Mamdani ICE Parking Lots: City Threatens to Sue DHS

New York’s mayor has told DHS to keep ICE agents off city park lots or face a lawsuit. The letter cites no law and no dates, which makes the legal fight it promises harder to predict than the politics.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Nov. 2 demanded that the Department of Homeland Security stop ICE agents from using city-owned parking lots as staging areas, and said the city will sue if they keep coming back. The Mamdani ICE parking lots letter, sent to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting ICE Director David J. Venturella and New York field office director Kenneth Genalo, names an unstaffed lot at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and lots along 111th Street on the west side of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, next to a city-run preschool.

The demand itself is short: DHS “must immediately issue guidance” barring agents from using “any City lots to stage or conduct enforcement operations.” No deadline is attached. If agents continue, the letter says, the city “will take legal action to prevent this unlawful commandeering of City property.”

Why the parking lots became a flashpoint

Staging lots are where enforcement teams park and brief before an arrest. They became a city issue after an ICE officer shot Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill on Oct. 8. Bloomberg reported that Mamdani then ordered a review of the 24 hours around the shooting, including agents’ use of a privately owned lot as a staging area. A Brooklyn federal judge has since ordered DHS to name the statute it is holding him under.

The city also announced a new NYC Parks policy on Monday telling frontline workers how to respond when ICE or other non-local law enforcement agencies try to use park sites, NY1 reported. Its text is not public. It builds on the executive order Mamdani signed on Feb. 6, which bars ICE from entering city property such as schools, shelters, hospitals and parking lots without a judicial warrant, according to Anadolu Agency. DHS condemned that order at the time, with Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin saying it would make New Yorkers “less safe.”

No DHS or ICE response to the Nov. 2 letter appeared in the coverage reviewed for this article. Bloomberg reported that Mullin has defended the officer in the Marble Hill shooting and rejected Mamdani’s earlier call to halt enforcement.

Can a city legally keep ICE off its parking lots?

That is the question a lawsuit would have to answer, and the letter does not try. It cites no statute, ordinance or case. Its one legal term, “commandeering,” borrows from the anti-commandeering doctrine of Printz v. United States (1997) and Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which bars Washington from forcing states and cities to carry out federal programs. It is why New York can refuse ICE detainers, and a Brooklyn judge dismissed the Justice Department’s suit against the city’s sanctuary laws in October. But the doctrine protects a city from being drafted into service. Courts have generally not read it as a tool for excluding federal officers from places a city otherwise opens to the public.

The government’s likely answer runs through the Supremacy Clause. Under the intergovernmental immunity doctrine, states and cities may not directly regulate federal operations or single them out for worse treatment. The en banc Ninth Circuit used that principle in 2022 in GEO Group v. Newsom to strike down California’s ban on private immigration detention. A rule that keeps only ICE out of an otherwise open lot would face the same objection.

The city’s stronger footing is as a landowner. The letter says park lots “are reserved for the safe use and enjoyment of New Yorkers and visitors who wish to use our parks,” which points toward a general rule limiting the lots to park users. A rule written and enforced that way, for everyone, is harder to attack as discrimination against federal agents than a demand aimed at ICE alone. Whether the Parks policy announced Monday is built that way is not yet known.

There is also a proof problem. The letter says agents “have reportedly parked their vehicles and conducted meetings” in the lots, with no dates. A lawsuit would need documented use before a judge reached the constitutional question. For now the letter is pressure, not a binding order, and it does not limit ICE arrests anywhere in the city.

The signals to watch are a written DHS reply, publication of the Parks policy and any documented return to the lots. A filed suit would test how far a city’s control over its own property reaches against a federal agency. For background, see New York’s record on ICE detainers and what DHS has promised about ICE near polling places.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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