A coalition of civil rights organizations filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday in the Eastern District of New York accusing the Department of Homeland Security of running a systematic campaign of racially-targeted immigration enforcement — stopping, detaining, and arresting New Yorkers based solely on how they look and what language they speak, without warrants or probable cause.
The Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and Covington & Burling LLP brought the suit on behalf of eight Latino immigrants and asylum seekers, most of whom have lived in New York for at least a decade and each of whom was arrested while doing nothing more than living their daily lives. One plaintiff was arrested entering his apartment building in Bushwick after a night shift and spent eight days in detention. A 46-year-old Greenpoint resident was detained on his morning commute — aboard a ferry, sitting in his parked car — and held for 22 days. A Staten Island man was surrounded by federal agents in three unmarked vehicles while watching a game of dominoes.
The pattern, according to the suit, is not incidental. Between January 20, 2025 and March 10, 2026, immigration officials arrested more than 9,300 people in the greater New York City area and more than 4,000 elsewhere in the state. In the first six months of the current administration alone, ICE arrested 2,888 noncitizens in the greater New York area — more than triple the pace under the prior administration. Of the 800 New Yorkers flagged as non-targets who were nonetheless arrested, 85 percent had no prior criminal record.
The legal terrain enabling this enforcement was partly shaped by a 2025 Supreme Court concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which held that federal immigration officials may use factors such as language and ethnicity as one element in determining whether someone is in the country without authorization — though not as the sole factor. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argue agents have been using that ruling as operational permission to ignore the rest of the constitutional standard entirely, conducting what the NYCLU has termed “Kavanaugh stops” — pretextual encounters that begin with appearance and end in detention.
“For over a year, immigration agents have treated our state like a constitution-free zone,” said NYCLU attorney Amy Belsher, “unlawfully profiling and detaining Black and Brown New Yorkers in service of Trump’s deportation agenda.” New York Attorney General Letitia James called the tactics “illegal and unconscionable” and announced her support for the plaintiffs.
DHS maintains that all arrests are based on reasonable suspicion consistent with Fourth Amendment protections. Immigration Supervising Attorney Hasan Shafiqullah at Legal Aid offered a different read: the administration, he said, wants to create an environment so saturated with fear that people will self-deport. The arrests are not incidental byproducts of enforcement. They are the enforcement.
The structural stakes of this lawsuit extend beyond New York. The Trump administration is simultaneously signaling a second phase of mass deportation focused on workplace raids and a broader pool of targets beyond those with criminal records. A framework in which appearance functions as probable cause does not stay geographically contained — it becomes the logic of the entire system.
The Deportation Data Project tracks ongoing immigration arrest data nationally. The lawsuit is pending in the Eastern District of New York.
