NYPD officers teamed up with ICE agents to jointly storm a Bronx apartment, guns drawn.
A Department of Corrections employee exchanged numerous friendly emails with ICE to coordinate the pickup of an incarcerated person, using the hashtag #teamsendthemback.
An immigrant mother asked shelter workers for therapy for her family to help them overcome the trauma of fleeing Venezuela, but instead she ended up in detention after the Administration for Children’s Services shared her information with ICE.
Such overt examples of cooperation and data-sharing between New York City agencies and federal immigration enforcement, were read as testimony during a 2025 City Council committee meeting, putting some New Yorkers on high alert. As President Trump uses increasingly aggressive tactics to weaponize both federal and local data against immigrant New Yorkers, battles rage on — in both the city council and the court of public opinion — about how much collaboration the New York, a sanctuary city, should have with federal authorities.
The debate was also central to then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, where he promised to “Trump-Proof” New York as mayor, and vowed to defend the personal information of the city’s 3 million immigrants from landing in the hands of federal authorities. And last month, he took a first step towards fulfilling that pledge with an executive order aimed at re-affirming the city’s sanctuary status.
“I speak of protecting those with the least from the consequences of a man with the most power in this country,” Mamdani said the morning after his victory.
But experts who spoke to Documented say there are holes to plug — or potentially data to erase — if the city truly wants to protect immigrant New Yorkers. Closing law enforcement loopholes, limiting how much data the city keeps in the first place, and holding individual city workers accountable for their role in sharing data improperly are just some of the ways in which multiple experts interviewed by Documented suggest shielding New Yorkers from federal overreach.
“Anytime there’s concern that an institution is part of the city, these fears about whether it is safe to engage with them, or whether engaging with them will cause their information to be shared with ICE, are very real,” said Rosa Cohen-Cruz, director of immigration policy at Bronx Defenders.
The mayor’s office did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this article.
In a statement to Documented, a spokesperson for the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), where the Chief Privacy Officer works, said that the mayor’s latest executive order “demonstrates this administration’s unyielding commitment to safeguard residents from abusive immigration enforcement.”
Ray Legendre, an OTI spokesperson, pointed to the city’s 2017 Identifying Information Law as “one of the nation’s most comprehensive municipal privacy laws.” The law, which aims to protect information that can identify or locate a person, gives guidance on how identifying information is collected and disclosed by city agencies and requires that each agency designate privacy officers, which oversee compliance with the law.
“For nearly a decade, the Identifying Information Law has fostered public trust so that those in need of New York City services can safely and confidently seek them, and that remains unchanged,” he said.
Where we stand
Since Mayor Ed Koch was in office, 1978-1989, a series of policies and laws have largely prohibited New York’s city agencies from sharing personal data — everything from simple information such as birthdays and people’s names to surveillance footage photos — with federal immigration authorities, albeit, with some exceptions for law enforcement and corrections.
Such sanctuary laws now further protect New Yorkers by barring NYPD and the Department of Corrections (DOC) from honoring requests by ICE to hold New Yorkers for immigration detention unless they have been convicted of certain violent crimes or are on the terrorist watchlist — and in both cases, ICE would have had to obtain a judicial warrant.
During the first Trump administration, City Council voted to pass the Identifying Information Law to protect all New Yorker’s personal identifying information — including immigration status. Mayor Bill de Blasio at the time also mandated that any requests from federal immigration to the NYPD be reviewed by city officials before complying. The de Blasio administration also decided to shred applications for IDNYC cards, a citywide government identification card often used by immigrant New Yorkers as a primary form of ID. In destroying application documents, such as copies of foreign passports, which are used to verify a person’s identity to obtain the card, certain personal data could be kept out of the hands of federal officials.
However, Trump’s more recent immigration enforcement tactics have only increased concerns of what experts call data leakage. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to further “protect all personal data from other jurisdictions” and that “on Day 1” he would “survey every city system to determine where sensitive data must be protected.”
His first public step towards fulfilling that promise came with his executive order in February, when he called for six of the city’s agencies — child welfare, police, corrections, social services, probation and mental health — to perform audits of, update and publicly post their policies for cooperating with federal immigration authorities. The order also required additional training for staff on such policies.
Included in the order, named “Protecting New Yorkers from Abusive Immigration Enforcement,” is a requirement that the city train agencies’ respective privacy officers on New York’s Identifying Information Law, and also requires the city’s Chief Privacy Officer to develop additional protocols necessary to protect personal data.
However, reporting requirements of that law includes carveouts — such as for law enforcement work. And the executive order’s requirement for audits and training will not go far without both systemic and staff-level accountability, said three experts interviewed by Documented about the initiative.
Additionally, a recent Department of Investigation report on NYPD work with immigration authorities suggests inconsistencies with how and when requests for assistance by ICE were documented and “raises questions about whether the NYPD has a complete understanding of the frequency with which its members are receiving requests for assistance with civil immigration enforcement.”
Documents obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project through open records requests also show that DOC staff communicate frequently by phone with ICE.
The question of law enforcement
In a city that collects vast amounts of data, the NYPD holds substantial information about everyday New Yorkers while actively sharing information with federal agencies working on investigations. So it’s no surprise that experts saw the agency as the most vulnerable to potential data leakage.
Joint task forces between federal agencies and the NYPD — allowed under sanctuary law — are areas which Cohen-Cruz says are ripe for potential overreach. As Trump deputizes an increasing number of federal agencies, including the FBI, to carry out its deportation agenda, it quickly becomes clear just how blurry the lines can get when it comes to information sharing, especially since the police often work with federal agencies to investigate criminal cases.
The information available to the NYPD takes many forms. The department gives individual officers access to the Domain Awareness System, which aggregates vast amounts of information such as CCTV video, license plate readers, 911 call logs, arrest records, photos and more for review while responding to incidents.
The NYPD also runs camera networks, uses facial recognition and deploys cellular surveillance technologies. It also maintains large gang and shooting databases that have shown to be flawed and stores information on witnesses as well as individuals who have never been charged or connected with a crime, said Eleni Manis of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP).
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment by Documented. But in May, NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch said, “Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE. The short, straight answer to this is no.” Her comments came in the wake of two Venezuelan migrants being sent by ICE to a mega-jail in El Salvador following an arrest by the NYPD.
Additionally, in January, Tisch defended the department’s gang database — next to a silent Mayor Mamdani — saying it was a tool that “has helped drive gun violence down,” and led to numerous gang takedowns.
Meanwhile, federal officials have worked to further criminalize immigrants and designate certain gangs as foreign terrorist organizations — an exception for data sharing in sanctuary policy. Data, even when shared legally, can then leak outward, said Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, an expert in data leakage and the founder of the Forensic Evidence Table, which seeks to change the criminal justice system’s relationship with technology.
“Once ICE has a hand on these lists, it doesn’t matter if the information is verifiable or true,” added Manis. “What matters is that ICE has a pretext for initiating a deportation hearing where it is the judge and jury of whether somebody is deportable or not.”
Moreover, the structures to protect such data from the NYPD’s many surveillance systems — which also includes data on people who are not suspected of a crime — are thin, said Vasquez. “If you hold that kind of information, given the law enforcement loopholes that are put into every kind of protective law that’s out there, I don’t know how you would resist a court order or a subpoena if one were to come,” she said.
However, there are some steps the city could take to further protect immigrant New Yorkers from such leakage, said Manis, including further minimizing data collection and creating policies that “slow the deportation machine down and make it so difficult to target large numbers of people at once.”
Manis added that an individualized warrant approach, where ICE would need to request a warrant for each individual it seeks to receive information about — instead of targeting large groups of people — could also be effective. Vasquez has also advocated for a federal Data Justice Act, which would give individuals more power over what information state actors hold on them. Cohen-Cruz stressed that bright-line state laws like New York For All are also important.
“We’ve spent over 10 years trying to fix the mistakes of having of the system that included carve outs, and we have years and years of evidence of how the carve outs have enabled the law to be violated, both intentionally and [unintentionally] because it’s more complicated for [individual] agents … to manage”
Another solution? Destroying data, said Vasquez, who noted that many information privacy laws — from city policies to national standards like HIPPA — have provisions that allow the sharing of data if it’s in furtherance of a criminal investigation.
She pointed to de Blasio’s shredding of IDNYC applications to keep them out of federal hands — a tactic specifically mentioned in Mamdani’s platform — as a responsible example of how the city could re-evaluate city data caches to flag which of them may no longer be worth keeping.
“If they truly want to protect all personal data … you get rid of it. And that doesn’t seem to be the conversation that we’re having,” said Vasquez.
Holding individuals accountable
The guidance and audits put into place by Mamdani’s executive order are important, experts said, but there are some additional factors to take into account: ways to hold individual city staffers accountable for violating policies; the mayor’s power to appoint the public officer that decides when and if to share personal data; and whether the mayor’s office plans to review the guidance he requested.
Manis suggested NYPD Officers’ access to DAS as a clear example of a place where ease of access could lead to individual slip-ups, and where accountability measures are needed.
“I would also ask the mayor what he intends to do about individual officers’ misuses of database access,” said Manis.
Additionally, there is a provision in the Identifying Information law that says the Chief Privacy Officer — a role appointed by the mayor — can approve disclosures to outside agencies “upon the determination that such disclosure is in the best interests of the city.”
Therefore, the sharing of data is “reliant entirely on the morals and politics of the person who holds that position,” said Vasquez.
Vasquez noted that so far, Mamdani has retained Adams appointee Michael Fitzpatrick as Chief Privacy Officer. Previously, Fitzpatrick served as NYPD’s agency privacy officer under the de Blasio administration, and on the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee under President Biden.
In addition, although the latest executive order requested new guidance for six of the city agencies, follow up will be key, said Bronx Defenders’ Cohen-Cruz, adding that she hopes that public defenders — and others who often directly deal with the consequences of collaboration — will be at the table when the administration reviews such audits and guidance.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
At the end of the Adams administration, examples of collaboration between the NYPD and ICE may not have been textbook violations, she said, but went against the intent of sanctuary laws.
“I think that the mayor has an opportunity to really critically examine when agencies are collaborating with the federal government, and make sure that when they do it, it aligns with his priorities,” said Cohen-Cruz.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the Office of Technology and Innovation.
