What would ‘flood the zone’ immigration enforcement look like in NY?

It’s been a week since a Trump administration official threatened to “flood” New York City with immigration enforcement officers, but the deluge has yet to materialize.

The omission has immigration policy experts and activists imagining the possibilities. Some of their guesswork: dispatching hundreds of enforcement agents to immigrant communities across the five boroughs; targeting immigrant-dependent workplaces; or perhaps a military-style show of force in the city, as was recently seen in Los Angeles.

“They effectively have a blank check,” said David J. Bier,  director of Immigration Studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research organization. “With New York I think a thousand agents flying in is a reasonable proposition.”

The speculation follows “border czar” Tom Homan’s promise to “flood the zone” – New York City – with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The threat followed last weekend’s shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection agent at Fort Washington Park in Upper Manhattan.

Suspects identified in the non-fatal attack, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez and Christhian Aybar-Berroa, are undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic with criminal records, according to DHS.

That prompted Homan to blame the city’s sanctuary laws – which generally bar the use of city resources and personnel to federal immigration enforcement – for precipitating the attack, which allegedly occurred during a botched robbery. The accused men’s legal counsel could not be reached for comment.

The finger-pointing from federal officials continued on Thursday, when the Trump administration filed a federal lawsuit seeking to undo the city’s sanctuary protections, contending they amount to an “intentional sabotage of federal immigration enforcement.”

The White House has filed similar suits in other jurisdictions with similar sanctuary policies, notwithstanding a string of federal court decisions barring the federal government from commandeering state and local resources for enforcement of immigration law.

Homan, who for months has pressed New York and other sanctuary jurisdictions to change their laws and cooperate with federal enforcement officers, said he would “put more agents in New York City” following last weekend’s shooting.

ICE officials did not respond to subsequent questions about what enhanced enforcement in New York City would look like. Los Angeles’ Democratic Mayor Karen Bass called the stepped-up enforcement there a “reign of terror.” That action, featuring masked ICE agents, National Guard members and federal troops, has resulted in the arrests of nearly 3,000 immigrants since early June.

Approximately 412,000 undocumented immigrants live in New York City, according to a 2023 report by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. Additionally, in recent months the Trump administration has withdrawn legal authorization for hundreds of thousands of immigrants previously permitted to remain in the country under various parole programs.

The policy experts and others said enforcement efforts in New York would potentially be greater than those recently seen in Los Angeles, due to recent passage of President Donald Trump’s newly signed domestic policy law, which earmarks some $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement.

Bier, of the Cato Institute, said the resources available to ICE as a result of the law “are an order of magnitude” bigger than the agency previously had, allowing it to vastly expand the number of enforcement agents on the ground.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the law provides for the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents and 80,000 new ICE beds.

The 42-year-old CBP officer who was shot was in stable condition following the shooting, according to DHS. The federal agency stated that the two suspects in the attack had criminal histories that included armed robbery, thefts and reckless driving.

Mayor Eric Adams said at a Tuesday press conference that existing sanctuary laws contributed to such violent incidents and called on the City Council to change them.

“We need to examine parts of our laws that allow extremely dangerous people to go in and out of our criminal justice system,” Adams said.

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior  fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said “flooding the zone” is not a legal term, so experts could only speculate on what the administration actually has in mind.

“ I believe they mean something like a very highly publicized operation,” Chishti said, “and they clearly want to do one in a blue city. That has now become an obsession of this administration.”

Steven Yale-Loehr, a retired professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School, said the administration would not necessarily be limited to federal immigration agents.

“Depending on the public’s response, President Trump could bring in the National Guard, just as he did in Los Angeles,” Yale-Loehr said.

Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, noted the new funding has given the administration new resources to expand detention facilities for immigrants, but acknowledged that won’t happen right away.

There are currently 56,800 people in federal immigration detention, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and Awawdeh said the administration is “seeking to double that in a short period of time.”

“So we’re gearing up just as they are and preparing our communities for what’s to come,” Awawdeh said.

Bier said a lack of local detention facilities won’t easily be solved.

“ Just less space in Manhattan in particular to construct anything,” Bier said.

Chishti said construction sites were also highly vulnerable to enforcement due to their “part public, part private” nature, as opposed to restaurants and hotels, which he said required warrants for entry.

Immigrant rights advocates said all the enforcement talk had communities on edge.

“The community is currently very overwhelmed and fearful and staying away,” said Nathaly Rubio-Torio, the CEO of Voces Latinas in Jackson Heights.

“This is causing an elevated mental health crisis, as you can imagine,” Rubio-Torio said. “We as an agency are trying to stay on top of the changes and creating a safe space for our clients to feel they can still come seek services.”