We’re Suing to Stop ICE’s Racial Profiling

In an effort to meet Trump’s sky-high immigration quotas, immigration agents are illegally stopping and arresting people based on the language they speak and the color of their skin. Agents detain people who are simply going about their daily lives: going to work, driving their kids to school, or entering the grocery store.

These illegal arrests terrorize communities and tear families apart – and we’re suing to stop them.

The Trump administration has increased such arrests dramatically. In the first six months of Trump’s second term, 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. Since then, federal agents have continued these suspicionless stops and warrantless immigration arrests without pause.

Between January 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, immigration officials arrested 9,346 people in the greater New York City area and 4,094 people elsewhere across New York State.

These numbers include hundreds of people who were not targets of an immigration operation who ICE and CBP agents swept up nonetheless. Between August 2025 and March 2026 in New York City alone, agents made 800 of these “collateral arrests.” Eighty-five percent of those arrested in this way had no criminal history.

This inhumane and capricious activity has struck enormous fear in immigrant communities throughout New York. People find themselves living under a state of siege. Many who believe they might be targeted, including U.S. citizens and those with lawful status, limit their activities out of fear they will be unlawfully stopped.

Suing to End Illegal Stops and Arrests

On April 8th, the NYCLU, Legal Aid Society, Make the Road New York, and Covington & Burling LLP filed a class action lawsuit against Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. We filed the case on behalf of the Workers’ Center of Central New York and eight Latino New Yorkers who immigration agents illegally arrested.

Officers stopped and arrested one plaintiff as he was driving his daughter to school. Another was pumping gas. Several were on their way to work. In no case did officers have a warrant to make the arrests. One plaintiff endured two months of ICE detention after ICE officers arrested him.

Federal agents targeted these New Yorkers based on racial profiling, in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and other federal laws and regulations that prohibit using a person’s race as justification for arresting or detaining them.

Before making an arrest, the law requires agents to have probable cause that a person is 1) in the United States unlawfully and 2) likely to escape before agents can obtain a warrant.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers flagrantly violate these requirements. Having brown skin or speaking Spanish do not constitute probable cause, yet agents regularly engage in racial profiling by stopping and arresting people for precisely these reasons.

Agents also routinely arrest people who pose no flight risk, and in fact have deep ties to the communities where they have been living for years or even decades. Far from targeting “the worst of the worst,” immigration agents rip law-abiding residents from their families and the lives they have built here.

For over a year, immigration officers have treated our state like a constitution-free zone, profiling and detaining thousands of Black and Brown people in service of Trump’s inhumane deportation agenda. This siege on New Yorkers must end.

We’re confident the court will hold the Trump administration’s immigration officials accountable for this cruel and lawless behavior.