A dozen federal agents in tactical gear arrested several people outside the Row Hotel, a shelter for migrant families, in Midtown Thursday afternoon, sending shockwaves among residents living above.
Immigration enforcement agents detained people near a Midtown migrant shelter, Oct. 16, 2025. Credit: Obtained by THE CITY
According to video footage and eyewitness accounts, federal agents from the FBI and other agencies, dressed in flak jackets, swarmed the sidewalk at W44th Street, around the corner from the Row’s main entrance, at around 4 p.m. Thursday – a busy time when many families are coming home for the day.
The videos showed three people being taken away by federal officers. A source familiar with the incident said that around 10 people were arrested overall. The incident is the first known case of a federal raid near a migrant shelter since Trump took office.
But in a bizarre twist, one person who was arrested said they and several others were briefly detained and questioned in a subterranean parking garage by federal agents who told them they were with ICE, asked for their names and countries of origin, before telling them they were looking for Venezuelans, and letting them go shortly after.
“It was like something out of a movie,” the Ecuadorian asylum seeker who’d lived in the Row Hotel for five months with their family told THE CITY in Spanish the day after their brief detainment. THE CITY is withholding their identity because they fear further retaliation. “‘We’re looking for Venezuelans’ They had a lot of pictures of a lot of men they were looking for.”
One Venezuelan woman returning home Friday said her husband had been detained in the raid and remained in custody, declining to say anything further right away.
Immigration enforcement agents detained people near a Midtown migrant shelter, Oct. 16, 2025. Credit: Obtained by THE CITY
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and for ICE, which oversees interagency teams making arrests across New York, hasn’t returned repeated requests for comment.
Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said they were reviewing the incident.
“As the mayor has consistently stated, New York City does not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” Garcia said, adding that the NYPD was not involved in any of the arrests.
The federal agents did not enter the hotel and would have had to show a judicial warrant in order to do so, Garcia said.
While New York City’s “sanctuary city” protections block coordination with federal authorities on civil immigration enforcement, Adams has called for rolling back some of those rules.
He’s also claimed that the corruption case brought against him by the Justice Department, and later dropped by the Trump Justice Department, had been a political punishment for saying President Biden’s immigration policies would “destroy the city.”
Row Hotel residents and eyewitnesses described a scene of chaos with people screaming and running outside the hotel Thursday afternoon as federal agents the sidewalk. Federal officers grabbed a 12-year-old boy who was on the sidewalk with a babysitter waiting for his mom to come home, and shoved him briefly into one of their cars.
“I got so scared. I didn’t want to talk,” a 12-year-old boy who lives at the Row told THE CITY with permission from his mother. He got up the courage to tell them he had a visa, he said. Agents let him leave the car moments later.
The Ecuadorean was among those taken away in handcuffs along with their partner who was just getting home from work at the time of the arrests.
“You, up against the wall, don’t move,’” the agents yelled at them, the Ecuadorean recalled. “What did we do? I’ll cooperate, I almost fainted,” they added.
From there agents loaded the Ecuadorean and another person into a car, driving the several blocks away where they entered a subterranean parking garage. The agents told them to get out of the car and sit on the ground, where the pair joined another two people already sitting, including their partner who was also detained but driven to the garage in a separate car.
NYPD outside the Row Hotel on 8th Avenue on Friday afternoon. Photo: Catie Savage
The agents took pictures of their faces with their phones and looked at print outs they had, the person said. The Ecuadorean shelter resident said agents asked for their names and countries of origin. The two Ecuadoreans were told they would be allowed to leave, loaded back into a car and driven several blocks away and let out, while the two Venezuelans stayed behind in the parking garage.
The couple returned to the hotel shortly after on foot, to find their children terrified in tears with their grandmother, having already seen videos of their parents’ arrest circling on WhatsApp.
“My children were crying when I got home. It’s so crazy,” the person said. “I have to get out of here, find a rental, a basement, an apartment, something, take where I can be better, where this doesn’t happen.”
“I couldn’t even go to work because my children were telling me I couldn’t leave because they were so afraid,” they said.
While the raid near a migrant shelter is apparently the first since Trump took office, advocates say federal agents have come looking for specific people at various shelters in the past.
As tens of thousands of people arrived from the southern border starting in spring of 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams stood up a rapidly expanding system of ad hoc emergency shelters for “new arrivals,” segregating people who had crossed the border after the spring of that year. The Row in Midtown was the first designated hotel to open up in the fall of 2022 as part of that separate system.
But as the system grew, and Trump won reelection, advocates feared that the widely-known migrant shelters like the Row and the Roosevelt, or any number of tent shelters that have since closed, would become easy targets for the new administration bent on mass deportation.
In June, the New York Times reported that NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry had been attempting to coordinate a large-scale raid with the Trump administration at the Randall’s Island migrant shelter which closed in February. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch learned of the scheme and quashed it.
NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry with Mayor Eric Adams at a Town Hall in Hell’s Kitchen. Photo: Phil O’Brien
But thus far, the remaining migrant shelters have evaded large scale immigration enforcement. All of the large-scale tent shelters have closed, leaving four remaining separate migrant shelters, plus another 155 run by the Department of Homeland Services, according to data through July, housing around 35,000 people, down from a peak of 68,000 people in December of 2023.
Widescale street raids by ICE have been more common in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, with ICE focusing enforcement in New York City thus far inside immigration courthouses and at ICE check-in locations.
The news of the arrests outside the Row rattled residents, as word quickly spread on Whatsapp groups of families living at the hotel.
Outside the hotel Thursday evening, Joan, who declined to give his last name, was waiting for his wife to come home from work. He wasn’t at the hotel at the time of the arrests, but was among those who learned from WhatsApp.
“Everyone is worried and anxious,” he said. “You have to shut yourself in and not be in the street.”
The Row Hotel on 8th Avenue has been used as a migrant shelter. Photo: Phil O’Brien
Father Fabián Arias, a pastor at Saint Peter’s Church who has been accompanying families to immigration court, was outside the Row Thursday evening distributing food and supplies as the dust settled.
“It’s terrible,” he said in Spanish. “It’s this state of terrorism that we’re living in the streets, in the courts. It’s getting worse and worse.”
The Row is expected to close by the spring.