NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 10: Students, activists and area politicians gather in Corona, Queens, a neighborhood with a significant immigrant population, to denounce the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arresting people in the area on August 10, 2026, in New York City. ICE actions have increased throughout New York City in recent months as the Trump administration continues to press for a surge in arrests in neighborhoods throughout the country with high numbers of immigrants.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A car full of takeout, a blank warrant
Andrés had barely made it back into College Point with dinner one night in late June — Peruvian takeout still warm, his wife next to him, his six-year-old strapped into the back seat — when a ring of unmarked cars closed around his vehicle. Masked agents pulled him from the driver’s seat as his daughter burst into tears. He asked, repeatedly, to see a warrant. What came back, according to his account to The City Reporter, was a blank sheet of paper, his name penciled in only after he handed over his license.
Andrés had no criminal record, held a valid work permit, and had an immigration hearing already scheduled — none of which stopped what happened next. He also, it turns out, had just relocated to Queens from New Jersey, which is why his car still carried Jersey tags. He would spend three weeks inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park before fellow detainees urged him to pursue a habeas corpus petition for his release.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 10: Students, activists and area politicians gather in Corona, Queens, a neighborhood with a significant immigrant population, to denounce the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arresting people in the area on August 10, 2026, in New York City. ICE actions have increased throughout New York City in recent months as the Trump administration continues to press for a surge in arrests in neighborhoods throughout the country with high numbers of immigrants.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
What federal attorneys say triggered the stop
Sworn filings from Trump administration lawyers tell a version of events that starts before Andrés ever came into view. According to that account, the agents working College Point that evening were hunting an entirely different man, a Colombian national wanted on a separate warrant. It was only after Andrés’s New Jersey-plated car rolled past that agents ran it through federal systems, matched the registration to him personally, and pulled his immigration file — putting him in their sights over a target who was never him.
A pattern repeating along one commercial strip
College Point is home to roughly 30,000 people, close to four in ten of them Hispanic, with many families tracing roots to Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. The neighborhood has no subway stop, and most residents get around by car far more often than the rest of the city does. Along the avenue’s storefronts, upward of a dozen employees and neighbors said they had personally watched federal agents operating nearby in recent weeks. One employee at a smoke shop described a scene from July 31: roughly ten agents in tactical gear, tinted-window trucks double-parked down the block, cameras aimed at plates and paperwork. A nearby butcher, Andrés Piscel, said he had watched several people get pulled from cars outright, including two men taken from a vehicle registered in New Jersey. “People who have license plates from elsewhere, there they are,” he said in Spanish. City Council Member Vickie Paladino, a Queens Republican whose district covers the neighborhood, has voiced support for the stepped-up federal presence.
Attorneys say the plates keep showing up in their caseload
At Make the Road New York, attorney Paige Austin said her caseload increasingly includes people detained after being stopped in vehicles registered outside New York, among them a driver pulled over in Queens with Virginia plates. She’s careful about cause and effect — it isn’t always obvious, she said, whether a plate is what draws an agent’s eye first, or whether it simply turns up once someone’s information gets checked — but the pattern keeps recurring across her cases.
There’s also a data point behind the anecdotes. A months-long tally of documented street stops across the city found that, between October and April, cars accounted for only four out of 81 confirmed incidents — pedestrian stops made up the rest. That balance appears to be shifting: a separate review of habeas corpus filings turned up a run of newer cases built specifically around vehicle stops, cars with plates from New Jersey and elsewhere among them.
The Brooklyn case behind the Bushwick standoff
One of those habeas filings describes agents spotting a Brooklyn vehicle bearing New Jersey registration, running its plates, pulling the driver’s immigration history, and only then making an arrest — a sequence that matches, in both order and detail, the case of Chidozie Wilson Okeke. The Nigerian-born Bushwick resident’s arrest this past May triggered a standoff outside Wyckoff Heights Medical Center after reports that he’d been shocked with a stun device while agents forced him from his car.
ICE’s own account of that arrest, filed in federal court, says agents had staked out a Bushwick address holding an administrative warrant for a different individual, a Mauritanian man — and, spotting Okeke at the wheel of a similarly New Jersey-tagged Toyota, mistook him for that target based on a resemblance in build and appearance. Running the plates connected agents to a federal database that flagged Okeke as having overstayed a tourist visa, a finding that ultimately justified an arrest never meant for him in the first place.
A US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stands watch at a security checkpoint at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, on March 23, 2026.
Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images
Fitting into a wider Queens buildup
The College Point pattern sits inside a much larger enforcement wave across the borough. Volunteer trackers with Hands Off NYC have logged more than two dozen ICE arrests across Queens since late July, clustered in immigrant communities including Corona, East Elmhurst and College Point. The surge follows a June 8 Fox News appearance in which Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, promised “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen” in New York City, framing it as a response to the state’s newly toughened sanctuary protections signed by Governor Kathy Hochul — though the warning has since been folded by local officials and reporters into the broader story of the city’s sanctuary stance more generally.
A related lawsuit, and a flat denial
The plate pattern echoes claims at the center of a class-action lawsuit that the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union and Make the Road New York filed in Brooklyn’s federal court this past April, representing eight latino New Yorkers. That suit accuses agents of stopping and detaining people based on appearance alone while they went about ordinary tasks — driving children to school, filling up at a gas pump, cutting through a store parking lot. The Department of Homeland Security has flatly rejected the framing. “Any allegations ICE law enforcement engages in racial profiling are FALSE,” a spokesperson said in response to the suit, adding that the agency’s arrests are grounded in reasonable suspicion consistent with Fourth Amendment standards. Neither ICE nor DHS has issued a statement addressing whether out-of-state plates specifically factor into which drivers get pulled over.
Lawyers at Make the Road expect more habeas corpus filings in the weeks ahead, each one a potential new window into how agents choose which cars to stop. For now, organizers working the length of College Point Avenue are circulating a simpler message to drivers: know your rights before any encounter with federal agents, whatever state happens to be printed on your plate.
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