First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani demanded that ICE get out of his city. President Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, has now given him his answer — and it was not the one the mayor wanted.
"He can scream and yell all he wants. He's not gonna stop us from doing this job," Homan declared. "I don't know what color the sky is in Mamdani's world, but ICE isn't going anywhere. We're gonna be in New York City, we're gonna be in New York State, we're gonna keep enforcing the law — that's why President Trump is in the Oval Office."
The confrontation started on Thursday, October 8, in the Marble Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, where ICE agents moved to arrest a 28-year-old Dominican man whom the Department of Homeland Security describes as a criminal illegal alien with a prior grand-larceny conviction, other arrests, and alleged ties to the Trinitarios gang. During the encounter, a federal agent fired seven rounds, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, striking the man in the neck while his five-year-old son sat inside the vehicle. The child was not injured and was placed with a family member; the wounded man was treated at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and returned to federal custody.
Mamdani seized on the shooting to demand the agency's removal altogether. "ICE out of our hospitals, ICE out of our streets, ICE away from our kids," the mayor declared, and he called President Trump directly to demand that ICE stop all operations in the city. He has also attacked federal agents for operating in the city while masked and carrying long guns.
Homan answered the politics as bluntly as the demand. Mamdani's position, he said, "sounds dangerously close to abolish ICE," and he argued that rhetoric attacking ICE officers encourages people not to comply with federal law enforcement — officers who, he noted, are "moms and dads too." He added that the uniformed NYPD officers he meets want to support ICE, not obstruct it. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin backed the same line: "We're not putting a pause on enforcement."
The standoff sits on top of a deeper war between Washington and Albany. Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a law barring local police and sheriffs from entering formal agreements with ICE — a move 15 elected New York sheriffs have publicly pushed back against. And according to Mullin, the federal government has lodged 14,766 detainer requests in New York since January 20, 2025, covering 47,750 felony charges, and been met with "absolute silence."
Immigration enforcement is a federal power, and no mayor can expel a federal agency from his city by press release. Homan has promised a ramp-up of operations in sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate, and New York — its mayor demanding ICE leave, its governor restricting cooperation, its sheriffs dissenting — is now the front line of that fight.
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