Investigation finds 93% of New York-area ICE street arrests targeted Latinos

A joint investigation by THE CITY and Documented, published May 27, 2026, examined more than 1,200 habeas corpus petitions filed in three federal courts across the New York region between October 15, 2025 and March 15, 2026 — a window spanning the late-October Chinatown raid and the national enforcement surge that accompanied the Minneapolis crackdown. From those filings the reporters identified 430 ICE street arrests and found that more than 93% of the people arrested were from Latin American countries. By the investigation's own benchmark, Latinos make up roughly 66% of the region's immigrants without legal status, leaving a 27-percentage-point gap between that baseline and the share of street arrests.

That gap is the entry's central fact, and it does not stand alone. The finding aligns with an active federal lawsuit brought by the Workers' Center of Central New York and eight Latino plaintiffs, which alleges that ICE has been conducting suspicionless stops and warrantless arrests directed at Latino communities. The convergence of an independent data analysis and the lawsuit's allegations is what moves the pattern past disparate impact and toward documented targeting along national-origin lines — the basis for recording this as discriminatory policy and the targeting of marginalized communities, layered on the due-process concerns inherent in warrantless street arrests.

What is recorded here is the systemic profiling layer rather than any single arrest. The Standing has previously archived individual instances of warrantless ICE home entries and street arrests; this investigation captures the aggregate pattern those individual incidents fit into, documented through the federal habeas record rather than anecdote. The primary THE CITY investigation was verified live at recording time; both Documented NY links returned automated-access blocks (HTTP 403) typical of publisher WAF systems and are retained for editorial verification.