New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and more than 100 elected officials have sent a letter asking private garage and lot owners across the city not to rent, lend or otherwise make their property available to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to City Limits, the letter was released Friday, Oct. 16.
City Limits reports that the letter is a request with no legal force. It follows an ICE shooting in Marble Hill and reports of agents using a Queens lot. The Department of Homeland Security responded that ICE operations will continue.
Coverage of the letter split along familiar lines. Breitbart News described the mayor as demanding a ban, while City Limits, a New York policy outlet, said he urged owners to act. We did not obtain the letter itself, so we cannot say which description fits its wording better.
What the Letter Asks
According to City Limits, the letter asks owners to notify ICE that it is not authorized to use their facilities. The mayor put it bluntly in a statement quoted by the outlet: "Do not rent your property to ICE. Do not lend it to them. Tell them they are not welcome."
Breitbart, citing a Gothamist account of the letter, quoted it as telling owners to "make it known to ICE that it is not authorized to use your garages and lots." Neither outlet links to the letter text, and we have not obtained it.
Breitbart reported that the signers include Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, most of the City Council and dozens of state and local officials. That list comes only from Breitbart. The count also varies slightly, with Breitbart citing 100 Democratic officials and City Limits saying more than 100.
Two Incidents Behind the Push
The letter follows two encounters this month. On Oct. 3, residents in Jackson Heights, Queens, saw ICE agents in a lot next to P.S. 280, City Limits reported. The lot and building belong to Blessed Sacrament Church, and NYC Public Schools leases the building on weekdays. DHS has said two Ecuadorian nationals were arrested that day and that officers pulled briefly into an empty, publicly accessible lot to assess an officer's injury. Residents were alarmed, and the episode remains disputed.
The larger trigger was the shooting of Oscar Belgal, 28, by an ICE agent in Marble Hill earlier in October. City Limits captioned a photo showing Mamdani speaking at the scene on Oct. 8. City Limits reported that federal agents had reportedly staged at a private lot nearby, and said the mayor's office stated Belgal's 5-year-old son was in the car.
Breitbart offered a sharply different account. It calls Belgal a Dominican national and a "criminal illegal migrant" who tried to run down agents with his vehicle, and it links a report that a judge had blocked his deportation. City Limits gives no such account, and we found no independent confirmation of the criminal record or the vehicle claim. We have not checked DHS's own account of the shooting.
Washington Says It Will Not Matter
DHS made clear the letter will not slow enforcement. "No terminated parking will stop ICE from deporting criminal illegal aliens to make New York safe again," a department spokesperson said, in a statement as quoted by City Limits and, via The Hill, by Breitbart. The wording appears as the outlets printed it, and we have not checked it against the original DHS statement. The two outlets published different additional lines from DHS, so it is unclear whether they drew on one statement or two.
On the other side, advocates want the city to go further. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, called for stronger steps to stop the NYPD from facilitating federal enforcement, according to City Limits. Hands Off NYC, which has organized protests at garages, called the letter a step forward.
Breitbart also reported that Boston Democrats moved in August to bar ICE from renting or buying parking space. We have not confirmed that independently.
What Comes Next
No deadline has been reported for the request. In the two reports we read, no garage operator is quoted saying whether it will comply. The open questions are whether any owners respond, whether the city or state attempts any legal action, how Washington answers, and what comes of the Belgal case.
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