Civil rights groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday, accusing federal immigration agents of targeting immigrants across New York based on race and language alone.
The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of New York. Counsel includes the New York American Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and the Legal Aid Society. Eight immigrants from across the state are named in the suit, each alleging detention without probable cause.
The individual cases don’t read like coincidences. Juan Carlos Quintero, 41, was standing on a Staten Island sidewalk watching a dominos game when three unmarked federal vehicles pulled up around him. Agents handcuffed him after he said he didn’t have ID. There was no warrant. No prior contact with law enforcement. Nothing.
A 36-year-old Hispanic man was grabbed outside his own apartment building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, returning home from work. A 24-year-old Hispanic man, a graduate of the City University of New York, was arrested near the Long Island Rail Road station in Hempstead. All three have since been released after attorneys filed emergency legal challenges.
“ICE is profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance,” said Meghna Philip, Director of the Special Litigation Unit at the Legal Aid Society. “This is an egregious violation of their civil rights that has caused fear and panic to ripple throughout New York’s immigrant communities.”
The complaint itself is less diplomatic. “DHS agents routinely stop Latinos for no other reason than their appearance and the language they are speaking,” it reads.
Homeland Security isn’t backing down. A department spokesperson insisted agents operate on reasonable suspicion consistent with Fourth Amendment protections. “Any allegations ICE law enforcement engages in racial profiling are FALSE,” the spokesperson said.
The numbers behind the lawsuit are harder to wave away. Between October 2025 and March 2026, 800 New Yorkers who weren’t the intended targets of any enforcement action were arrested here anyway. In 85 percent of those cases, the people detained had no prior criminal record. New York is the most immigrant-dense urban county in the country, and the breadth of that figure tells you something about who’s getting swept up.
The case was first reported by The City on April 04, 09, 2026, drawing immediate attention from immigration advocates already tracking a sharp rise in what they describe as pretextual stops.
The legal ground here isn’t settled. Last fall, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in an emergency order that federal agents can weigh factors like ethnicity, language, or type of work when forming suspicion that someone may be undocumented. That’s a significant opening. It’s also exactly the kind of reasoning the plaintiffs argue leads directly to the stops described in this lawsuit.
The ACLU’s history of challenging immigration enforcement practices goes back decades, and this suit fits squarely into that lineage. For a guide to what rights immigrants retain during these encounters, the organization maintains a resource on immigrant rights that’s seen heavy traffic since enforcement operations accelerated in 2026.
What’s at stake legally is whether ICE agents can treat ethnicity and language as sufficient proxies for immigration status. The plaintiffs say that’s not reasonable suspicion. That’s a profile.
The suit doesn’t just challenge individual arrests. It asks the Eastern District to certify a class covering all people stopped or detained by immigration agents in New York without documented individualized suspicion. That’s a wide net, and if it holds, it could constrain how agents operate across the entire metro area.
For now, the three New Yorkers who were released are out. The broader class they represent, the 800 people flagged in the underlying data, includes hundreds with no criminal history, no warrant, no reason to be on any enforcement list. Just people who looked a certain way or spoke a certain language in the wrong place.
The Eastern District hasn’t yet scheduled a hearing date.