{"id":8081,"date":"2025-10-19T01:43:31","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T01:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/8081\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T01:43:31","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T01:43:31","slug":"everyone-is-worried-federal-agents-arrest-multiple-people-outside-row-hotel-migrant-shelter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/8081\/","title":{"rendered":"“Everyone Is Worried” \u2014 Federal Agents Arrest Multiple People Outside Row Hotel Migrant Shelter"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ImmigrationImmigration enforcement agents detained people near a Midtown migrant shelter, Oct. 16, 2025.\u00a0Credit:\u00a0Obtained by THE CITY<\/p>\n

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\u2019s main entrance, at around 4 p.m. Thursday \u2013 a busy time when many families are coming home for the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like something out of a movie,\u201d the Ecuadorian asylum seeker who\u2019d 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. \u201c\u2018We\u2019re looking for Venezuelans\u2019 They had a lot of pictures of a lot of men they were looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"ImmigrationImmigration enforcement agents detained people near a Midtown migrant shelter, Oct. 16, 2025. Credit:\u00a0Obtained by THE CITY<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and for ICE, which oversees interagency teams making arrests across New York, hasn\u2019t returned repeated requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for the mayor\u2019s office, said they were reviewing the incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the mayor has consistently stated, New York City does not participate in civil immigration enforcement,\u201d Garcia said, adding that the NYPD was not involved in any of the arrests.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The federal agents did not enter the hotel and would have had to show a judicial warrant in order to do so, Garcia said.<\/p>\n

While New York City\u2019s \u201csanctuary city\u201d protections block coordination with federal authorities on civil immigration enforcement, Adams has called for rolling back some of those rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s 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\u2019s immigration policies would \u201cdestroy the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI got so scared. I didn\u2019t want to talk,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou, up against the wall, don\u2019t move,\u2019\u201d the agents yelled at them, the Ecuadorean recalled. \u201cWhat did we do? I\u2019ll cooperate, I almost fainted,\u201d they added.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"NYPDNYPD outside the Row Hotel on 8th Avenue on Friday afternoon. Photo: Catie Savage<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019 arrest circling on WhatsApp.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy children were crying when I got home. It\u2019s so crazy,\u201d the person said. \u201cI have to get out of here, find a rental, a basement, an apartment, something, take where I can be better, where this doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t even go to work because my children were telling me I couldn\u2019t leave because they were so afraid,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201cnew arrivals,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In June, the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0reported that NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry had been attempting to coordinate a large-scale raid with the Trump administration at the Randall\u2019s Island migrant shelter which closed in February. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch learned of the scheme and quashed it.<\/p>\n

\"KazNYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry with Mayor Eric Adams at a Town Hall in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. Photo: Phil O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

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\u00a0peak of 68,000 people in December of 2023.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a0inside immigration courthouses<\/a>\u00a0and at ICE check-in locations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The news of the arrests outside the Row rattled residents, as word quickly spread on Whatsapp groups of families living at the hotel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t at the hotel at the time of the arrests, but was among those who learned from WhatsApp.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is worried and anxious,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to shut yourself in and not be in the street.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Row Hotel on 8th Avenue has been used as a migrant shelter. Photo: Phil O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

Father Fabi\u00e1n Arias, a pastor at Saint Peter\u2019s Church who has been accompanying families to immigration court, was outside the Row Thursday evening distributing food and supplies as the dust settled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s terrible,\u201d he said in Spanish. \u201cIt\u2019s this state of terrorism that we\u2019re living in the streets, in the courts. It\u2019s getting worse and worse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Row is expected to close by the spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dozen federal agents in tactical gear arrested several people outside the Row Hotel, a shelter for migrant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[810,75,84,83,9,24,63,7123],"class_list":["post-8081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-hotels","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-rowhotel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8081","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=8081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}