Federal Judge Orders Mamdani Administration to Hand Over Bronx Shelter Resident Data to ICE
A federal judge ruled on Friday that New York City officials must hand over the names and birth dates of specific residents living in a Bronx homeless shelter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered the enforcement of an administrative subpoena in a 12-page decision, dismissing the city’s repeated attempts to block the demand and concluding that the municipality “has not shown that producing this list would be unduly burdensome.”
The legal clash centers on an emergency migrant housing facility operating inside a converted warehouse on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx, a site that sleeps more than 2,000 and is the city’s last emergency migrant housing facility. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in February he plans to phase out the shelter by the end of the year.
How the Subpoena Battle Unfolded Over Four Separate Requests
The confrontation did not materialize overnight. Beginning in August 2025, ICE submitted four separate subpoena requests seeking personal information about people residing in New York City shelters. City Hall fought the attempts, dismissing the initial demands as an improper fishing expedition lacking any legitimate investigative purpose. As the legal wrangling dragged on, city attorneys argued that the federal agency was improperly trying to force local workers to conduct a costly and time-consuming investigation on behalf of federal authorities.
The city contended that the information requests were more political than investigatory, specifically designed to circumvent and undermine local sanctuary protections enacted under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014. Those local laws strictly limit communications and cooperation between federal immigration agencies and local entities, including the New York City Police Department and the Department of Correction. Judge Kaplan, however, found no evidence to support that theory in the court record.
“Although the City and the federal government do not see eye to eye on immigration policy, nothing in the record sufficiently suggests that ICE is attempting to identify migrants with serious criminal histories for any reason other than to enforce the immigration laws against them,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote in his 12-page decision.
To overcome the city’s objections, the federal agency steadily narrowed the scope of its demands. While initial requests sought comprehensive lists of all residents across two shelters, the finalized order focuses strictly on a roster of certain male residents living at the Bruckner Boulevard location. To handle the sensitive data retrieval, the court agreed to appoint a special master tasked with gathering and supplying only the names of individuals flagged with certain serious criminal histories.
The Response from Immigrant Advocates and City Hall
Immigrant rights organizations immediately condemned the judicial ruling and urged city leaders to mount an aggressive legal challenge. Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition—which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups throughout New York—argued that compliance violates the spirit and letter of local sanctuary legislation.
Federal judge rules NYC must give ICE names of Bronx shelter residents https://t.co/2OjyITJ7ex
“What ICE has been trying to do for some time now is continuously launch these horrible campaigns of mass deportation against our community members,” Awawdeh said. “We believe that the city must appeal and that City Hall and Albany must act also on the simple principle of making sure they are also protecting everyone that’s in their care.”
Awawdeh maintained that providing personal data for civil immigration enforcement runs directly counter to municipal law. Just last month, a Brooklyn federal judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that had sought a permanent injunction to dismantle New York City’s sanctuary protections. That July 2025 federal lawsuit aimed to force city agencies to honor civil immigration detainers and stop shielding undocumented immigrants from federal custody.
Judge Kaplan gave the city two weeks to formulate a concrete plan for handing over the requested records in accordance with the court’s ruling. The City Law Department deferred a request for comment to City Hall, which did not immediately respond.
