Trump administration border czar Tom Homan is again threatening to flood New York City with ICE agents, in what could be the biggest single-city crackdown since the White House pulled back on major operations after the disastrous Minneapolis surge in January that left two Americans dead.
Homan said the surge threat was in response to a series of provisions New York passed last month restricting police cooperation with federal agents, a set of restrictions Homan said he warned Gov. Kathy Hochul not to sign.
“I made her a promise: You’re going to see more ICE than you’ve ever seen in New York City, and it’s coming,” Homan told Fox & Friends on Fox News on Monday. “I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming.”
The threat comes as New York City is expecting a flood of visitors in the coming days for the NBA Finals and World Cup.
Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who previously appeared to strike an unlikely friendship with Donald Trump, sharply criticized the proposed ICE surge.
“We will not allow ICE or anyone else to sow fear in our communities — especially at this moment,” Mamdani wrote in a statement on X. “As the world comes to our city, we will stand proudly with our immigrant neighbors and reject these attacks for what they are: an attempt to divide us.”
“Soccer would not exist without immigrants,” Mamdani, himself an immigrant to the U.S. from Uganda, added. “Immigrants play and coach the game, work in the stadiums, fill the stands, and make celebrations like the World Cup possible. Six of the players on the US Men's National Team are immigrants.”
Last month, Hochul approved a package of immigration-focused changes that allow residents to sue federal agents who violate their rights and bar local governments and police departments from entering into formal cooperation agreements deputizing local staff to carry out federal immigration enforcement alongside agencies such as ICE and the Border Patrol.
The package also bars government and school employees from letting agents onto state property without a warrant, and it forbids law enforcement in the state from wearing face masks when interacting with the public.
Immigration agents can still arrest immigrants in detention in New York facilities after they’ve been found guilty and served their sentence, according to state officials.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Hochul said the ICE threat went against commitments the president made not to surge agents to jurisdictions that weren’t seeking help.
“In New York, our local police need to be focused on local crimes and not filling up our jails with people who ICE has taken off our streets, out of our schools, out of our pizzerias, out of our homes, and I'm not going to be part of that,” Hochul said. “So we'll help you with the criminals — always have, always will — but we're not going to be helping with civil immigration enforcement. I think that's a common sense approach.”
She also warned that an ICE surge could disrupt the New York City economy, harm protesters and lead to a political disaster for Republicans.
“If they come here and go throughout New York State with a surge in ICE, there won't be a Republican standing in this state,” she said. “This would be weaponized against them.”
Some jurisdictions such as New York City already limit cooperation with federal immigration agents, but the new immigration provisions are set to upend things in other areas such as Long Island’s Nassau County, which entered into a cooperation agreement with ICE last year.
Federal immigration agents have already been active in New York City, and they caused controversy throughout last year as they made violent arrests inside immigration courts and held immigrants in poor conditions at a makeshift detention center on the 10th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper.
Throughout 2025, the Trump administration surged ICE and the Border Patrol to carry out military-style raids in mostly Democrat-led cities.
There, agents were accused of regularly using excessive force and making mass warrantless arrests based on racial profiling, which immigration agencies have denied.
The White House pulled back from this aggressive posture in the wake of agents fatally shooting two Minnesota immigration protesters in a manner of weeks in January.
By early February, the administration announced it was pulling hundreds of agents from the state.
The following month, the administration fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, one of the faces of the Minnesota surge, and Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol official, soon retired.
