Federal immigration agents closed out a five-week enforcement push across New York this week, and the Department of Homeland Security wasted no time calling it a win. Legal aid attorneys in Queens and Brooklyn describe a very different story about who actually ended up in agents' custody.
A Five-Week Dragnet, Framed as Payback
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared Tuesday inside 26 Federal Plaza, the downtown building that houses ICE's local processing operation, to lay out the results of Operation Rotten Apple, a five-week campaign that reached beyond the five boroughs into Long Island, the Hudson Valley and a stretch of upstate counties, running between July 27 and August 29. DHS's written statement put the total at 2,197 arrests, a figure Mullin and other officials rounded down to "over 2,100" whenever they spoke publicly.
Mullin framed the sweep less as routine enforcement than as retaliation for New York's immigration stance, telling reporters the crackdown was necessary "because New York City has a liberal, socialist mayor." He pointed to a proposed $22 million cut to the NYPD budget and accused Gov. Kathy Hochul, alongside the mayor, of refusing to work with federal agents. Border czar Tom Homan went a step further, saying the operation swept up people he claimed local officials had already turned loose rather than hand over to ICE custody.
The campaign followed New York's move to sever ties with federal immigration enforcement. The Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which Hochul signed in May and which took full effect in late August, bars local police departments from entering 287(g) partnerships with ICE, while separate city rules already keep jails from honoring detainer requests unless agents produce a judicial warrant. Mullin's Tuesday briefing landed the same day Mamdani and the governor held a competing news conference demanding Washington release $87 million in withheld counterterrorism funding for the city.
The Numbers DHS Left Out
DHS's public messaging leaned heavily on its most serious cases, spotlighting arrests tied to murder, kidnapping and sex offenses and publicizing details on only about 10 individuals out of the full arrest total. Neither Mullin nor his agency ever broke down how many of the rest had violent convictions rather than purely civil paperwork problems, and a follow-up request on that point went unanswered.
Independent figures complicate that worst-of-the-worst framing. Statewide enforcement data obtained through the Deportation Data Project put July's ICE arrest count in New York at 1,355 people, three in four of whom carried no criminal record at all. A separate tally from the TRAC research center found that, of roughly 66,000 immigrants sitting in ICE custody nationwide in mid-July, 70.6 percent had never been convicted of a crime. LatinTimes could not independently confirm what portion of the Rotten Apple arrests specifically fell into either category, and DHS's own materials did not close that gap.
DHS's written release went further still, asserting without documentation that New York had released 13,621 people it described as criminal illegal aliens back onto the streets rather than transferring them to ICE. That figure appears nowhere outside the agency's own statement and could not be independently verified for this reporting cycle.
From Jail Transfers to Street Stops
As courts and jails grew harder for agents to reach, ICE leaned more heavily on stopping people directly in neighborhoods with dense immigrant populations, a pattern researchers at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy have tracked nationally. Their peer-reviewed study found that arrests made in the community rather than through jail handoffs jumped from 17 percent to 47 percent of all ICE arrests as sanctuary jurisdictions cut cooperation, with especially sharp spikes in states and cities including New York.
That shift has landed hardest in Queens corridors like Corona and Jackson Heights and in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, home to some of the city's largest concentrations of Latino residents. Roughly three in ten New Yorkers identify as Hispanic or Latino, with the heaviest concentrations in the Bronx and Queens, making the city home to one of the largest Latino populations of any in the country. New York Immigration Coalition president Murad Awawdeh told a rally in Corona Plaza last month that more than half of recently reported ICE arrests and detentions in the five boroughs had happened in that single neighborhood. Residents there and in Jackson Heights have since organized informal alert networks and handed out bilingual know-your-rights materials to warn neighbors when agents are spotted nearby.
A Profiling Lawsuit Already in Motion
A class-action suit filed earlier this year accuses federal agents of stopping people based on how they look or sound rather than any individual suspicion of wrongdoing; the plaintiffs are represented by Make the Road New York together with the Legal Aid Society and the New York Civil Liberties Union. Meghna Philip, who directs Legal Aid's special litigation unit, said in a statement that agents are "profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance." Attorneys working on the case have described families skipping church and driving farther for groceries to steer clear of blocks where agents have recently been spotted, according to reporting from City Limits.
That same tension between enforcement volume and due process has already pulled elected officials into direct standoffs at the very building where Mullin held Tuesday's briefing. Eleven New York lawmakers, including Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes, were arrested a year earlier while trying to inspect a detention floor at 26 Federal Plaza, a flashpoint that has continued to shadow the building well after those charges were resolved.
DHS has not said whether Operation Rotten Apple represents a template for future citywide sweeps or a one-time show of force tied to New York's new state law. For now, both sides are using the arrest total to make opposite arguments: DHS points to the number as proof that sanctuary policies endanger public safety, while legal aid groups point to that same number as evidence of a dragnet that reached well beyond violent offenders and into the daily lives of ordinary Latino New Yorkers.
