New York City will take Immigration and Customs Enforcement to court if its agents keep using city-owned parking lots as a base for raids. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said so in a letter sent Monday to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting ICE Director David Venturella and Kenneth Genalo, who runs the agency’s New York field office.
The letter cites two sites: unstaffed lots at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and along 111th Street on the western edge of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Agents have been seen parking vehicles and holding meetings there. “ICE has no right to use our property as a base for tearing families apart,” Mamdani wrote. Corporation Counsel Steven Banks said the city is “prepared to go to court if it does not stop.”
City rules already say they cannot. An executive order Mamdani signed in February bars non-city law enforcement from using city parking lots as a staging ground without a judicial warrant or another qualifying legal exception. The city says ICE never asked for permission. Parks Department staff have new instructions too: ask agents for identification, call the general counsel, document the encounter when it is safe, and call 911 if agents enter without authorization.
The urgency has a date on it. On Oct. 8, a federal agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck in Marble Hill, in the Bronx, while his 5-year-old son sat in the car. The mayor’s office says agents had been staging from a privately owned lot a few blocks away. City law does not reach private property the same way, which is why Mamdani and more than 100 elected officials had already asked private garage and lot owners to turn ICE away.
For Black New Yorkers, this is not a story that happens to someone else. Black immigrants, from Haiti, Jamaica, Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea among other places, are more than a quarter of the Black population in New York, Boston and Miami, according to a 2016 report from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the NYU School of Law immigrant rights clinic. The same report found they were 7.2% of noncitizens nationally but 20.3% of immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds. It tied that gap to the heavy policing of the neighborhoods where many of them live, which turns minor stops into deportation cases.
A raid staged from a park lot in the Bronx lands in exactly those neighborhoods. Every enforcement operation that begins with a police-style stop is one more place where the same pipeline can run.
The Trump administration is likely to argue that federal agents answer to federal law, and that a city cannot decide where they park. That argument has not been tested over these particular lots, and a city that owns the asphalt has a strong claim to say who uses it. Mamdani is right to make ICE ask a judge first. The letter sets no date, but Banks has said the city is ready to file if the lots stay in use.
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