By Luis Ferré-Sadurní
President Donald Trump’s newly installed Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced Tuesday morning that federal immigration agents had begun an enforcement action in New York City.
Noem, who oversees the federal agency that runs the nation’s immigration system, posted a video on the social media platform X that she said showed an “enforcement operation” in New York that had led to the arrest of an unauthorized immigrant with kidnapping, assault and burglary charges.
The video, which seemed to have been taken before dawn, shows two officers outside an apartment building in the Bronx guiding a man in handcuffs to an SUV with flashing lights. A spokesperson for the Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in New York City declined to provide any additional details of the arrest or say whether other operations were in progress.
Noem wrote on X that “dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.” She arrived in New York to accompany the enforcement effort; in her first predawn post on the social media platform, she said she was “live this AM from NYC. I’m on it.”
It was not immediately clear how many arrests ICE was conducting in the city or where, but a spokesperson for Noem said there were “multiple” enforcement operations in New York on Tuesday.
Pictures posted on social media by two Justice Department agencies involved in the operations — the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — appeared to show multiple people being taken into custody.
A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams of New York, a Democrat who has said he wants to collaborate with Trump to deport criminals, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Noem’s arrival in New York City, and the accompanying publicity blitz, came two days after a multiagency immigration crackdown in Chicago on Sunday. The Trump administration is heavily publicizing such arrests across the nation, from Colorado and the Atlanta suburbs to Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
ICE, which has started posting daily tallies of arrests on social media, has reported more than 3,500 arrests nationwide since Trump took office, and a total of 1,179 in a single day Monday. That daily count is larger than the average 310 arrests a day during former President Joe Biden’s final year in office.
Federal officials did not say how many people they had arrested in Chicago, but Thomas Homan, the president’s border czar, told The New York Times on Sunday that ICE had targeted those with criminal backgrounds. He also confirmed that there had been “collateral arrests” of immigrants who were near the targets of the operations.
Trump officials have indicated they are focused on people who threaten the public before casting a wider net.
“My goal is to arrest as many public safety and national security threats as possible and move on to the other priorities,” Homan, the face of the crackdown, told CNN on Sunday.
ICE has a field office in lower Manhattan with a staff of nearly 400 people in charge of conducting arrests of noncitizens in New York City, Long Island and parts of the Hudson Valley.
Under Biden, the agency arrested 4,667 people in the 2024 fiscal year in the region, or an average of about 12 a day. That was down from 9,229 people in 2023, or about 25 a day.
The Senate confirmed Noem, a former South Dakota governor and longtime ally of Trump, as Homeland Security secretary Saturday by a vote of 59-34. Most Democrats opposed her, but she received scattered support from some Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey.
Noem is tasked with leading counterterrorism efforts, as well as Trump’s immigration crackdown. As governor of South Dakota, she sent members of her state’s National Guard to Texas to address the immigration crisis. She has described the high levels of illegal immigration in the United States as an “invasion.”
