Mayor Zohran Mamdani is leading a coalition of more than 100 elected officials in New York state in urging parking lot and garage owners across the five boroughs to block federal immigration agents from using their properties as staging areas.<\/p>\n
In a letter to private parking operators, Mamdani asked owners not to rent, lend or otherwise make their properties available to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to tell the agency directly that it is not permitted to use their facilities.<\/p>\n
The letter comes after an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck<\/a> in Marble Hill on Oct. 8 while his 5-year-old son was in the car. ICE agents had been using a privately owned parking lot<\/a> a few blocks away as a staging area, according to the mayor\u2019s office.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s letter also mentions reports of ICE using several other private lots across the city to conduct enforcement operations.<\/p>\n \u201cICE is using private parking facilities across the City as staging grounds for its operations: from two bank parking lots on Northern Boulevard in Queens, to a garage on Morton Street in Manhattan,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cEach such use, whether part of a formal or informal arrangement or no arrangement at all, gives ICE a launching point for operations that have terrified and terrorized local communities, and risks placing your property, your employees, and your customers at the center of that,\u201d Mamdani continued.<\/p>\n The mayor asked parking operators to stand with immigrant New Yorkers, noting immigrants make up more than one-third of New York City\u2019s population and 43% of its workforce.<\/p>\n \u201cImmigrant New Yorkers account for hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity every year. When immigrant New Yorkers are afraid to drive to work, run errands, or park their cars, every business in this city feels it,\u201d Mamdani wrote.<\/p>\n He said owners, like a garage operator on Morton Street that removed ICE vehicles after neighbors raised concerns, help to \u201cadvance public safety by protecting their own staff and customers, as well as fellow New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s office said city law already restricts the use of city-owned property for federal civil immigration enforcement. However, those restrictions do not apply to privately owned property in the same way.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s letter invites parking operators who want to discuss the request to contact city Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs Faiza Ali.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani is leading a coalition of more than 100 elected officials in New York state in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[109,387,25,98,100,99,576,2301,9,24,12,63,87,308,27],"class_list":["post-374689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-public-safety","tag-app-top-stories","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-erica-brosnan","tag-immigration","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nyc","tag-politics","tag-public-safety","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}