Federal agents arrested two Venezuelan men on Thursday outside a Times Square hotel in New York City that is being used as a migrant shelter, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which accused the men of belonging to a Venezuelan gang.
Video shot by a witness and obtained by The New York Times shows about a dozen federal agents in plain clothes arresting several people on West 44th Street, around the corner from the entrance of the Row NYC, a hotel that is home to more than 800 migrant families.
The arrests, in broad daylight on the crowded sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan, rattled migrants residing at the Row and shook the theater district, which is heavily trafficked by tourists.
A spokeswoman for D.H.S., the parent agency of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said the two men arrested were in the country illegally and were part of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang that the Trump administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The partner of one of the men who was arrested denied that he had gang ties.
Video of the arrests shows agents — some wearing vests that said F.B.I., others that said Homeland Security Investigations — taking away several people in handcuffs and placing them in unmarked vehicles as passers-by hurled expletives at them in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district.
“They’re taking all of them!” a woman exclaims in Spanish in the video.
City officials said that the agents did not enter the shelter, which would have required them to present a judicial warrant.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams said that the Police Department was not involved in the arrests and that City Hall was “actively reviewing the incident.”
“As the mayor has consistently stated, New York City does not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” Liz Garcia, the spokeswoman, said in a statement. The arrests were first reported by The City, a digital news outlet.
The arrests took place as migrant parents were waiting for school buses to drop off their children near the Row, causing some to run at the sight of the agents.
Maria Diaz, 30, said her partner, Cristofer Hernandez, 25, was one of the Venezuelan men arrested. She said that the agents seized him while he was standing at West 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, waiting for Ms. Diaz’s daughter to return from school. She said that Mr. Hernandez, who had been staying at the Row, was speaking on the phone with Ms. Diaz’s daughter when the girl heard him tell agents: “I’m waiting for my daughter! I’m waiting for my daughter!”
Ms. Diaz said that she received a call from Mr. Hernandez shortly after he was arrested. He told her that the agents had taken him to 26 Federal Plaza, the ICE offices in Lower Manhattan, where he was being held.
“They told him to communicate with a lawyer and that he’ll be transferred or deported,” Ms. Dias said outside the Row on Friday.
The D.H.S. spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said that Mr. Hernandez was a Tren de Aragua gang member who had previously been arrested in New York for criminal possession of drugs and petit larceny.
Ms. Diaz vehemently denied that her partner, who she said arrived from Venezuela about two years ago, belonged to Tren de Aragua. She said that he had been arrested during the summer by the police — for public disorder, she believed — and released shortly after.
“What Tren de Aragua?” she said in Spanish. “He doesn’t belong to any Tren de Aragua. Is he a delinquent just for standing around near other people who are delinquents? It’s a lie.”
The agency identified the second man arrested as Ali Eloy Uribe-Gil.
City officials and immigration activists have long braced for the prospect that the Trump administration would target the emergency shelters that New York City opened for migrants in 2022. But ICE has largely steered clear of conducting raids inside or outside migrant shelters, even as Trump officials have targeted so-called sanctuary cities with large immigrant populations, including New York.
The city requires that federal law enforcement officers present a warrant signed by a judge to enter city-run locations, such as shelters and schools. Raids inside migrant shelters would present a significant logistical undertaking for ICE agents, an escalation that would probably require careful planning and the involvement of dozens if not hundreds of officers.
Trump officials have previously cast the city’s shelters as a hotbed of gang activity. Mr. Adams and the Police Department have expressed concerns about robberies and shootings attributed to migrants belonging to Tren de Aragua. But city officials have defended the overwhelming majority of shelter residents as peaceful asylum seekers.
For months, the Trump administration has zeroed in on Tren de Aragua in its escalating campaign to carry out mass deportations.
“Tren de Aragua has unleashed chaos and violence on the streets of New York City, emboldened by reckless sanctuary policies and feckless politicians who have allowed this gang to terrorize the streets of New York,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
The Adams administration has closed more than 60 migrant shelters in recent months, relocating migrants to the city’s homeless shelter system. Officials have attributed the closures to declines in border crossings and the number of migrants arriving in the city.
The Row, a four-star hotel, became the first and largest hotel converted into a shelter for the tens of thousands of migrants who started arriving in buses from the southern border three years ago, overwhelming city resources. In August, the city announced that the 1,300-room hotel on Eighth Avenue would stop operating as a shelter after its lease expires in April.
The Row, city officials said, is still housing about 2,900 migrants, many of whom have begun to receive notices requesting that they leave the shelter in the coming months. The city is still providing housing for more than 32,900 migrants, mostly families with children, down from a peak of 69,000 in early 2024. Most migrants have been moved to shelters run by the city’s Department of Homeless Services, leaving only four shelters that exclusively house migrants.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration in the New York region.
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