Immigration arrests in New York City have slowed since peaking in the summer months while deportations increased, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data available through mid-October released Monday and analyzed by THE CITY.
Since ICE last released data covering immigration arrests through late July, the agency arrested 858 people in streets, courts and homes and at ICE check-ins across the five boroughs through Oct. 15 — a 47% decrease from the 1,608 in the two and a half months prior. The downturn locally occurred even as arrests nationwide increased by 9% over the same span, according to the ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the number of deportations exceeded the number of arrests in August and again in September — the first time that’s happened in the two years for which data is available.
Overall, 55% more people who had been arrested in the city within the last two years were removed from the country from August to mid-October compared to the preceding two and a half months.
In all, ICE has arrested 3,212 people in New York City this year through mid-October, with 1,832 of those people — or 57% — subsequently deported.
That’s a massive hike from the 13% of arrests over the same period last year that led to 238 people being deported.
Reports by THE CITY and other news outlets suggest ICE has ramped up street arrests since the new data’s mid-October cut-off, including a raid of street vendors on Canal Street in Chinatown later that month.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons and Border Czar Tom Homan have both promised in recent weeks to hit New York City with more street raids, claiming those are a consequence of its “sanctuary city” policies restricting local enforcement cooperation with federal authorities.
As of mid-October, arrests here have continued to involve mostly people without any criminal charges or convictions, though less so than during the summer months. Sixty-seven percent of people arrested between August and Oct. 15 had only civil immigration violations, compared to 81% of those arrested from mid-May through July.
Since the beginning of the year, 70% of people ICE arrested in New York City through Oct. 15 had no criminal charges or convictions, compared to 34% nationwide.
Most of these arrests are processed at 26 Federal Plaza — where, for weeks over the summer, ICE held hundreds of detainees overnight without beds, sometimes for days at a time. Since a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Aug. 12 requiring the Trump administration to improve conditions in the make-shift lock-up there, however, detainees have spent less time on average at the Lower Manhattan site.
Meanwhile, 22 people detained in New York City were deported to a country other than the one they hold citizenship in between August and mid-October, including 17 with no previous criminal charges or convictions — bringing the total this year to 62 people.
The people deported to a third country include a 41-year-old Chinese man who was sent to the Central African Republic in September and a 28-year-old Ecuadorian woman deported to Honduras along with two girls aged 4 and 11. The Central American country in August struck a deal with the Trump administration to receive U.S. deportees.
ICE has also increasingly targeted people aged 18 or under, the data suggests. The number of youth arrests increased to 62 between August and mid-October from 56 from mid-May through July even though overall arrests are down.
That means 7% of all immigration arrests in the city between August and mid-October involved a person who’s 18 years old or younger, compared to 3% in the two and a half months prior.
More recently, a 6-year-old from China was separated from his father after both were arrested at an ICE check in on Nov. 26 and the father was sent to an ICE detention facility upstate, as THE CITY reported Tuesday. The child is, as of Friday morning, in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which shelters unaccompanied children.
The youngest person arrested so far this year is just 3 years old.
