Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall spent three months treating federal immigration agents like the enemy. On Friday, a federal judge told the mayor’s team that the stalling is over. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the city must comply with an ICE subpoena and hand over the names and birthdays of certain male residents of the city-run Bruckner shelter in the Bronx, the New York Post reports.
The city’s main argument was that the request was too much work. Kaplan wasn’t buying it. “The City has not shown that producing this list would be unduly burdensome,” he wrote, after what the Post described as months of back and forth between the city and the feds.
ICE says the residents’ names, birthdays and records are relevant to an investigation into whether any of them are subject to deportation. And the request is narrower than the mayor’s allies would have you believe. ICE first asked for the names of every resident, but it agreed to let a special master be appointed to identify only residents with “certain serious criminal histories,” according to the filing. Let that sink in. The fight City Hall picked was over handing federal agents information on migrants with serious criminal records.
This was not a one-time standoff. ICE has filed four separate subpoenas since August seeking information on people staying in several city-run homeless shelters, and the Mamdani administration has fought every one of them. When the first request arrived on Aug. 6, covering two city-run shelters, the city blasted it as “an improper fishing expedition lacking any legitimate investigative purpose.” A federal judge has now looked at the request for the Bruckner shelter and decided it was nothing of the kind.
The Bruckner facility is no ordinary shelter. It is a 2,200-bed emergency migrant shelter carved out of a vacant South Bronx storage building, and it became home to asylum-seeking men moved out of the troubled Randall’s Island tent city. Neighbors in Mott Haven were furious when it opened in 2025. In February, the Mamdani administration rolled out a plan to phase out the shelter by the end of 2026 and fold its residents into the broader city shelter system. City Hall did not immediately respond to the Post’s request for comment on the ruling.
This ruling is a window into what sanctuary politics looks like when it finally runs into a courtroom. New Yorkers are told the city is protecting vulnerable people. What a federal judge actually saw was City Hall putting up a wall between immigration agents and a list that had already been narrowed to men with serious criminal histories. Americans who live next to these shelters deserve to know whether anyone sleeping there is subject to deportation. Judge Kaplan just made sure the feds can find out.
Source: nypost.com