Around six in the morning on Tuesday, the manager of a Bronx building was awakened by phone calls from worried tenants of an apartment complex.
The property manager, who wished to remain anonymous, told NBC News, “They were telling me that ICE was there.”
As part of the Trump administration’s increased push to increase deportations and make them highly visible, targeting major cities and publicizing the actions, Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently conducted raids in New York, drawing the attention of locals and business owners who were taken aback by the early morning activity.
On social media, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noemann said she was there when ICE and other law enforcement agents detained at least one undocumented individual in the Bronx apartment complex in the Highbridge neighborhood.
While New York City police officers remained on the site late Tuesday morning, NBC News interviewed seven local employees and business owners.
Although violence has long been an issue in the neighborhood, the majority expressed surprise and stated that immigration enforcement activities are uncommon.
“I think it’s okay if they need to arrest somebody because they committed a crime, but I worry that with ICE, they may also arrest others that haven’t done anything bad,” a 28-year-old business owner said in Spanish, requesting that his name not be used out of fear.
Data from New York University’s Furman Center, which studies housing and urban policy, indicates that Highbridge has a greater rate of serious crime than the city as a whole.
Despite being prohibited by state and local regulations from participating in civil immigration enforcement, the New York police department is a member of the Homeland Security Investigations task force, which focuses on federal criminal law offenses.
Police officers attended the “criminal enforcement action” early Tuesday as members of the task force. They claimed that the arrested illegal individual was wanted for significant offenses like burglary, assault, and kidnapping.
The Department of Homeland Security spearheaded the immigration enforcement effort, with assistance from the NYPD and other federal agencies, according to Mayor Eric Adams.
As we have done for years, we will not think twice about working with federal law enforcement to apprehend violent offenders,” Adams said in a statement. “We are steadfast in our resolve to defend the law-abiding citizens and foreign-born people of our community.
The city, which is home to many immigrants, including recently arrived migrants, was rocked by the news.
The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, close to Times Square, is temporarily housing a large number of recent refugees.
Isabel Miranda, a 39-year-old Colombian mother of two who has been staying at the hotel for a few weeks, said her 3-year-old youngest daughter has expressed to her that she fears the police.
“It makes you desperate; you go out, and they look at us as if we were delinquents who came here to destroy the country, and that’s not the case,” Miranda remarked in her native tongue. “We contribute, too, because we work hard and we do the tough work.”
Miranda responded to a question regarding her concerns about deportations by saying, “The only thing I ask for is that my children remain safe, because I can’t go back to Colombia.”
About half of the people who have been arrested by ICE recently had no criminal history, according to recent statistics released by the Trump administration.
Eight-year-old Colombian Ihan Forero, who had been in the US for six months, was returning home from school with his mother. As he stood outside the Roosevelt Hotel, asked what he thought of President Donald Trump, he said: Fear. He has a cold heart.
Using images and videos of Noem in body armor while leading the multiagency operation in the Bronx, Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, a nonprofit group that supports immigrant rights in the state, denounced the enforcement actions as “a publicity blitz” from the Department of Homeland Security.
“The goal of this crackdown, regardless of how the Trump administration presents it, is to inspire fear in our immigrant communities, not to ensure public safety. According to Awawdeh’s comments, it doesn’t seem like there have been any large-scale raids in New York City as of yet.