New York
Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Pervades Long Island Suburbs
The sun poked above the horizon one bright March morning in the sprawling suburbs of Long Island. A fleet of federal vehicles began their daily search for immigrants.
They were followed, as usual, by Osman Canales, the roving neighborhood watch leader who has 100,000 Facebook followers and an entourage of secret lookouts. With one hand on the wheel of his black Jeep Grand Cherokee and another gripping a bullhorn, he telegraphed a warning:
“ICE is here!” Mr. Canales shouted in Spanish. “Stay home!”
President Trump’s immigration crackdown has played out most graphically in big cities run by Democrats, where aggressive tactics by federal agents have dominated headlines and fanned partisan debate. But in those cities, immigrant arrest rates have been erratic, spiking and plummeting.
The rhythm of detentions has been more steady in car-dependent places like Long Island, where agents have the advantage of stealth and where immigrants live far from the eye of news cameras. Just east of New York City’s jampacked boroughs, the arrest rates since last August have been consistently higher than in the city and the Hudson Valley.
The detention rate on Long Island has been about 60 percent higher than in the city and Hudson Valley since Mr. Trump took office. The rate remains slightly lower than in the rest of the country.
The expansive roads of Long Island have been fertile terrain for agents to capture migrants without the scrutiny that has often accompanied officials’ actions in big cities. Residents must drive for miles to get to work or to go grocery shopping, allowing officers to detain them during traffic stops beyond the critical eye of observers.
“It’s harder to say something when you’re in your car driving in a suburban area,” said Serena Martin, an immigration advocate and the executive director of New Hour for Women and Children, an organization that helps mothers, women and children whose lives have been affected by incarceration. “It’s not that people care any less. We just aren’t on the street walking in the way that people in urban areas have the ability to do to quickly mobilize, to take the photos, to take the video.”
On Long Island, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested about 12 people a day in early March, compared with about one a day in 2024. Nationwide, ICE agents were making more than 1,000 arrests per day in early March, compared with about 300 a day in 2024.
Deep-blue cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis and New York have vowed not to work with ICE, and protesters there have foiled large immigration operations by leaping quickly into action in substantial numbers. Federal agents in Manhattan have sometimes struggled to carry out arrests. Activists have chased them during a street raid, barricaded a garage where they were parked and staged a protest at a hotel where they were staying.
The pace of immigration arrests in the New York City area has remained at an elevated level since last summer — a contrast to the operations in Chicago and Minneapolis, where arrests skyrocketed for a month or two and then calmed down.
Arrests in Illinois fell from about 70 a day in October 2025 to about 10 a day at the beginning of March. In Minnesota, they fell from more than 80 a day in January to just about three a day. At the same time, arrests in the New York City area went from about 30 a day in January to about 28 a day in early March.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to discuss operations, but officials suggested that cities choosing to cooperate with ICE have less crime.
“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” D.H.S. said in a statement. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us.”
In Nassau County, the Long Island county closer to New York City, federal agents are aided by a partnership between local police and the Trump administration that empowers law enforcement officers to assist in enforcing immigration laws and transfer people into ICE custody. The agreement is known as Section 287(g) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. And Nassau County isn’t alone.
A growing number of 287(g) agreements have been adopted across the country since Mr. Trump returned to office. In January 2025, 133 state and local agencies had agreements, according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union. Since then, ICE has announced agreements with at least 1,000 agencies.
Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive who is the Republican nominee for New York governor and an ally of Mr. Trump’s, has vowed to fight a proposal by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to ban officers from working with ICE through 287(g) agreements. Mr. Blakeman has passed several policies to help federal agents, including the deployment of local detectives to assist with deportations.
“Because of the county’s cooperation with ICE, we have removed over 2,000 illegal migrants with criminal records ranging from attempted murder, to rape, to car jacking and drug dealing,” said Chris Boyle, a spokesman for Mr. Blakeman. “It is a safer county.”
ICE agents have turned Nassau County’s fire stations into rest stops, pulling into parking lots to take a break from patrolling. Sandra Valencia, who runs a youth leadership program on Long Island through Rural & Migrant Ministry, an advocacy group, said that agents park outside schools after classes are released, frightening parents.
“Children of Republican parents have intimidated our kids,” Ms. Valencia said in Spanish. “They showed up to school with American flags.”
Latinos on Long Island have accused ICE of discrimination. In a lawsuit filed April 8, five residents of Latino descent said that agents unlawfully stopped and arrested them based solely on their race and ethnicity, with no regard for their immigration status, in violation of federal laws and regulations. The agency did not respond to an inquiry about the litigation.
Long Islanders have made plans in the event of their own arrest, asking family members to take care of relatives or property left behind. One woman who is living in the country illegally and spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared reprisal said that in June, she decided to pack a bag with blankets, mittens, hats and a sleep sack for her 1-year-old baby in case they wound up in a frigid detention center.
Teenagers said they have felt shocked to see families unravel around them. Some said they worried that losing a parent or a sibling would risk their academic pursuits or deplete their family’s income.
Fernanda Mejia, 16, is the daughter of a bagel store worker who was detained in June while agents were searching for another person. In a tearful plea to the Republican-controlled Nassau County Legislature in July, she said that she was heartbroken to lose her father and urged the governing body to stop helping ICE arrest migrants like him. She said her father had no history of criminal behavior, and The New York Times found no evidence of a criminal background.
“My name is Fernanda Mejia,” she said, her voice trembling as she approached the lectern while wearing a ruffled skirt and a pink bow in her hair. “My dad was taken by ICE.”
Howard J. Kopel, the presiding officer, cut her off, drawing protests from audience members who demanded to hear more. When Fernanda finished speaking, Mr. Kopel was terse.
“I wish you good luck,” Mr. Kopel said. “I hope it works out. All right, next.”
Mr. Kopel declined an interview request through a spokeswoman.
Fernanda’s father had been deported to El Salvador. In her messy bedroom, piled with stuffed animals, makeup brushes and Polaroids, she keeps the gifts he sent from detention — a bracelet that he spooled together with broken rosaries and a necklace made out of beads shaped from bread.
Many adults around Fernanda barely go outside. Some depend on Facebook posts from Mr. Canales, the neighborhood watch leader.
On that bright March morning, Mr. Canales drove for hours before he found out agents had quietly arrested someone. He stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant, where the owner thanked him with a free torta and lamented a lack of customers.
Defeated, Mr. Canales finished eating, climbed back into his Jeep and braced for the next day.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
A man accused of running a secret police station in Manhattan at the direction of the Chinese government, using it to report to Beijing on political dissidents, was convicted of illegally working as a foreign agent on Wednesday.
Lu Jianwang, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said, opened the station with the goal of helping Chinese citizens renew their driver’s licenses while living in America. But a far more sinister aim, they said, was running the outpost as a hub to monitor outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Lu, an American citizen also known as Harry, was accused of aiding China’s campaign of transnational repression by opening an illegal police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Mr. Lu, 64, who wore an American flag pin on his suit during the trial, did not react as the verdict was read aloud. He was supported by dozens of members of a group linked to his hometown in China.
He was “in lock-step with what the Chinese government asked him to do,” Antoinette N. Rangel, a federal prosecutor, said during her closing argument on Tuesday.
After a full day of deliberations, a jury found Mr. Lu guilty on one count of acting as a foreign agent and another of obstructing justice. He was acquitted of conspiring to act as an agent of China.
Dozens of Mr. Lu’s supporters from his church and his Chinese community organization packed the courtroom. One supporter pumped her first as the verdict on the first charge, not guilty, was read aloud, but struck a somber tone after the guilty verdicts. Mr. Lu did not change his expression.
Mr. Lu had been “held accountable for blatantly disregarding the law and our country’s sovereignty,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement. He added that his office would protect the rights of those “seeking freedom from repression and speaking out to bring democracy, reform and human rights to China.”
Mr. Lu, along with Chen Jinping, was arrested in April 2023. Mr. Chen pleaded guilty to working as an unauthorized agent of China in December 2024.
Mr. Lu was the president of the American Changle Association, a Chinese community organization and social club for people from the city of Fuzhou, like Mr. Lu. Such groups have attracted scrutiny for their persistent efforts to influence New York politics, through methods such as harassing and threatening candidates with platforms seen as harmful by the Chinese government, at the behest of the Chinese Consulate.
Mr. Lu’s brother, Jimmy, had made donations to former New York Mayor Eric Adams, who spoke at the club during an event in September 2022, days before it was raided by federal agents. In July 2022, Jimmy Li, a congressional candidate with roots in Fujian Province, which includes Fuzhou, visited the clubhouse and was endorsed by a number of the group’s leaders.
The weeklong trial showcased the Justice Department’s long-running crackdown on what it calls a global campaign by China to harass, intimidate and repatriate its political dissidents. Prosecutors depicted Mr. Lu as a willing operative of the Chinese government, eager to deepen his longstanding ties with party officials.
They presented the jury photos of Mr. Lu mingling with government officials in China, text messages in which a Chinese security official asked him for information on a prominent pro-democracy activist, and expert testimony about China’s global efforts to quell dissidents.
But Mr. Lu’s lawyer, John Carman, described the case as overreach by federal prosecutors. During his closing statement on Tuesday, he said Mr. Lu had merely been trying to help his fellow community members, Chinese Americans of Fujianese heritage.
“This isn’t spy time,” Mr. Carman said. “This isn’t international espionage. This is license renewal.”
In January 2022, Mr. Lu began working with Liu Rangyan, an official at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, who became his official handler, prosecutors said. They met and were photographed at the global rollout ceremony in China for the overseas police stations.
Ms. Liu, prosecutors said, had directed “every detail” of the Manhattan station, down to the type size, logo and spacing of a banner inside the station. She wanted Mr. Lu to track down an outspoken critic of Beijing who was living in California and had taken part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
“Just help me verify if this person exists,” Ms. Liu wrote, referring to the dissident.
On the second day of the trial, two F.B.I. agents dramatically unfurled the banner in front of jurors. It read “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York, U.S.A.”
Prosecutors said Mr. Lu had aided the Chinese authorities beyond his work setting up the station. In 2018, he sent photos to another Chinese official of two members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in China.
Just as the F.B.I. searched the organization’s headquarters in 2022, prosecutors said, he deleted messages from the social messaging app WeChat from his phone, which amounted to obstructing justice.
Ms. Rangel said the station was “stopped early in its tracks.” Though Mr. Lu was not financially compensated for his work, he received “continued bona fides from the Chinese government,” said Carrie Crossmore, an F.B.I. agent who interviewed Mr. Lu.
But supporters of Mr. Lu said they thought he was being punished for work that was ultimately benign.
“Harry’s motives were pure,” Mr. Carman said outside the courthouse, standing alongside Mr. Lu. “His support was there because he’s helped a lot of people in his 45 years in America.”
Baimadajie Angwang, a former New York City police officer who was cleared of accusations that he had spied for China, sat with Mr. Lu’s legal team throughout the trial. Like Mr. Lu, Mr. Angwang said he was wearing an American flag pin on his suit to quell any notion that he was disloyal to America.
“We have to do things like this to prevent people from coming after us,” said Mr. Angwang, who also served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.
On Tuesday, the police arrested Daniel Santana, 45, of Unionport in the Bronx, and charged him with arson and three counts of homicide. On May 6, the police said, Mr. Santana came to Ori’s home, which housed a deli on its ground floor. He carried with him a container of accelerant and began to douse the building.
Video surveillance, and Mr. Santana’s own statements, indicate he intentionally caused the fire that killed the three men, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who was not permitted to speak publicly. A motive was still being investigated.
Standing near the ash pit that was once the rooming house where she lived, Mecca Daniels, 51, shook with tears as she remembered Mr. De Leon, who put her up when no one else would. Drugs and alcohol flowed freely there, she and others said, but Mr. De Leon did not judge his tenants’ struggles. “We all looked at each like brothers and sisters, like family,” she said. “And Ori was our pop-pop.”
Almost a week after the fire, Ms. Daniels still wore the hospital bracelets from that night; she had jumped out of a bathroom window onto the neighboring roof, and her hands were covered in scrapes. She and Ms. Horton and another male housemate climbed down to the street using the chain of a roll-down gate, she said, and dropped the last few feet into the arms of a group of Muslim men who happened to be passing by on the way home from morning prayers.
Sandwiched between Tony’s fabric shop and a medical office, the two-story building was built in 1931. The ground floor was most recently home to El South Bronx Deli, with housing on the second story. Mr. De Leon grew up there and was a star baseball player, who liked to tell people he could have gone pro until an injury ended his career. Three generations of De Leons had lived in the home, according to his niece’s GoFundMe page. She did not answer calls. Reached by phone, a sister, Orpha Rivera, declined to comment.
“Wards of Newark” is far from Acevedo’s first major showing. In addition to photography, he works across various mediums, including drawing, animation and projected image. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, El Museo del Barrio and others.
Yet the Newark exhibition, which runs through Oct. 30, is a show of a different kind.
Acevedo, Tillet and Shakur spoke individually by phone and video with The New York Times about the exhibition. The interviews have been combined, condensed and edited.
Why is this exhibition outdoors?
SHAKUR Art doesn’t simply have to exist indoors. Having access outdoors helps spark dialogue and civic engagement, and tells our story. It also helps communities appreciate representation and seeing themselves depicted in art across the city.
Many people have photographed Newark. Salamishah, what drew you to Manuel’s images in particular?
TILLET Through Manuel’s eyes, you get this breadth and depth and diversity and dynamism of Newark at a time when there are the most stereotypes about its impoverishment, its crime in terms of the crack-cocaine epidemic. Then you have Manuel, who’s living in the city and showing us the depth of humanity.
Manuel, how did what you saw in the media about Black and brown people in Newark differ from what you saw every day, growing up in the city?
ACEVEDO Representation of Caribbean and African diaspora people has always been unjust. I had to contend with why we were being represented this way when in fact I could walk out of my house, go on to my porch, talk to my neighbors and hang out with my friends in a way that was never shown. I felt all I could do was point the camera to my reality, which was the opposite.
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