A federal judge has ordered New York City to turn over the names and birth dates of Bronx homeless shelter residents with certain serious criminal histories to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing a setback to Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration in a legal fight over the city's sanctuary protections. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that the subpoena concerns information material and relevant to enforcing federal immigration laws, and gave the city two weeks to devise a plan for handing over the names of qualifying residents.
Kaplan compelled Mamdani's administration to comply with the subpoena on Friday, according to Politico, which reported that the request includes the names and birth dates of homeless men living at the Bronx site. The outlet reported that the federal investigation centers on whether anyone living at the shelter is in the country illegally and subject to deportation. ICE has since narrowed its request to residents with certain serious criminal histories, the New York Daily News reported, and agreed to the appointment of a special master to gather and hand over only those names.
How the Subpoena Fight Began
The dispute traces back to August 2025, when ICE first served the city with a subpoena seeking full names and birth dates of residents at two city shelters, per the Daily News. New York City declined that initial request, calling it an improper fishing expedition that lacked a legitimate investigative purpose. The city also argued ICE was asking it to conduct a time-consuming and costly investigation, and that the request was more political than investigatory, aimed at undermining the city's sanctuary laws.
ICE revised its request repeatedly in the months that followed, the Daily News reported. In his ruling, Kaplan found the city had not shown that producing the list would be unduly burdensome, and said the city's speculation about ICE's motives was unsupported by the record. He added that the record did not sufficiently suggest ICE sought to identify migrants with serious criminal histories for reasons other than enforcing immigration laws.
Sanctuary Laws and a Parallel Legal Battle
New York City's sanctuary laws, passed in 2014 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, limit communications and cooperation between federal immigration enforcement agencies and local agencies, including police. The city also has local laws barring the Department of Correction and NYPD from honoring civil immigration detainers placed by ICE and other federal agencies. A relevant subsection of the city's administrative code states that it does not prohibit city officers from participating in cooperative arrangements with law-enforcement agencies that are not primarily intended to further immigration enforcement, according to New York City Administrative Code § 10-178.
Those sanctuary protections have faced a separate federal challenge. The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in July 2025 seeking a permanent injunction against the city's sanctuary protections, aiming to eliminate local laws restricting the use of city resources in immigration enforcement and barring agencies from honoring civil detainers. A Brooklyn federal judge dismissed that lawsuit in October 2026, the Daily News reported.
A Pattern of Federal Pressure on City Shelters
The Bronx subpoena is not the first time federal authorities have sought shelter residents' identities. Federal prosecutors previously issued a criminal subpoena to a Manhattan hotel used in the city's asylum-seeker shelter program, asking it to provide a list of full names of people residing at the site, according to The Guardian. New York City has contracted with numerous hotels to shelter asylum seekers since 2022, the paper noted, around the same period that U.S. immigration detention nationwide reached capacity, with 47,600 detainees as of February 2025.
Federal agents have also entered city shelters directly. A report summarizing incident reports obtained by Gothamist, published by the Brooklyn Defender Services, found at least five instances in which federal immigration officers entered private areas of New York City shelters or obtained resident information without judicial warrants. One of those incidents, detailed on bds.org, described seven federal agents entering a Brooklyn shelter in February and arresting a 30-year-old resident from Venezuela, according to an incident report and the resident's attorney.
Kaplan has also weighed in on federal immigration enforcement conditions elsewhere in the city this year. In September, he granted a permanent injunction and certified a class in a separate lawsuit challenging conditions inside ICE holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, court filings posted on Courthouse News show.
City Hall Stays Quiet
The city's Law Department deferred a request for comment to City Hall, and City Hall had not immediately responded to a request for comment, the Daily News reported. With the two-week window now running, it remains to be seen how Mamdani's administration will structure its plan for turning over the names of residents covered by ICE's narrowed request.
