Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday threatened to take legal action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency after accusing federal agents of using parking lots owned by New York City to stage operations.
In a letter to the Trump administration, Mr. Mamdani said that since July, ICE agents had gathered at city-owned parking lots in Queens and the Bronx, including one next to a preschool, in violation of a mayoral order that prohibits ICE from doing so.
“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,” the two-page letter said.
“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 mayor’s letter said. It was addressed to Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, and top ICE officials in Washington and New York.
The letter signaled the latest escalation in Mr. Mamdani’s intensifying feud with the Trump administration over ICE activity in New York after a federal officer shot and injured a Dominican man during an ICE operation in October.
The mayor called for ICE to be abolished after the shooting, while Trump officials blamed New York’s so-called sanctuary laws for hindering immigration enforcement and shielding immigrants with criminal records from deportation.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, said that “ICE’s presence in public parking lots is fully authorized under federal law and is a standard practice for law enforcement agencies nationwide.”
“Mayor Mamdani should be grateful to our brave law enforcement officers for cleaning up the streets of NYC since he won’t,” the statement said.
ICE officers in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles commonly gather in the lots to prepare for early morning raids. The presence of agents in parking lots has become a flashpoint as arrests by ICE across the United States have reached record highs this year.
The debate over the parking lots has underscored the constraints that Democratic-led cities face in their efforts to deter ICE activity.
While City Hall has the authority to restrict ICE from using city-owned parking — at parks, schools and public hospitals — municipal lots are sometimes unstaffed, complicating the city’s ability to monitor ICE officers.
The city has little power to restrict how ICE might use the thousands of privately run parking lots in New York.
Activists have documented ICE officers using the parking lots of banks in immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and a Target store in the Bronx, not far from where the Dominican man, Oscar Belgal, was shot on Oct. 8.
A week later, the mayor and more than 100 elected officials urged the private owners of garages and lots “not to rent, lend or otherwise make their property available to ICE for their operations.”
Under an executive order Mr. Mamdani issued in February, federal officers are barred from using city-owned lots as operational bases or staging areas unless they have a judicial warrant or an agreement with the city.
In the letter sent Monday, Mr. Mamdani said that ICE agents had “reportedly parked their vehicles and conducted meetings” in a city-owned lot at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and in lots on 111th Street near Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, next to a city-run preschool and the New York Hall of Science, a museum.
City officials said that they relied on reports from elected officials and activists who have tracked the officers’ movements in immigrant neighborhoods since last year.
One coalition — Hands Off NYC — shared with The New York Times a list of ICE sightings that its members documented at the two city-owned parking lots. The coalition said that it spotted ICE officers on at least five occasions at the lot near Flushing Meadows during the past three months.
One photograph, which the coalition said was taken on Aug. 21, appears to show an officer in a vest standing by his S.U.V. Another, from Sept. 30, appears to show three officers in plain clothes talking by two S.U.V.s that the coalition said were unmarked ICE vehicles.
The coalition said that it saw ICE officers at Van Cortlandt Park on July 27. It shared a list of five license plates that activists said they had linked to unmarked ICE vehicles frequently seen during agency operations.
As a result, the city issued guidelines on Monday to employees from the Parks Department. The four-page memo tells employees to deny ICE officers entry into lots and areas that are not public unless the agents have a judicial warrant, while instructing them to notify city lawyers and not to “engage in physical or verbal altercations” with them.
Hae-Lin Choi, the co-director of Hands Off NYC, said that the city and New Yorkers “must continue pulling every lever to get ICE out of our city.”
“New Yorkers have made it clear that ICE is not welcome here and that we won’t be intimidated — we will stand together, be courageous and protect our neighbors,” she said.
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