> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When ICE Comes to Town: The Role of Law, Local Police and Neighbors - URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/ice-enforcement-local-police-immigration/ - Published: 2026-10-27T19:57:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-27T20:03:01.000Z - Description: Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, immigration researcher Austin Kocher and Documented reporter Eileen Grench on what police should do when an immigration operation comes to a city. - Author: Vital City - Tags: Immigration *On Tuesday, Oct. 27, Vital City and* [*Documented*](https://documentedny.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *hosted a conversation about what happens when aggressive federal immigration enforcement descends upon a city: what its police department should do, where cooperation should end and how residents might respond. Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a columnist for Documented, moderated. Panelists were Jeh Johnson, secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama; Austin Kocher, a research fellow at American University’s Immigration Lab; and Eileen Grench, who covers immigration enforcement for Documented. Vital City founder Elizabeth Glazer opened the event.* *What follows is a complete transcript, edited only to remove filler words.* **Introductions** **Elizabeth Glazer:** So hello, everyone. And so glad you’re joining today’s panel to dive into what happens when ICE comes to town. And we’re particularly glad to be doing this jointly with Documented, which I think everyone knows is a fabulous and independent nonprofit newsroom that’s dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City, and obviously sign up for Documented if you’re not already. So this is an issue that isn’t going away, and it’s having an impact on everything from safety to democracy. And today, we’re so honored that Dara Lind, who is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, will moderate this discussion. Before joining the council, Dara was one of the most respected immigration reporters in the country, first at Vox, where she also co-hosted the podcast The Weeds, and then at ProPublica. And her work has also appeared in the New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. And she’s obviously moderating equally distinguished panels. So I think this will be terrific. And thank you so much, Dara, and over to you. **Dara Lind:** Thank you so much, Liz. And thanks to everyone for joining. Liz, you said equally distinguished panelists, and actually arguably more distinguished, but I was not planning on reading everybody’s full bios, because in my experience, that can really kind of sap the momentum out of what I’m hoping is going to be a really informative and kind of actionable discussion about the kind of ground-level effects of enforcement and the way that federal and local policies play into that. I’m joined by Jeh Johnson, who was the Homeland Security Secretary under President Obama, and before that as General Counsel of the Defense Department. Austin Kocher, who is a geographer who is currently a research fellow at American University’s Immigration Lab, used to be at TRAC under Syracuse University, which tracks federal enforcement data, and is my fellow columnist for Documented. He, as of a couple of weeks ago, writes a monthly column called The Baseline. And Eileen Grench, who is actually a full-time Documented reporter, where she covers immigration enforcement. She’s a Livingston Award finalist, which is super cool. Eileen, I actually want to start with you, because I really want to start us on the ground level and then dig from there into the laws that structure how that works. Can you talk us through a recent immigration enforcement action that you reported on? What did you see? What did the people you talked to have seen? How were they reacting? **A shooting in Marble Hill** **Eileen Grench:** Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me here and having Documented. Well, I guess this is also run by Documented, but it’s really great to be here. In my time as a reporter covering immigration enforcement and even policing before that — so this is an interesting intersection of my experience — I’ve covered multiple immigration raids, both in Texas, most notably in Colony Ridge, where 118 people were taken in a joint operation with police, to today, right, in New Jersey, where I covered an operation that arrested 75 people in Passaic. And then, of course, to most recently, what many people will know about, which is the detention of Oscar Belgal … *\[Technical difficulties\]* … that shooting itself, and they were actually the people who showed up and … *\[Technical difficulties\]* … basically into their car and took him to the hospital — what I understand is called a — I think it’s called a scoop and run, where police are just trying to get someone to the hospital as quickly as possible. But what happened after that is that there were a lot of questions that started swirling both in the community and within the broader New York City about what NYPD’s role was and should be kind of in a shooting like that. We don’t know what happened after police took him to the hospital, but police also played a role in crowd control outside the hospital in which Mr. Belgal was being treated for his gunshot wound. And that basically caused a lot of questions to be had in the public and even demands for the police chief to step down — kind of renewed demands that the mayor had to deal with that day. I also learned from people on the ground — Documented, one of the things that we do best is that we live or we work and listen and report for immigrant communities — people on the ground in Marble Hill, those neighbors who saw the thing and that were there on the scene in the many hours into the night in which both federal authorities and police authorities were at the scene, had really — they were the ones that I spoke to were very upset, and many asked, “Shouldn’t the NYPD be protecting us? What was their role?” And really kind of — which were questions that I’ve heard kind of repeated throughout the city and throughout different neighborhoods. So I’m really excited to be talking about and digging into that today. **What local police may do at an ICE scene** **Dara Lind:** Well, yes, thank you so much for — and well, also thanks to your sources and residents for really calling that question into being about what the obligation of local law enforcement agents is. Jeh, I’d actually like to toss it to you to talk about the ways that those actions are kind of structured by laws and policies. When local police arrive at a scene like that, especially one where there’s already tension between federal immigration agents and the local community, what are they legally allowed to do? And from a kind of tactical perspective, what should they be doing first? **Jeh Johnson:** First of all, thanks for inviting me to this discussion. A little background, big picture, before delving into your specific question. When I became Secretary of DHS December 2013, I didn’t have a whole lot of awareness and knowledge of immigration law and policy. I had to learn it. And one of the things I was confronted with almost immediately was the controversy surrounding the Secure Communities program, and how in many big cities, local law enforcement, mayors, city councils were reacting to ICE in their communities, and out of which the sanctuary city movement arose. And so for the sake of public safety and getting at the worst of the worst, our priorities, we reinvented the program. We called it the Priority Enforcement Program. And it ended up being sort of a city-by-city negotiation between me and mayors like Bill de Blasio or Michael Nutter in Philadelphia, where we’d reach an agreement where local authorities will cooperate with us if the individual who was undocumented was convicted of a particular kind of felony, as opposed to a lower-level misdemeanor. And in my experience and in my observation, this kind of arrangement is overall good for public safety, getting at the worst of the worst, which the current administration purports to want to do. If you talk to Tom Homan, he purports to want to do that. But they’ve set upon this arbitrary goal of rounding up as many people in the interior as they can, irrespective of whether they’ve committed a felony, a misdemeanor, or nothing at all. And we can talk more about the atmosphere in the country that has been created. But the specific answer to your question is that in situations, interactions, encounters where there is both federal law enforcement and local law enforcement, the Supremacy Clause somehow plays a role, such that if it’s a federal crime or federal investigation, the local authorities are supposed to sort of step aside or have a secondary role. But in my judgment — and this is more a policy statement — not to the exclusion of local law enforcement. That is counterproductive, in my view. And so if there is an encounter on the street — federal law enforcement, whether it’s ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF — local law enforcement should have a role, because local law enforcement most often is more aware of what goes on in Marble Hill, more aware of what goes on in NoMad, more aware of what goes on in Southeast Queens. And there should be, ideally, for the sake of public safety, a collaborative working relationship. The approach that we see now by my old department and ICE is one that is, frankly, turbocharging the sanctuary city movement, which in my judgment is to the detriment of public safety, where mayors, city councils, sheriffs, police departments refuse to work with ICE. And the worst of the worst, which the current administration purports to want to get at, happen to be in city jails. But if there’s a situation where local law enforcement refuses to work with ICE, in my judgment, that’s counterproductive. I used to say to ICE ERO when I was Secretary of DHS, “When you’re out on the streets, use your common sense.” One controversial incident can set back your entire mission in a community. *\[Technical difficulties\]* **Who ICE is arresting** **Dara Lind:** Jeh appears to be frozen. I apologize that our panelists are having independent connection issues today. I actually was going to have a follow-up question for him, but we will figure out how to unfreeze him. And in the meantime, Austin, I will turn to you to kind of give us some of the — Jeh was talking a little bit about kind of intentions and strategy about what this administration is doing. Talk to us about what the effects have been. What do we know about who is getting arrested and how they are getting arrested? **Jeh Johnson:** Sorry, I’m back. I don’t know how much of that you got, but I was just about at the end. **Dara Lind:** We probably missed a little bit of it, but I’m tossing to Austin, and then I’m going to come back to you, because I want to drill down on some of the concepts that you raised. **Jeh Johnson:** Okay. **Austin Kocher:** Sure. So immigration enforcement during this administration, I often say, has taken two sort of tactics. One is all of the normal mechanisms of immigration enforcement that those of us who study the system are aware of have been amplified many times over. However, there’s also a second track, where there’s all kinds of creative and — I would describe as — dangerous new tactics that aren’t just the normal operations of immigration enforcement, but go much beyond that, sometimes cross over questionably into areas that may not be entirely legal, whether that’s defying federal court judges’ orders or using tactics that fail to comply with local, state, federal laws. So I think there’s a lot of concern over simply understanding what immigration enforcement officers, ICE specifically, is even doing in the first place and how they’re doing it. I’m sure people who are here or listening later — five years ago, even though immigration has been a hot topic for a long time, I would talk to friends, and nobody knew somebody who had been deported or arrested or detained by immigration officers. Now, I can barely be in a room with five or six people and not have one or two of them know somebody or know somebody who has been impacted. So it’s been a dramatic expansion. And by and large, as former Secretary Johnson was saying, the focus, as we know it from ICE’s own data, is that they have not focused on the worst of the worst. All of the growth in immigrant detention and all of the growth in ICE arrests since basically the summer of last year has come entirely from people with no criminal charges or convictions on their record. So we’ve seen a growth in detention. We’ve seen growth in arrests over the summer of 2026, when we saw about 50,000 arrests just in the month of July alone, which is the largest number of arrests in U.S. history, as far as we can tell from the data. That entire spike was not driven by people with criminal convictions. It was driven by people with no criminal history on record. And even when we dig into the history of people who do have criminal convictions, the vast majority of those don’t really fit what most Americans would put into the bucket of a significant public safety threat or national security threat. Now, I will note, and just to remind folks, you don’t have to have a criminal conviction to face deportation from this country. America’s immigration system is largely civil, not entirely. And so civil violations can get a person deported. In the bucket of unusual, though — I think which complicates a lot of this, Dara — is that under this administration, we’ve seen people who have never even been accused of violating immigration laws be targeted and had their status revoked and then face deportation. So I think there’s just a really big question right now about whether this is really just about enforcing the law, or whether it’s about something broader that I think that makes people really concerned. And it sets the tone partly for fact-checking some of the misinformation out there. One of the things I’ll say — I’ll just sort of close with this observation. One of the things I’m always writing about — you know this, Dara and Eileen — is I’m always writing about the fact that the data does not match the rhetoric. And it’s more than just misinformation, though. I think this administration knows that if it was honest about who it was arresting and focusing on, that an even larger percentage of the American public would be against it. I think that if they actually showed that instead of claiming that they’re going after the worst of the worst — if they were honest, if they put up the pictures of the teenagers that they’ve arrested on the way home from high school, or the mom with the kids in the back seat, or the guy that cooks or does dishes at the restaurant down the street, if they put up those pictures and said, “Hey, here’s who we’re really arresting” — I think people would be much more outraged. So I think the administration also, unfortunately, is contributing to some of the misinformation. And of course, we can talk about how immigration enforcement should work on the federal-local collaboration, but that just sort of lays some of the groundwork for what we’re seeing in reality. **Mixed messages inside the administration** **Jeh Johnson:** If I could add to that, part of the explanation, I think, that you’re hearing this message at odds with reality is there are conflicting opinions within the Trump administration about how to deal with this issue. The Stephen Miller attitude is deport them all, and let’s create a quota — a daily or monthly or yearly quota for how many people ICE can find in the interior to deport from the country. But then you listen to Tom Homan and his public commentary. He says, “We’re focused on the worst of the worst.” And then there’s the political bumper sticker, mass deportation. And so if the rhetoric seems at odds with reality, it’s because there’s an internal difference of opinion within the administration. Everybody assumes that governments all function in unison. They’re all rowing the same direction. I know from personal experience that’s not always the case. But to emphasize something Austin said, you have to have priorities. You have to have enforcement priorities. Whether it’s prosecutorial discretion in the criminal context or immigration enforcement, you have to have priorities. And the thing that I believe garners the most public support is when we do focus on the worst of the worst and we prioritize national security threats, convicted felons who are undocumented, and people who are arrested at the border for the purpose of border security. And a mass approach to this, where there are no priorities at all, makes no sense. It taxes the resources of ICE. Tom Homan himself will say it takes two ICE ERO to take somebody out of a jail who’s already detained, but to arrest that very same person on the streets takes five or six. **Shock in the community** **Dara Lind:** I definitely do want to get into the jail enforcement versus street enforcement thing, but I do also kind of want to just note that at this point I suspect that certainly anybody who is watching this webinar, and I think a lot of people who have been following the administration’s policy over the last couple of years, kind of know that the worst of the worst rhetoric doesn’t necessarily reflect who’s being arrested, even if they don’t necessarily have the numbers to demonstrate it. And, Austin, I think that that’s where your interventions are really useful. But I would love to kind of ask Eileen, when you’re reporting out in the field, how are people reacting to enforcement actions in their communities? Are they still surprised that there’s any action towards somebody who is just a community member who’s been complying with the government or has been following the law? Or is there in the community an assumption at this point that ICE is just going to go after everybody? And how is ICE’s stance — whether they’re being, how confrontational or cooperative they’re being with residents — how is that playing into things? **Eileen Grench:** Yeah, well, I think that’s a really good question. I think that’s been evolving, right, in my conversations with community members. I think there are some community members who know that no matter — if a person has any kind of immigration status that’s not citizenship or maybe even a green card, but they might be targeted. There’s the extreme of, “Any of us can be targeted.” But then there’s still a lot of community members, and I hear over and over, that think that ICE is just still targeting people with criminal records. I can even give you a story that just happened recently in the Bronx. There was a man who led a soup kitchen, a food pantry that served thousands of people a week or a month, who was detained the other day. And in the conversations that I was present for amongst community members, there was an extreme level of shock — and not just about the fact that they didn’t know his immigration status, but about the fact that multiple people told me in one night, “I didn’t think they were going to be going after people like Aleksander Nilaj,” and people who even kind of — there was a pastor that was leading a prayer session that said, “I want to confess, essentially, that I voted for Trump, and I regret it. I didn’t think he would be doing this to people like my friend.” So there still is very much a rhetoric or just a sense among some communities, some immigrant communities, that they are going after the worst of the worst still. But when that just is patently not true, as Austin and Mr. Johnson have explained. But yeah, no, it’s definitely still a pervasive idea in the community. **Jail pickups versus street arrests** **Dara Lind:** So, Jeh, I do want to go back to what you had kind of just talked about, about the difference between arresting somebody in a jail and arresting somebody in the street. Because when we talk about 287(g) agreements, or when we talk even more broadly about federal and local cooperation on enforcement, it happens along both of those axes, whether in terms of cooperation among people who have already been brought into local jails, or what the role is of local enforcement in terms of getting people on the streets. And so I’d like you to kind of dig into the distinction between the two of those, both in what law and policy set up and what effects the two of them have on public safety, and why, for example, it takes five people to arrest the same person on the street that it takes two of them to arrest in jail. **Jeh Johnson:** Going back to when I was an assistant U.S. attorney with Liz Glazer 35, 36 years ago, I can still recall going to a bail hearing or a sentencing where there’s a detainer — an ICE detainer — it wasn’t ICE then, an INS detainer — on an individual who we were prosecuting. And the second he was released from federal custody, ICE was right there and would take him, because there’s a detainer. If the system is working, ICE puts a detainer on the individual once they’re detained, and he never is released. He goes straight into INS, ICE custody, and eventually deported, going after prioritizing public safety threats. And when you have a situation where local law enforcement refuses to work with the federal government because the local officials perceive ICE to be out of control, causing upheaval in communities — and we’re seeing this real time, whether it’s New York, whether it’s Minneapolis, whether it’s Houston and other cities — if an individual is then released onto the streets who’s undocumented, who has been accused of a serious violent crime, if ICE ERO has to go into a particular neighborhood to look for this individual, as a matter of their own security, it requires five, six, because you’re going to encounter a whole lot of other people looking for this one individual in particular, and the others around him may represent public safety threats as well. And so it’s an inefficient way of looking for the worst of the worst. And they engage in a practice now of these collateral arrests of others who can’t demonstrate that they’re documented, that they come upon when they’re looking for the individual they’re really looking for. And so it’s a very inefficient way to conduct any type of law enforcement. **Dara Lind:** Can I actually clarify a little bit? Because I think that you raised the prospect of somebody being arrested in their community instead of in jail as a result of local policies. But it’s also the case that, especially with the passage of the Laken Riley Act last year, that there are so many cases in which there is theoretically a mandate for ICE to take people into custody, that there are cases in which people will be held and still not get picked up. To what extent are you seeing this administration kind of taking the hard way, where the easy way might be possible? **Jeh Johnson:** Well, yeah, you’ve just put your finger on it. They’re taking the most controversial, most volatile approach to interior enforcement, such that they’re losing political support for the overall Trump policy toward immigration enforcement. And you have to have priorities. I’d much rather see ICE ERO focused on working with the local sheriff, the local city council to get at the criminals, as opposed to scooping up somebody who’s been in this country 20, 30 years, who has U.S. citizen children, never committed a crime while they’re here, and have become de facto Americans. That’s heartbreaking. Technically, they’re subject to immigration enforcement, but you have to have priorities. And if somebody is detained, let’s say, who’s been picked up off the streets, they have to go through a process before they can be deported. But the process can only handle so many people, especially if you’re firing immigration judges. There are only so many people that can be siphoned through the process. And so you can have mass deportation, but ultimately they have to go through a process, or entitled to go through the process. And part of what’s going on here is a Stephen Miller approach to deterrence: Let’s make this sound so horrible that no one will ever want to come here, without regard to the real-life consequences on the streets of trying to adopt this approach. **How much 287(g) matters** **Dara Lind:** So, Austin, I want to kind of kick this to you so that we have a little bit more of the picture nationally about the role that local cooperation is playing. What can we say about how much the rise in arrests is being driven by cases in which local departments have 287(g) agreements, or other cases in which there is cooperation? I know that there are some kind of tactical operations in which, in Tennessee, for example, ICE was working very closely. How much can we say that that’s a driver of what we’re seeing right now? **Austin Kocher:** Sure. So nationally, 287(g) — actually, let me just emphasize something Mr. Johnson said, which is I do think that there’s an aspect of all of this which is what we would call politically performative in a social science sense, which is part of it is about internalizing a kind of prevention through deterrence strategy so that people will be inclined to leave on their own. And it’s not entirely ineffective either. So there’s all kinds of ways that ICE and immigration enforcement agents can work with local law enforcement. 287(g) is sort of the most lightning rod program, just because for the life of the program — since it started with any sort of vigor around 2007, 2008, but really started in 2002 at the earliest — it has symbolized sort of the most explicit — Let’s just remind ourselves that the reason that Congress had to include Section 287(g) in the 1996 laws is because the Supreme Court has said again and again, “We can’t have 50 different immigration systems. We can’t have local agencies enforcing federal immigration law on their own.” And so Congress in 1996 said, “OK, we’re going to carve something out for that. You have to sign a piece of paper, but this is the way that you’re going to do it.” And so this exception to that sort of judicial history has been significant. And certainly for communities who are now afraid that, “If I’m driving down the street, someone’s going to pull me over. Am I going to — all of a sudden, I’m facing deportation?” 287(g), despite this, has never really been the norm in the country. In those jurisdictions where 287(g) has been adopted, which is primarily in the U.S. South — that’s why I spent so many years doing research in the U.S. South on this — it was very significant for those communities. But even now, it’s just only recently crossed around 10% of all ICE arrests come through 287(g) in some way. In fact, even when it comes to custodial arrests — so arrests where ICE is getting someone from a jail — the vast majority of those don’t go through 287(g). They go through all kinds of other mechanisms. So you don’t have to have a 287(g), of course, to work with the federal government, which is not to say that the program isn’t significant. It is, especially in places like Florida, where the state legislature’s mandated for every single office, from a local county sheriff’s office all the way to the board of regents for many of the universities, are now signatories and have agreed to cooperate with ICE for immigration enforcement, which is a little absurd to imagine a university campus behaving that way. At least it’s a concern for many people. I think that Mr. Johnson’s right. I think there are important lines of communication and cooperation that do need to be baked in to how our agencies work together. And it’s one of the things that we learned after 9/11, was that we had a very fragmented, very stovepipe — a patchwork of law enforcement agencies. And so I do think communication is important, but it doesn’t solve the more fundamental question when residents are concerned about, “Is this doing something to make our community safer? Is this really about getting people off the streets who represent a real and immediate threat? Or is this more of a consequence of Congress’s inability to fix our — key parts of our immigration system, that people are caught up and are being deported in ways that don’t really reflect that?” 287(g), just for folks in the room — 287(g) is a program that comes from a specific section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 287(g). And what it means is, if you’re a local sheriff or your local police department, and you are either approached by ICE or you seek out ICE to participate with them in doing immigration enforcement — I’ve interviewed lots of law enforcement, and there’s reasons why some law enforcement agencies want these powers. Some of them have told me, “We’re really trying to address gang issues. And it would really help if we had the ability to work more closely with federal officers.” Now, there’s other sheriffs and police who say, “We want no part of this. This does not help us in any way. Please keep this out of our community.” But that’s sort of what 287(g) is. And it remains a really important program to understand. **Two elephants in the room** **Jeh Johnson:** So, Dara, can I add a point? There are two elephants in the room here that we haven’t touched yet. Austin cited that 287(g) was enacted by Congress in 1996, back when there was some sanity to legislating in the immigration space. Immigration has become so politically volatile that the political incentives are to not reach an agreement, not reach any sort of bipartisan agreement on immigration policy and enforcement, and to simply go to your polar extreme, call the other side weak or evil, and nothing ever gets done by way of comprehensive immigration reform. The proof of that was two years ago, when Jim Lankford and Chris Murphy reached a bipartisan agreement on border security and other related issues, and the political will in Washington was just not there. They’d rather have this to fight over and disagree about. The other big issue, which we haven’t touched on yet, and I hope we will, is the current climate and culture within ICE ERO and within immigration enforcement. To the average American who sees these things in images and videos, it looks like shoot first, ask questions later. Inadequate training. I’m certain there has been a climate created where they’re not careful. Inadequate training, I suspect, as well. That is a big, big issue, and it’s playing itself out and it’s become lethal and deadly, directed at American citizens. **Police and community trust** **Eileen Grench:** Oh, go ahead, Dara. **Dara Lind:** No, I was going to kick it to you anyway, because obviously when we’re talking about the attitudes that — how this shapes how local police themselves can respond to their communities — you have experience not only in New York, but also as a criminal justice reporter out of Houston. Can you talk about how police responded to the kind of situation that was being set up for them with ICE and how they negotiated ICE in their communities? **Eileen Grench:** Yeah, absolutely. I think it has a lot of pertinence to what we’re experiencing here in New York today. I think — obviously there are members of the police departments that I’ve spoken to who are very kind of pro what Stephen Miller is proposing — this kind of mass deportation push — but there’s also a lot of folks who feel that the policies that Jeh was describing, of just very chaotic, kind of violent, massive street arrests — how many of them felt that it really impacted their ability to do policing and their trust within the community. In 2024, there was a Police Executive Research Forum report that really kind of listed out the ways in which this organization felt that such policies undermine policing. And I can even quote from that report, but essentially they said, “If police are perceived as immigration agents, some crime victims and witnesses will become reluctant to talk to police,” is one of the biggest concerns that I heard speaking with members of the police department. And when ICE is so present and kind of enacting this mass deportation push no matter what, it further kind of drives that wedge, right, between police and their communities, especially if they’re perceived to be helping them. When I talked to line — just regular — police officers in Houston, that’s exactly what I heard too. I did a story that was about efforts by the sheriff’s department to create a — there’s a team of sheriffs who were specifically created to make connections within the Latino community. And they were constantly kind of confronted by this idea of, “How do I build trust when there are situations in which someone might be turned over to ICE? Or how do I build trust when I can’t promise someone safety? That’s my job.” And many of them, even as children of immigrants, really grappled with these questions. And this is kind of what I see — to your point, Jeh, about what’s playing out in New York right now, right? These actions that are being taken, police arrive on the scene, it’s kind of further driving this question of should there be even stronger sanctuary policies that very much separate what police do and what ICE does, so that the public can have more trust in law enforcement. I’ve heard that question from a lot of folks. And it seems like even the Mamdani administration has really been prying into this recently in his own executive order that he did at the beginning of his administration, which we can talk about later. But there’s been a lot of questions about both just generally what’s happening between communications between ICE and NYPD, but also on top of that, what’s happening in the legal interactions between ICE and NYPD. And Austin was mentioning these task forces that are oftentimes doing gang policing. There was an audit that was supposed to have been completed in September on those communications, whether or not they ever crossed the line of a sanctuary policy. We still haven’t heard, right, what came of that. We still haven’t heard whether there’s been any updated policies that NYPD is taking to kind of draw that line. And that’s a question not only that, I think, the mayoral administration is asking, but also what people on the street have been asking me. Not to just go off on this, but this is something I hear a lot, which is basically, when ICE has an operation on the streets of New York, and then the police show up — 911 is called — what’s their role? And, yeah, that’s something that has been kind of an ongoing conversation here, but very interesting kind of to be able to peek into that world of just officers who have to deal with these in their everyday interactions as well. **What residents can do** **Dara Lind:** So I want to flag for — some people have already taken advantage of the Q&A function on Zoom to submit questions. Thank you very much. We’ll be pivoting to those in a few minutes. But in the meantime, those who have questions and have not submitted them should absolutely take advantage of that. I want to, as we kind of orient ourselves toward the audience, talk a little bit about kind of what engaged residents who might be bystanders to a specific ICE operation, or who might just be trying to keep an eye on what’s going on in their communities and hold their leaders accountable — what they can do. And I actually want to go to you first, Austin, because I feel like you share my interest in thinking about your audience as responsible consumers of information. So what kinds of information should people be looking at and looking for? And what do you wish the government were willing to provide that would help better inform the public? **Austin Kocher:** Yes. So let’s just start at the top of that question. ICE has a culture of refusal to be transparent with the public, proactively or even in court. And if the agency or whatever agent — there’s all this conversation about replacing ICE, and I don’t really have much of commentary on that. As long as we have immigration enforcement laws on the books, someone’s going to be doing it. And whoever that is, whether it’s ICE or whatever other agency, needs to be transparent. There has to be a culture of transparency and accountability — not abolishing, defunding and firing offices in the department, in the agency that provides oversight, independent investigations and so forth. So first of all, that’s just crucial. And we can’t expect local communities, local leaders to trust an agency that can’t be transparent in that way. That’s just bad democracy. It’s not democracy. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I’ll say for local and city residents is, I would actually encourage everyone to not overreact when you hear things like 287(g) and Secure Communities. It’s really on all of us to understand how our local government and how our local law enforcement agencies work. Not everybody even knows the distinction between what a police department does and what a sheriff’s office does, or the fact that sheriffs are elected and police chiefs are not always — that police chiefs are typically more accountable to city government and city council. Sheriffs tend to have a tremendous amount of more independence, but they are elected. And so, first of all, I would just say, get to know these local leaders. And we’re in election season. Sheriffs are elected, too. So don’t ignore your local sheriff’s election and think that doesn’t matter. There is a range of perspectives within the law enforcement community on this. And the other thing I would say is, when we talk about sanctuary city and 287(g) — I’ve spent a lot of time looking at communities on this, and I will say, if you know one 287(g) agreement, you know one 287(g) agreement. 287(g) is put into practice in very different ways with very different consequences. So be sure that you really understand, if you are in or near one of these communities, that you really have a sense of what’s going on. And the same with sanctuary city policies. There are cities that have sanctuary city policies that still participate in lots and lots of immigration enforcement. So try not to let the labels dissuade you from really learning more and using that information to get involved and make sure change can happen at a local level much quicker and much more effectively sometimes even than the federal level. **Dara Lind:** Thanks so much. Eileen, I want to — and unfortunately I’m going to try to cram two separate subquestions in here for you and make you answer both of them quickly. What can local community residents do? First of all, if they happen to be in the vicinity of an enforcement action, what can they do legally? And what should they be doing, specifically in New York City, to make sure that the office — the people who they have elected are being accountable to the promises that they’ve made? **Eileen Grench:** Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Dara. And I also think — first of all, it’s really important, again, just as someone who works for Documented, to kind of ground this in the impact also it’s having on our communities and the stakes, right, of what’s going on right now. One of the things I want to kind of stress is also that now we know thousands and thousands of our community members have been detained, and that there’s been a huge impact not only on their own lives financially, psychologically — there’s also been impacts on our own economies, right, in our neighborhoods, and as well as just communities. When people disappear from a community, that really has an impact on kind of our many societies that exist in New York City. So just wanted to put that out, and I encourage folks to read Documented reporting kind of on what that impact really looks like. I think also, when you think about, “What can I do?” — we actually have some guides that I’d encourage you guys to read. But one of the things that I’ve heard, for those who are interested in making sure that ICE is held accountable within the city and that community members feel supportive when they’re detained, one of the first things you can do, and I’ve heard often, is to start to get to know your neighbors. I know it sounds very basic, but once you start kind of creating those — start understanding — and kind of to Austin’s point earlier, right, a lot of people didn’t, quote unquote, know people who are being detained by ICE. Now, it’s kind of hard not to be at least — have a couple points of separation from someone. And so get to know your neighbors, get to know your building, get to know your community members, so that when something does happen, you can act to support them. Secondly, when it comes to policy, I think one of the things that the mayor — if you’re here in New York City, if we’re granting it here in the city — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, one of the first acts that he made when he became mayor was called Executive Order 13, in which he — well, his 13th executive order, so maybe not first — but where he requested an audit of multiple city agencies, including the NYPD, and their practices when it comes to data and data sharing and communication with federal immigration enforcement. The last update we got on what came of those audits and policy was in, I think, last month, when the director of MOIA announced that the NYPD had finally finished an audit of their practices amongst police when it came to those task forces, which were a cause for a lot of concern and just the advocacy community, et cetera. And they were due both to react to that and to post publicly their new ICE policy based on the audits. So far, I don’t think that that has happened, at least to my knowledge. Someone can write me an angry email afterwards if that’s not true. But I would suggest that if people wanted to follow up on policy — sanctuary policy, that is — people should be holding the mayor to account for, and the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs to account, to tell us what happened, what came of that audit, and what actions are being specifically based on the findings of that audit, and then asking NYPD to publish their new policies, so we better understand them and, again, create clarity, right, for the community. **What good cooperation looks like** **Dara Lind:** Thank you guys so much. I want to pivot to some of the questions that we’ve gotten from the audience so that we have time to address those in a meaningful way. First of all, Jeh, we have a question from Victoria Levino asking for an example of what a good collaboration looks like between local police and ICE, even in a context where there isn’t anything structuring it, such as a 287(g) agreement or a sanctuary city policy. And Victoria writes that in their community, the police chief still says that there’s no communication with ICE. So when there isn’t anything kind of structuring or impeding cooperation, what does good collaboration between feds and locals look like? **Jeh Johnson:** I think a starting point for that is the feds — ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations — are people who are of the community, or at least mindful of the community in which they are operating, where they develop collaborative relationships with local law enforcement, even with community leaders, perhaps. It’s when ICE is viewed as this alien force that pops up on the streets out of nowhere, hooded in masks, unidentified, that creates so much controversy, sometimes deadly controversy. And so the way I answered that question is — and I think I would answer this question while I was still in office this way — be mindful of the communities in which you operate. Be aware of how you’re perceived in the communities in which you operate, for your sake, for the public’s sake, and for the most efficient way pursuing our objectives in these particular communities. And if ICE and local law enforcement is working in the same direction, a 287(g) arrangement is not even necessary, as you point out. **Rebuilding trust, and the risk of a standoff** **Dara Lind:** I actually want to push you to extend this a little bit, because a lot of other actors are acting in a space ICE created. And so what can a local police department that is dealing with the effects of the current ICE’s stance — is there anything that they can do? What can they do to kind of reestablish, rebuild community trust in the absence of getting ICE to change its entire approach? **Jeh Johnson:** Well, unfortunately, I think what will be necessary is political change in Washington before anything like that can happen, especially when you’re dealing with blue communities, blue cities like New York, like Chicago or Philadelphia. There needs to be political change at the top. Austin said earlier that it shouldn’t be about abolish ICE. It’s a worthwhile, important mission if done in the correct way with the right set of priorities. This is not a direct answer to your question, but the thing I worry about now, when we’re talking about local law enforcement versus federal law enforcement, is some sort of — I fear — deadly standoff between the two forces, when one is not properly identified to the other, when there’s no collaboration, where there’s no cooperation, where there’s no communication. We could end up in a really bad situation where local law enforcement doesn’t recognize ICE, or ICE objects to local law enforcement being on the scene. It could be a real car crash. And so it requires sustained engagement and cooperation, which probably requires more time and investment than just simply administration to administration. **Policy first, legality later** **Dara Lind:** So I want to next ask a question from Andrew Solis, who’s seen how, on the kind of attorney benefits-based side, the administration has kind of made policy first and asked questions later with regard to legality, and wants to know: Are we seeing similar in regards to enforcement actions, like immediate policy or rules being implemented without concern about whether they’re lawful? I’m asking this largely because I can actually answer it, and you guys actually know this too, right? Earlier this year — I think January, could have actually been fall of last year — it came out that ICE had secretly circulated a policy that allowed officers to enter homes without any form of warrant if the residents were unauthorized immigrants, or they had reason to believe they were unauthorized immigrants, on the logic that without legal status, they had no benefits, no claim to the protections of the Fourth Amendment. And that, furthermore, the written memo in which this policy was put forward was not circulated to all staff, but was only kept in closed-room meetings, where certain numbers of trusted agents would be brought in, allowed to read the memo and then told to leave, such that even people who were working in the field didn’t necessarily know that this was the policy. And I think that’s a really good — ultimately, after this was reported, a DHS official wrote an op-ed for, I think, the Wall Street Journal actually, defending the policy, but it took the reporting that it had actually been in the field for several months for anyone to know that this was the way the administration was interpreting the Constitution. And I think that that’s a very good example of the way that — and it kind of ties into what Austin’s been saying about the unreliability of not just the rhetoric, but the information and numbers that the administration purports to put out there — that there’s just such a complete effort at all levels of the federal enforcement infrastructure to reduce transparency, to reduce the extent to which the public can understand what’s going on, which just makes it awfully hard for, frankly, Austin and me as well as Eileen to do our job and keep informing the public about what’s responsible. **Trump-proofing New York City** **Dara Lind:** I want to ask Eileen: One of Mayor Mamdani’s core campaign promises was to Trump-proof New York City. How would you assess the administration’s progress on that so far? And the other two of y’all can jump in if you want. **Eileen Grench:** Oh, big question. I think, based on my reporting, I can say that in EO 13, there were a lot of questions asked that would kind of start to be kind of the first steps of his pledge to Trump-proof the city. And the results of those audits have been released, if not in full, in part. And there’s been movement towards a changing of policy across multiple agencies that have been known to have closer relationships or interactions with federal immigration authorities, including the NYPD. One thing, however, that I hear from my sources is an ongoing concern about — my sources have an ongoing concern in particular about collaboration, kind of to what Mr. Johnson was talking about, collaboration at jails, where folks are concerned about essentially handoffs from jail authorities to — sorry, it was \[inaudible\] — handoffs to authorities. And also just kind of the — again, kind of those close relationships that are created when legal collaboration exists. I think we’re still waiting for those answers. And until we know kind of what has happened within our city and within kind of those spaces, that lack of transparency is going to continue to drive distrust amongst the people that I spoke to, amongst community members, and continue to make me ask questions about where we stand now. So yeah, I think that there have been steps taken, but there are still some kind of open questions on what ultimately is going to be done about both the data that the city holds, closing loopholes, closing — figuring out if there are any additional places in which non-legal communication is happening, and continuing to kind of, let’s say, plug the leaks on the ship, as they’ve said to me. **Statewide mandates** **Dara Lind:** Thanks. So I want to ask a question that’s a little bit afield geographically of where we’ve been talking about, which is about states that are under statewide 287(g) agreements. The questioner mentions Florida and Texas. What situation does — Austin, what can we kind of say about the role that those play in the interaction between that and local law enforcement? And how does state government end up also as a player, Eileen, in kind of the New York context as well? Because I know the answer is not nothing. **Austin Kocher:** Yes. As Mr. Johnson said, this has become only more and more politicized as a topic. And so around certain campaigns and certain — the incentive structure that we have around elections — some folks have seen this as a winner for them. And so advocating for immigration-related policies, blanket policies — just so folks get a context of this, Florida has statewide legislation, as do a couple other states to a lesser degree, that mandate participation in immigration enforcement. And what it means is that basically just about any state agency you ever come in contact with, from a state park to a college campus, somebody could stop you and ask you about your immigration status. Obviously, this has a tremendous chilling effect. It doesn’t always correspond automatically to more deportations and more arrests, actually. In many cases, this is as much a kind of culture war issue as it is actually facilitating more enforcement. There’s been so many studies — there’s no correlation between this and all of a sudden communities are safer. In fact, there’s some correlation in the opposite direction. I guess I just want to just mention just one final thing, which is one of the things that we haven’t really just touched on, just to name it, is part of the danger here is that immigration law is really complicated. And it has been for a long time. And so, in fact, as far back as 1937, the director, Edward Shaughnessy of the INS — I have this great speech that he gave to social workers in Indianapolis, where he’s talking to social workers. It’s 1937\. He says, “Look, there’s a kid who overstayed unlawfully. His whole family is citizens, but we got to deport him, because there’s nothing for him. And then they say there’s these other guys who’ve actually committed crimes in the country. We’d like to deport them, but we can’t.” And so we’re a century in, at least, to having an immigration system that makes no sense to anybody. You can’t tell someone’s immigration status by looking at them or even holding them in jail. And what it means is that getting a bunch of people who do not have expertise in this wrapped up in the system just represents a huge, huge risk, because it’s not as straightforward as you think. **Jeh Johnson:** I can’t tell you the number of times at DHS when I’d be sitting with my lawyers, and I’d look at the language of an immigration section of law, and they’d say to me, “Well, I know that’s what it says, but that’s not what it means.” It’s very complicated. **Colony Ridge, Texas** **Eileen Grench:** Yeah, one thing I can speak to, too, is what it looks like when a 287(g) agreement is with state police, and what that can look like when it’s politicized — kind of what happens when all of these forces kind of come together into this package, and its impact on people. When I was reporting on police in Texas and Houston, Texas, over the course of a whole year, Republican politicians had been really kind of demonizing a specific town called Colony Ridge, Texas, saying a lot of just falsehoods about the people that lived there. But what’s probably most important to know is that it was a largely immigrant community. And when Trump was elected in 2025, one of the things that happened is that DHS — whoops, I just did something here — but DHS started working directly with the Texas State Police to do an operation in Colony Ridge that happened in the course of a day or two. And what it looked like was this, because I was on the ground when that happened. What happened was that police were quite literally just patrolling the streets, looking for anyone that, to be frank, just looked Latino or looked like they could be non-citizens, pulling them over, asking for their papers. And then nearby, ICE was in a big group, waiting to get a call from that officer to call them over to the car, after which they’d race off. So I began following with my colleagues at my outlet and the Houston Landing. We began following ICE vehicles to these sites of these arrests. And what happened was that basically a bunch of people were \[inaudible\] in the midst of claims that these were all criminals that they were arresting. We found out that many of them weren’t. I followed a family through their entire kind of process afterwards, requesting bond, trying to get him back home, a father back home to his kids. It was really — I have to say, as someone on the ground, it was quite a sight to see basically police and ICE descend upon a city and just start pulling people over. So I’d say that that was kind of the most extreme example of that kind of high level, both cooperation plus politicization and creating kind of a political target. And it was, to be frank, speaking with the people in that community that were impacted by it, it was a horror for everybody that experienced it. It was very scary. No one went outside. ICE was going door to door at businesses. It’s something that has always stuck with me. And I also want to note that 287(g) obviously creates a lot of very formal connections between ICE and police. But police can work with ICE without a 287(g) agreement. And that’s something — I know that you were asking kind of about state policies — that’s something that’s been kind of one of the bigger, let’s say, items of discussion since the new sanctuary laws were passed by Governor Hochul, was that there was a push to basically make any kind of collaboration illegal, whether it was through a 287(g) or jails or what have you, and that didn’t happen. And a lot of folks are very concerned that those police agencies — and these are, when I say folks, I mean sources who are kind of in the advocacy world, right, our immigrant advocate world — are concerned that people will just keep doing what they were doing already, just kind of through informal modes of communication. **Dara Lind:** Thank you so much to Eileen and to our other panelists. Austin, unfortunately, had to jump because we have run over, to which I apologize to everyone. But I thank you guys so much for such a great discussion. We will be sending a recording of this around with some helpful links to kind of add more depth and encourage more exploration. But thanks very much to Vital City and to Documented for convening this. And I hope everybody has a great day.