From the beginning of the Trump administration, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has championed the notion that the nation’s largest city is also a sanctuary — a place where a majority of undocumented immigrants need not fear that a minor interaction with law enforcement would set them on a path to deportation. While the rhetoric of the city’s liberal mayor may make sense politically, letters recently sent from the New York office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a subway stop away from City Hall, reveal a critical flaw in de Blasio’s assurances. In recent months, ICE’s New York office has sent letters to the homes of several individuals shortly after they had interactions with the New York City Police Department, requesting that they come to the immigration agency’s office in Manhattan. Once there, they’ve been detained and, in at least two cases, placed in deportation proceedings, according to a copy of one of the letters, obtained by The Intercept, and interviews with attorneys from three of the city’s leading immigration advocacy organizations.

The organizations, which include the Bronx Defenders, Make the Road New York, and the Immigrant Defense Project, have together documented six cases of ICE letters received by individuals in the New York City area, though they suspect the actual number could be significantly higher. The organizations say the letters are unprecedented in recent New York history, reflecting a “new low” in the agency’s ramped up immigration enforcement efforts throughout the city, and undermining the sanctuary protections trumpeted from City Hall.

Aura Hernandez, a 37-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala taking sanctuary in a Manhattan church, holds her 15-month-old daughter during a vigil and procession on March 29, 2018, in New York. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The dissemination of the letters “speaks volumes to the fear in immigrant communities,” Sarah Deri Oshiro, managing director of the Bronx Defenders Immigration Practice, told The Intercept. Though individuals who have received and abided by the letters have ended up in detention, nothing in the letters themselves explicitly indicates that detention would be a possibility. Instead, the letters arrive as an official, albeit vague, document from a federal law enforcement agency. Recipients are forced to decide between complying with the request or risking ICE showing up at their homes or workplaces. For those on the receiving end, Deri Oshiro explained, the thinking is: “I don’t want to be detained when I’m taking my daughter to school. Or, I don’t want to be detained while my daughter is at school, and there’s no one to pick her up.” Fostering those sorts of ethical dilemmas as a matter of strategy or policy, Deri Oshiro argued, is particularly cruel. “It really takes advantage of that fear,” she said.

A letter from ICE asking its recipient to come to 201 Varick St. in New York. Photo courtesy Make the Road New York

According to attorneys, the letters have generally arrived roughly two weeks after the recipients were arrested and fingerprinted by the NYPD. Two of the recipients were arrested for low-level misdemeanor offenses, according to their lawyer, Lauren Migliaccio, an attorney with the Bronx Defenders. Both showed up to their ICE appointment and were detained, despite neither having open removal orders against them or criminal convictions. They are both now in deportation proceedings and remain in ICE custody. The letters tell the recipients to come to 201 Varick Street, the address for immigration court and also an ICE processing center, “at the time and place indicated in connection with an official matter.” It also tells the recipient to ask for “a deportation officer” and to bring “Any Immigration Documents, Valid Passport and This Letter.” The authorizing official in the letter, provided by Make the Road, is James Rothermel, supervisory detention and deportation officer.

In response to a detailed list of questions, Rachael Yong Yow, a public affairs officer for ICE’s New York operations, emailed the following statement: “It is reasonable to assume that an encounter between local enforcement and an alien would bring that individual under agency scrutiny. However, all reporting requirements for those required and/or requested to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are determined on a case by case basis. Following in person interviews, ERO deportation officers make individual determinations, on a case by case basis, if any enforcement action is warranted.” When reached for comment, the mayor’s office said it had only recently learned of the practice via community members, and that it is in the process of gathering more information. “Our partners have recently brought these letters to our attention and we are looking into this new practice,” Rosemary Boeglin, communications director at the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said in an email to The Intercept. Though news of the ICE letters has circulated in New York’s immigrant community, their recent dissemination has not been reported before. In a time of heightened fear and paranoia, local advocates are urging immigrant New Yorkers who receive the letters to remain calm. Yasmine Farhang, an immigration lawyer with Make the Road, said she is aware of four additional cases of people receiving call-in letters. Her organization created a handout for community members, telling recipients of the letters to get in touch with an immigration attorney or one of their organizers. “Failure to attend the appointment with ICE could lead to ICE coming to your home, your community, including your workplace, or your next court date to arrest you,” the flyer says. While ICE and the Trump administration have worked hard to foster a public impression of widespread and dangerous criminality within immigrant communities, the letters distributed in New York, by the very nature of their request, seem guaranteed to attract people doing the opposite of hiding from law enforcement. “The very people who are choosing to respond in the way that ICE intends with these call-in letters are, on the spectrum of rule-following — they’re pretty far on one side, because there’s no actual authority cited on these call-in letters that says why you have to go in,” said Deri Oshiro.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers look to arrest an undocumented immigrant during an operation in Brooklyn on April 11, 2018, in New York. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

In railing against sanctuary cities, ICE officials regularly argue that the agency must take additional steps to find and arrest its targets. While there is no legal definition of a sanctuary city, such jurisdictions typically refuse to hold individuals in local jails for suspected immigration violations until ICE officials arrive. In January, de Blasio’s office announced a citywide guidance and new NYPD rules aimed at institutionalizing and clarifying the relationship between the local police department and the federal immigration enforcement agency. New York City would “not voluntarily cooperate with federal immigration enforcement activities, and will only coordinate in limited circumstances, including where there is a public safety risk,” the announcement said. Consistent with local law, the “NYPD shall only coordinate with or assist ICE in instances where the citywide Duty Chief (that Chief in charge of citywide operations at the time of the incident) has identified a public safety issue and conferred with the NYPD Legal Bureau on the need to coordinate with or provide assistance to ICE,” it went on to say. The mayor’s office added that the city would continue a policy of holding in criminal custody individuals “who have been convicted of one of approximately 170 qualifying violent or serious felonies under” existing law on so-called immigration detainer requests — when ICE asks other law enforcement agencies to hold an individual in custody until ICE can determine their removability. “We have been very clear that that our police officers and employees will not be a part of a federal deportation force,” de Blasio said at the time. The mayor’s announcement came with the support of NYPD commissioner James P. O’Neill. Echoing a phrase that has become common among police executives in big cities around the nation, O’Neill said, “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement. The NYPD does not seek individual’s immigration status. Our work can only be done if every New Yorker has trust in the police and is willing to work with us in our collective efforts to ensure the safety of every neighborhood and every block of this great city.” The citywide policy and police department rules in New York specifically prohibit city officials from cooperating with an immigration enforcement program known as 287(g), which, in its most common form, embeds ICE in local jails, allowing the agency direct access to suspected undocumented immigrants. Refusal to participate in the program has been a major thorn in the side of ICE and the Trump administration. But to hear both local officials in New York, as well as ICE and the federal government, describe it, one might be left with the impression that allowing ICE access to individuals in city jails is the only issue at play when it comes the interaction between local policing and federal immigration enforcement. That’s simply not the case, and the letters ICE has sent in New York are an example of why.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers frisk undocumented immigrants after detaining and bringing them to an ICE processing center on April 11, 2018, at the U.S. Federal Building in Manhattan, New York. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

While the modern face of information-sharing between policing agencies is high-tech, the way in which many undocumented immigrants find themselves on a deportation officer’s arrest list relies on the old-fashioned fingerprint. face of information-sharing between policing agencies is high-tech, the way in which many undocumented immigrants find themselves on a deportation officer’s arrest list relies on the old-fashioned fingerprint. Every day, police officers in New York City make arrests, and most of those arrests result in fingerprints being taken. In New York City, once fingerprints get rolled, police share the data with a state agency called the Division of Criminal Justice Services. From there, the data is transmitted to the FBI for a criminal history check to prepare a rap sheet. As Larry Byrne, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, noted in April of last year, “Regardless of your immigration status, once we fingerprint you, your fingerprints go into a database in Albany. If ICE has tagged that person for notification for any reason, ICE is gonna know as a result of the arrest, not as a result of any contact from the NYPD.” Like its counterparts at the NYPD, New York state’s Division of Criminal Justice Service strongly rejected implications that it plays any role in a Trump-ICE deportation dragnet. “Any assertion that DCJS is somehow willfully feeding information to ICE in order to assist with deportations is simply false,” Justin Mason, deputy director of public information, told The Intercept in an email. “DCJS does not proactively work with the federal government to provide information or determine an individual’s immigration status. Further, the only immigration information that is included on a rap sheet states whether or not an individual had been previously deported. There is nothing about an individual’s current immigration status on that document.” Whether local or state law enforcement “willfully” or “proactively” cooperate with ICE’s agenda is somewhat beside the point, immigration advocates argue, and it has been for a long time. These call-in letters show that once there is a point of contact with law enforcement, cities and states don’t have to take active measures to aid ICE. The fingerprint data, and whatever actions come next, are out of their control. Under Secure Communities — an immigration data-sharing initiative replaced under the Obama administration, then restarted by Trump during his first week in office — the information forwarded from a street level encounter up to the federal level is also made available to a Department of Homeland Security database called “IDENT.” The IDENT database includes “biometric information and other personal data on over 200 millions of people who have entered, attempted to enter, and exited the United States of America,” according to Gemalto, the company that administers the database. Put simply, once the NYPD takes an individual’s fingerprints, their personal data becomes part of the vast pool of information shared with federal law enforcement — meaning that even the low-level encounters de Blasio’s office seeks to wall-off from ICE can still become the first step to deportation in the sanctuary city of New York. Migliaccio, the Bronx Defenders attorney, confirmed that both of her clients were fingerprinted prior to receiving letters from ICE. At its peak during the middle stages of the Obama administration, the Secure Communities program allowed for the deportation of thousands of people across the country per month; more than 8,000 deportations were carried out during August 2012 alone. Responding to pressure from immigration advocacy groups, the Obama White House eventually replaced Secure Communities with the Priority Enforcement Program, which sought to limit ICE detainer requests to individuals who had been convicted of crimes or were considered threats to national security. According to a report published this week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University, Secure Communities deportation numbers under Trump have not yet reached peak Obama administration levels. However, the report does note a significant change in the kinds of offenses that lead to deportations through the fingerprint-based Secure Communities program under Trump, with the top ten fastest growing offense categories under the administration “generally” made up of “misdemeanors or petty offenses.”

Rosa, second from right, an undocumented immigrant who wants her family’s last name withheld, is surrounded by her family at their home in New York on May 17, 2017. Photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP