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“What they’re doing is like marauding. They’re out on the streets wandering around, stopping people who are Latino,” said Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road New York, one of several legal groups that filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of New Yorkers stopped or detained by federal immigration agents.
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Two months ago, around 6:15 p.m., a man court papers identified with the initials A.M.C. attempted to enter his apartment building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, after returning from work, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached and arrested him.
On Nov. 30, 2025, another man identified as X.P.F. was inside a deli in Jackson Heights, Queens, when two agents ran in, grabbed him, and arrested him without asking any questions.
What do these cases have in common? The people arrested were Latino and, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday, were racially profiled by ICE, stopped without cause, and arrested without warrants. The two men are among eight plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit filed against ICE by the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road NY, and others.
In the lawsuit, lawyers argue the arrests violated due process and the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures, and ICE arrest authority, which requires agents to have “probable cause that a person is both in the United States unlawfully and that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, before making a warrantless arrest,” reads the lawsuit.
X.P.F. has lived in the U.S. for nearly 30 years, is the primary caretaker and breadwinner of his family, and remains detained despite ongoing legal efforts, said Paige Austin, an attorney with the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New York.
“[His family] found out that this happened because he didn’t come home,” Austin explained. “They just didn’t know where he was, and his stepdaughter went out onto the street looking for him, and a street vendor told her they [ICE] took your dad.”
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to a request for comment Thursday.
During the first year of Trump’s second term alone, ICE agents made 811 “collateral” arrests—people at the wrong place at the wrong time—according to an analysis by The City. New York has also seem mass immigration arrests and large-scale raids in commercial strips.
“I would say the very vast majority of people that we have seen, and that we’re talking about in this lawsuit, they’re not collateral in that sense, because there was no person nearby that was the target of the raid,” Austin noted.
“What they’re doing is like marauding. They’re out on the streets wandering around, stopping people who are Latino,” she added.
It’s happening outside the city, too, the lawsuit says. From Buffalo to New York City, there has also been an increase in immigration enforcement, and the lawsuit describes how immigrant and Latino communities “are living under a state of siege.”
“Plaintiffs are limiting their time outside of their homes, and are anxious and nervous when stepping outside,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, a supervising attorney with The Legal Aid Society, via email.
“Some have stopped going to church, after hearing about ICE arrests near churches. Others just go straight to/from work. Some who were arrested at their nearby supermarkets now shop farther away, at stores where there haven’t been (to their knowledge) ICE arrests,” he added.
In Western New York, the lawsuit describes the story of F.R.P., who, while in custody, didn’t receive medication to treat his thyroid, and when he asked for water, was allegedly told to “drink from the toilet.”
Since X.P.F.’s arrest, his daughter has taken the helm as the family’s breadwinner, according to Austin.
“She needs more hours of work to try to support them, but it means that she doesn’t have anyone to watch her daughter, and it means there’s no one to take her mother to appointments,” she explained. “So it has put a tremendous strain on the family.”
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