Rafael Rubio, a 53-year-old staffer at the New York City Council in Mayor Mamdani’s municipal government, has been ordered to be deported by Federal Immigration Court Judge Charles Conroy.

Rubio is a native of Venezuela, and arrived in the United States in 2017 on a tourist visa, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security. He then stayed in the US without ever getting a permanent residence permit, and was hired by the New York City Council in January 2025, under Mayor Eric Adams’ tenure, as a data analyst.

In March 2023, Rubio was arrested for assault in the Queens borough of New York City, New York. However, that case against him was eventually dismissed. It is unclear if it was his arrest or the Trump administration’s decision to waive any protected immigration status for Venezuelan citizens that flagged him for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, but when he went to what he thought was a routine check-in with the local immigration centre in January 2026, he was apprehended. He has been in ICE custody since, and is now awaiting deportation as ordered by Judge Conroy in March 2026.

What makes this deportation case uniquely political is that the subject is an employee of the municipal government run by Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, who has previously described ICE as ‘fascists’ and vowed to never let local law enforcement cooperate with the federal immigration agency.

Mamdani himself is an immigrant, having been born in Kampala, Uganda in 1991, and having moved to the United States with his family as a child in 1998.

Accordingly, people inside the New York City government have spoken up in favour of Rubio. At a press conference at New York City Hall last week, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin called the judge’s removal order ‘cruel’, ‘inhumane’, as well as ‘an indefensible decision’.

‘Raphael should be released immediately. This is an outrageous decision by the judge. There’s no justification for continuing to detain him. We will continue fighting, as we have every single day in the courts and beyond, until this is corrected,’ Speaker Menin stated, as quoted by the New York Post.

On the anniversary of President Trump’s second inauguration, 20 January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release in which they touted that ‘nearly 3 million’ illegal aliens had left the United States in the first year of the second Trump administration—’2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations’.

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