DHS Answers Mamdani on the City Lots: Federal Law Authorizes ICE, Washington Says — and City Hall Publishes the Parks Rules for the Fight

The fight over New York City's parking lots now has both sides on paper. Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent a formal letter to the Department of Homeland Security on Monday demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement immediately stop using unstaffed, city-owned parking lots to stage immigration enforcement operations, and warning that the city will take legal action if agents continue. By the afternoon, DHS had answered: the department says ICE's presence in public parking lots is authorized under federal law — setting up a direct legal and operational dispute over who controls municipal property, the city's lots or the federal government that wants to park in them.

The letter, addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Acting ICE Director David J. Venturella and ICE New York Field Office Director Kenneth Genalo, says the city has not authorized ICE to use its property, and that agents have reportedly parked vehicles and held meetings in several unstaffed lots — including a lot at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and lots along 111th Street on the west side of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, sites city officials note sit next to a city preschool and cultural institutions. The mayor's letter called the use 'unauthorized and is therefore illegal,' saying it 'endangers City residents, and sows fear among those who seek to access City property.' Governor Kathy Hochul and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams publicly backed the city's position.

Alongside the letter, the administration published the machinery to enforce it: a new Parks Department policy for frontline workers, issued as part of the agency-policy updates under the mayor's Executive Order 13. Parks employees are now instructed to check federal identification, route any warrants to city lawyers, deny access without a judicial warrant, and call 911 if agents enter without authorization. The policy turns an abstract dispute about municipal control into instructions a parks worker at a lot entrance can actually follow — and it follows an October appeal in which the mayor and more than 100 elected officials urged more than a thousand private parking garage owners and operators to refuse ICE staging access as well.

Nothing has been decided by a court, and no lawsuit has been filed — Monday produced a demand, an answer and a rulebook, not a ruling. The dispute arrives after weeks of pressure on the administration following an October 8 shooting in Marble Hill in which an ICE officer shot a man collecting his child from school, and it tests a question sanctuary-city law has never quite answered: not whether federal agents can operate in New York, but whether they can use New York's own property, without New York's permission, to do it. The lots at Van Cortlandt and Flushing Meadows are, for now, where that question will be answered first.