U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest in downtown Saratoga Springs in April. More than 100 ICE arrests have taken place in Saratoga County this year through July, according to data from the agency.
Provided
ALBANY — President Donald J. Trump’s unprecedented campaign to deport immigrants without legal status has resulted in hundreds of arrests across upstate New York in 2025, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data analyzed by the Times Union.
Beyond high-profile raids in the headlines, ICE has regularly arrested immigrants across New York at their homes, during traffic stops, at their jobs, at immigration office appearances, and also at state prisons, local jails, police stations and probation offices. The agency has picked up thousands of people in New York this year, mostly Hispanic men, along with smaller numbers of women and even young children, data shows. Hundreds have already left the country.
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ICE made over 520 arrests in Erie County this year through late July, the Times Union found. In Monroe County, the agency arrested more than 165 people.
The Capital Region has been another hotspot with at least 130 ICE arrests in Albany County, 118 in Saratoga County, and more than 30 each in Rensselaer and Schenectady counties.
The place where ICE has made the most arrests by far in New York is Federal Plaza Immigration Court in New York City, where immigrants from around that region often go for legal proceedings and ICE check-ins. There, the agency has made more than 1,600 courthouse arrests this year. That includes detaining people when they show up for civil immigration matters, a tactic deployed sparingly before Trump’s second administration, according to immigration advocates and attorneys involved in the cases.
Details of the arrests are based on government data provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers that collects and publishes U.S. immigration data. Locations are based on where the agency says it arrested the individual, not where the person resides.
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ICE arrested at least 4,600 people in the first seven months of this year in New York, surpassing the total number arrested by the agency in 2024, according to the data. Numbers of ICE arrests by state are not available for prior years. A third of all the arrests in New York were not labeled with a precise location, making it hard to know where they occurred.
Multiple immigration advocates cautioned that they believe this year’s data is likely to be missing cases and that more arrests may have happened in some areas.
More than 300 people arrested by ICE in New York this year have been deported, the data shows. At least 170 left the country voluntarily after their ICE arrest, nearly six times the number who did so last year. The vast majority of those arrested appeared to have ongoing immigration cases as of July.
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ICE officials did not respond to questions from the Times Union for this story.
Arrested at courts and check-ins
“What we are seeing is significantly more people being detained and deported than we have seen in a long time,” said Murad Awadeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The reason for that is they are going after people who are also seeking to adjudicate their immigration relief application.”
Bryan MacCormack, co-director and co-founder of the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, which works throughout the region, said his organization has never seen this many arrests and “such aggressive tactics” from ICE in the past nine years, even during Trump’s first term.
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The arrests include immigrants like Benjamin Kibamba, who was living in Albany before he was apprehended in February during his check-in at an ICE office in Malta. The nephew of a Congolese army colonel, Kibamba said he had entered the country illegally at the southern border in December, hoping to be granted asylum in the U.S. due to political persecution he faces in his home country. Kibamba thought he would be safe in America, the country where his uncle became a citizen, the nation that rescued his uncle from two years of detention in Congo after he supported opponents of the president.
Benjamin Kibamba was arrested by ICE in February at an immigration check-in in Malta. He remains in detention in Batavia.
Contributed by Kibamba’s attorney
After crossing the border, Kibamba was held by ICE in Arizona and Georgia for three weeks, kept in chains “like an animal,” he said, before he was released. Then, the 49-year-old made his way to upstate New York, where he has family. Until it happened to him, Kibamba and his attorney said they had never heard of ICE detaining immigrants at their ICE check-ins while they are cooperating during the pendency of their case. Now, that’s common, advocates say.
At the Malta office, Kibamba said he was held in a cement cell, empty except for a toilet, for seven hours before being transported to ICE’s Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia. He’s been locked up there ever since, unable to speak to his wife and six kids in the Congo, he said.
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“You left your country to look for refuge somewhere, and then they put you in a jail that you’ve never been to in your entire life,” said Kibamba, who spoke to the Times Union from detention through a translator. “Even staying one day in a jail is no good. Can you imagine eight months or nine? It’s no fair.”
Kibamba is hopeful he will eventually be granted the right to remain in the U.S., where he’d like to learn English and return to his profession as an electrical engineer. If deported to Congo, he believes he will be killed.
“Once he puts his foot in the airport, that’s when he is going to disappear,” Kibamba’s translator said.
New York’s migrant crisis
The immigrants arrested by ICE have been a mix of people who have lived in New York for years, as well as people like Kibamba who arrived in the U.S. more recently, immigration advocates said.
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During the administration of former President Joe Biden, more than 210,000 migrants arrived in New York City starting in 2022, straining the city’s shelter system and requiring many to be lodged in hotels around the state. That crisis has cost the city and state billions of dollars on a tab that keeps climbing. In addition, tens of thousands of people illegally crossed the northern border into New York each month last year, a record surge.
Response to the influx of migrants and the surge of ICE arrests in the state has created thorny issues in state government. Gov. Kathy Hochul has tried to maintain a balanced political posture, highlighting her support for immigrants living in the state but also saying her administration will cooperate with ICE to deport criminals.
Some Democratic lawmakers have advocated for new legislation to prohibit state and local governments, including police, from disclosing information to ICE or sharing resources with them. Gaining widespread support has been challenging even in a Democratic-controlled Legislature, after Trump was elected with significant support in the state.
“Many of my colleagues want to do something at the state level to stop ICE in their tracks,” said Sen. Andrew Gounardes, a Brooklyn Democrat sponsoring a “New York for All” bill aimed at curbing local cooperation with ICE. “The reality is there is a lot we can’t do to stop ICE, so we have to get out of this notion that we are going to stop them and instead think about how can we make their jobs more difficult, and how many barriers can we put in place to protect our communities and enhance public safety.”
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Demonstrators chant during a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside Federal Plaza Immigration Court in New York City in September.
Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press
On the other hand, some state Republicans have responded with their own bills seeking to prohibit local governments from preventing ICE enforcement or enabling local law enforcement to help them more.
Republican Assemblyman Jarett Gandolfo of Long Island, who sponsors a bill to enhance police cooperation with ICE, said the arrests improve public safety and could help address alleged immigrant-involved gang activity. If more New York police participated, more immigrants with criminal histories and no legal status could be apprehended, he suggested.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pledged to pursue “the largest deportation operation of criminal aliens in American history.” The administration has previously said it has a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests per day, although it later denied the existence of quotas in recent court filings.
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Most have no criminal history
So far in 2025, the majority of people arrested by ICE in New York did not have any pending criminal charges or convictions, the data shows. The same was true in 2024.
Amy Belsher, supervising attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, said ICE’s pledged goals mean the agency has been arresting more people without criminal histories because they are often easier to locate.
“They are indiscriminately arresting people if they think there is any basis to find they are not here lawfully or even when they are here lawfully,” Belsher said. “The policy of this administration is to detain literally everyone.” Then, individuals must decide whether to litigate their case from detention or give up and leave the U.S.
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U.S. District Court records in Albany indicate that dozens of migrants who allegedly entered or reentered the U.S. illegally are being prosecuted this year. Many of those cases include misdemeanor federal criminal charges filed against immigrants who entered the country for the first time but had evaded a border checkpoint, which is illegal. Under the Biden administration, it was rare for individuals who crossed the border illegally for the first time to be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
In this photo, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official purportedly arrested a man in Saratoga Springs in September, according to the Saratoga Immigration Coalition. Agents sometimes wear masks and sometimes appear unmasked and in plain clothes, the coalition said.
Provided by the Saratoga Immigration Coalition.
Rensselaer County Sheriff Kyle Bourgault, whose department has an agreement to assist ICE in limited ways, said he believes ICE is targeting people with criminal records, but may arrest other immigrants without legal residency status, but with no criminal records if they find them during those investigations. His department will notify ICE if they have arrested a person with an existing ICE warrant, he said. Bourgault would be willing to help ICE locate other immigrants allegedly living in the country illegally and suspected of crimes, but said he doesn’t have the staff available to do so.
“It’s the crimes committed by individuals who are in our country illegally, including drug traffickers, human trafficking, gun violence and fraud. I think those are the things that disrupt our community more than us trying to remove the people that are committing those crimes,” Bourgault said. “It’s a sad misunderstanding, I think, by members of our community who think we are just targeting people by race or gender or nationality.”
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ICE arrested at least 90 people at city and county jails around the state in the first seven months of the year, the data shows. Another 215 people were arrested by ICE at state prisons in New York, with half of those occurring at Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County.
The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision provides ICE with a list of people in its custody who are noncitizens, said Nicole March, a spokeswoman for the department. The department will notify ICE before releasing anyone with a final deportation order or immigration detainer, but they will not hold inmates beyond their scheduled release dates for ICE to pick up. Detainers are requests from ICE for jails and prisons to hold a person for them to take into federal custody.
The corrections department confirmed that, through the end of August, it has released 249 incarcerated people with ICE detainers to the agency on their release dates. An additional 42 people in state prisons with ICE detainers were released but not picked up by the agency, March said.
Working-age men arrested
The immigrants arrested by ICE in New York this year so far are overwhelmingly men with an average age of 36, the data shows. But at least 86 of those arrested were minors, with the youngest just 3 years old.
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Immigration advocates and attorneys said in most cases, ICE has arrested more working-age men than any other demographic, but in a few instances, they have apprehended whole families.
Nevertheless, arresting men, many of whom are family breadwinners, creates immense financial and psychological difficulties for their wives and children, who are left behind in their homes across New York, said MacCormack, whose organization provides assistance to immigrants in the Hudson Valley.
“It creates an extreme hardship on the rest of the family,” MacCormack said. “The impact of having a parent disappeared from the household has been extremely difficult for youth in these families, and we’ve seen noticeable changes in behavior, school participation or success in school, in motivation and drive and mental health.”
The immigrants arrested in New York this year are largely Hispanic, with more from Ecuador than any other country.
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According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, more foreign-born residents of New York come from the Dominican Republic than any other country, followed by China, Jamaica, Mexico and then Ecuador. These estimates include people with and without legal residency status.
Many Ecuadorians in New York were members of indigenous groups who were displaced in their country and came to the U.S. in recent years, said Jennifer Connor, executive director of Justice for Migrant Families, an organization assisting immigrants in Buffalo. In Erie County, where almost a third of all ICE arrests have been Ecuadorians, many of those immigrants are living with multiple families squeezed in small apartments and working in more dangerous and less desirable jobs, like roofing, Connor explained.
Albany County
According to multiple Capital Region immigration advocates, the Albany area has been experiencing a surge in ICE enforcement this year, with most activity in the city, not in the surrounding suburbs.
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ICE agents and arrests have been observed in the Pine Hills, Central Avenue and Second Avenue neighborhoods, according to a local organizer who has tracked activity on behalf of the Capital Region Sanctuary Coalition. The organizer requested not to be named in order to avoid what they said could be increased scrutiny of their work by ICE.
ICE has apprehended Albany residents in their cars on their way to work, while they are waiting at a bus stop or while taking their kids to school, the organizer said. Those stopped for questioning have included U.S. citizens with darker skin tones. Some of the arrested immigrants have lived in the community for more than a decade.
In the first seven months of the year, ICE arrested 130 people in Albany County, including eight at the county jail, data shows.
Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said ICE agents must have looked up the criminal cases of his inmates to determine their release date and waited for them outside the jail to make those apprehensions. His department is not always aware of when ICE is trying to apprehend one of their inmates, although sometimes employees see ICE vehicles parked at the jail, he said.
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In July, ICE apprehended Sakir Akkan at the jail, a 22-year-old Turkish immigrant who was convicted of raping a girl in Albany. Akkan is facing deportation.
Apple said the Albany County Sheriff’s Office does not honor ICE detainers.
Saratoga County
To the north, in Saratoga County, immigrants targeted by ICE include restaurant workers arriving for a shift or day laborers headed to jobs, said Terry Diggory, a co-coordinator for the Saratoga Immigration Coalition.
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In a very public episode, ICE agents in April stopped a sedan on Broadway in the heart of Saratoga Springs, removed an immigrant from the backseat and loaded him into an unmarked SUV. ICE data suggests that man, a Mexican immigrant in his late 20s, had an active immigration case and remained in the U.S. as of July.
The Saratoga Immigration Coalition has documented about 20 arrests of immigrants by ICE in the county through July this year.
Another 100 arrests in the county recorded by ICE in their data likely reflect people who went to an immigration check-in at the ICE office in Malta and were detained there, Diggory said. Like Kibamba, who was arrested at his ICE check-in in February, those individuals might live anywhere in the region.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s office in Malta has seen a number of ICE arrests as the agency ramps up its apprehension efforts.
Wendy Liberatore / Times Union
Three ICE arrests unfolded at the Saratoga County jail between January and July, according to the data. Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo declined to discuss the arrests directly, but said his office “routinely” works with law enforcement partners to hold criminal suspects accountable, regardless of their immigration status.
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“Under (state) law, the sheriff’s office cannot hold an inmate based purely on a civil detainer request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and we have no authority to act on the agency’s behalf,” Zurlo said in a written statement. “Nonetheless, as we have done for decades, we will continue to engage in responsible partnerships with other law enforcement entities when warranted and act within our authority in the interest of public safety.”
Rensselaer County
In Rensselaer County, ICE data reflects 34 people arrested this year through late July. Similarly, the nonprofit Justice Center of Rensselaer County reported that it had confirmed at least 36 people have been detained in Troy, as well as two in East Greenbush, from February through September.
Activist Angela Beallor, who has been following these local cases, said the numbers are likely an undercount. Apprehensions have often occurred when ICE has stopped vehicles in neighborhoods, mostly in the morning.
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The Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office said only one person has been arrested by ICE this year at the jail through the department’s cooperative agreement with ICE, according to their records. However, that apprehension took place in June, said county Chief of Corrections Eric Morin, whereas the one case listed in ICE’s records occurred in February. Morin said no arrest matching ICE’s description took place at the jail in February.
The Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office has worked with ICE since 2018. Officers at the Rensselaer County jail are authorized to check federal databases to see if ICE has a hold on any inmates housed at the jail. The jail can then notify federal immigration officials about an inmate’s release date and deliver them into federal immigration custody.
Sheriff’s offices in Broome, Nassau, Niagara and Steuben counties have also made cooperative agreements of various kinds with ICE this year, along with the Nassau County and Camden police departments, ICE said.
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Hudson Valley
In the Hudson Valley, there have been fewer ICE arrests than in the Albany area, the data shows. Local advocates agree. The data shows a handful to roughly a dozen arrests by county in the first seven months of the year, with some occurring in the community and others at jails and prisons.
Like elsewhere in New York, many of the arrests have snagged immigrants in their vehicles, MacCormack said. That’s largely because people have learned not to open their doors at home for ICE, he said. Other immigrants have been detained at check-ins in Malta and New York City.
A federal agent wears a badge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the immigration court at Federal Plaza Immigration Court in New York City in June. Immigration arrests in Buffalo, Rochester, Albany and Saratoga have dominated upstate New York. In New York City, arrests skyrocketed at Federal Plaza.
Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press
Columbia County Sanctuary Movement and another immigrant-serving organization in the Hudson Valley have both observed an uptick in immigration enforcement in the Kingston area in recent weeks, including multiple people detained and several ICE agents spotted locally.
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“There was a lot of threat in the beginning of the year and now we are starting to see more action,” said a coordinator at a Hudson Valley immigration organization, who asked not to be identified.
Buffalo
ICE has multiple offices in New York City and Buffalo. The presence of many agents in those cities, as well as the numerous immigrants who appear at immigration court hearings and check-ins in those cities, has also coincided with increased arrests, according to advocates. Buffalo also has a significant presence of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, given its location on the U.S.-Canada border.
On a regular basis, organizers at Justice for Migrant Families in Buffalo witness ICE agents apprehending immigrants as they exit a courthouse after hearings, said Connor, the group’s executive director. The calls that her organization receives point to an “overwhelming number” of arrests in the city.
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“Every single arrest is a horror,” Connor said. “We have seen a constant presence and massive impact on the schools, on the workforce, on really every neighborhood.”