwick while returning home from work. A.M.C. spent eight days in ICE detention. Due to his Latino ethnicity, A.M.C. fears being stopped, arrested, and detained again while going about his daily life.

ICE and CBP agents regularly violate laws that require reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation before agents can detain someone and routinely ignore 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. 

In just the first six months of the second Trump Administration, immigration officials arrested 2,888 noncitizens in the greater New York City area, more than triple the number of arrests in the last six months of the previous administration. 

“ICE is profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance,” said Meghna Philip, Director of the Special Litigation Unit at Legal Aid. “This is an egregious violation of their civil rights, that has caused fear and panic to ripple throughout New York’s immigrant communities.”

“This lawlessness must come to an end, and the federal government must be held accountable for its abuse of authority,” she continued. “Our clients, and all New Yorkers, deserve to go about their daily lives and routines without fear of arbitrary and discriminatory surveillance, detention, and family separation.”