New York has argued with Washington over plenty of things, including the subway, the sanctuary laws and the tunnel under the Hudson. On Monday, Nov. 2, Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened a new front over something humbler: parking.
In a letter dated Nov. 2, the mayor told Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director David J. Venturella and Kenneth Genalo, the field office director of ICE’s New York Enforcement and Removal Operations, that agents had been using city-owned lots “to stage enforcement operations.” He wrote that “this use of City property in furtherance of federal immigration enforcement is unauthorized and is therefore illegal, endangers City residents, and sows fear among those who seek to access City property.”
Then came the threat. “If your agents continue any unauthorized use of these lots, New York City will take legal action to prevent this unlawful commandeering of City property,” the letter says. It demands that the department “immediately issue guidance to your agents prohibiting them from using any City lots to stage or conduct enforcement operations.”
Which lots
The letter names two places. One is a lot at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The others are lots along 111th Street on the west side of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, “right next door to a City-run preschool and several cultural institutions that children visit every day.” According to the mayor, ICE agents “reportedly parked their vehicles and conducted meetings” in these unstaffed lots. The New York Times reported that one of the institutions is the New York Hall of Science.
“Reportedly” matters here. City officials told the Times that they had relied on reports from elected officials and activists who have tracked federal officers in immigrant neighborhoods. One of those groups, Hands Off NYC, gave the paper a log of sightings. It said its members saw ICE officers at least five times in the past three months at the lot near Flushing Meadows, including photographs it dated Aug. 21 and Sept. 30, and once at Van Cortlandt Park on July 27. The coalition also shared five license plates that it linked to unmarked ICE vehicles. As of the letter, the city had not filed suit.
“ICE has no right to use our property as a base for tearing families apart. That goes for every park and every lot this City owns,” Mamdani said in a statement reported by amNewYork’s Adam Daly. “Today, I’m telling DHS to order its agents off our lots. If they keep coming back, we will see them in court.”
Corporation Counsel Steven Banks, head of the city Law Department, said the same thing in lawyer’s language: “Now that the Department of Homeland Security is clearly on notice regarding its unauthorized use of city lots, there is no excuse for continuing to commandeer city property, and we are prepared to go to court if it does not stop.”
The legal scaffolding
The letter rests on Executive Order 13, which Mamdani signed on Feb. 6. It bars non-city law enforcement, federal immigration authorities included, from using city lots and property as staging, processing or operations sites. The exceptions are a judicial warrant, city authorization or some other legal basis. In May, the administration released an audit under the order that described attempts by ICE to get into city shelters without authorization.
Monday’s letter also came with paperwork for the rank and file. A new four-page Parks Department policy, described by amNewYork and the Times, tells employees to ask federal officers who want to enter nonpublic areas for identification and to call the agency’s general counsel. Warrants go to agency lawyers, who decide whether they are valid. Without a valid judicial warrant or other authorization, agents are to be kept out of restricted areas. If officers go in anyway, workers are to call 911 and document what happened when it is safe to do so, but they must not “engage in physical or verbal altercations.” Any advance request by federal authorities to use a Parks lot for staging goes to the general counsel. Employees who ignore the policy could be suspended or fired.
Washington’s answer
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, did not concede the point. “ICE’s presence in public parking lots is fully authorized under federal law and is a standard practice for law enforcement agencies nationwide,” the department said in a statement to the Times, adding: “Mayor Mamdani should be grateful to our brave law enforcement officers for cleaning up the streets of NYC since he won’t.”
The federal argument deserves a fair statement. Federal officers enforce federal law everywhere in the country, including in New York’s five boroughs. A lot that is open to the public is, in the department’s view, as available to an ICE agent as to a Little League parent. The Trump administration has also argued for a long time that the city’s sanctuary policies shield people with criminal records and push enforcement out of jails and onto the street. Officials have cited those laws as a reason ICE needs to stage operations in public places at all. Whether a municipality can legally keep federal agents out of an unfenced, unstaffed lot is the question a lawsuit would have to answer. Constitutional lawyers will note that it has no simple answer.
The practical limits of City Hall’s position are just as real. As the Times observed, the city can restrict ICE at lots it controls, at parks, schools and public hospitals. But many of those lots are unstaffed, and the city has little say over the thousands of private garages and lots in New York. Activists have reported agents gathering at bank lots in Queens and at a Target in the Bronx.
How we got here
The letter is the latest escalation in a fight that sharpened after Oct. 8. That day a federal officer shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, a Dominican man, during an ICE operation in Marble Hill. Agents had reportedly staged from a private lot nearby. About a week later, the mayor and more than 100 elected officials urged private garage and lot owners “not to rent, lend or otherwise make their property available to ICE for their operations.”
Hae-Lin Choi, co-director of Hands Off NYC, told the Times that the city and New Yorkers “must continue pulling every lever to get ICE out of our city.”
What happens next depends on whether the SUVs come back. The mayor has written down his warning. The Corporation Counsel says he is ready. Parks workers now have a script. If the lots on 111th Street fill up again with unmarked vehicles before the preschool opens, the city will have to decide whether to file the lawsuit it has promised.
Featured image: Mayor Zohran Mamdani at his inauguration, January 2026. Photo by NYC Mayor's Office via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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