This ICE vehicle, NY plate MBL6213, has been seen at 3 separate staging or abduction events. Then it was seen parked in Southside Williamsburg, aka Los Sures, so we poked two tires with an ice pick, tagged ICE OUT to alert the neighbors, and smashed two side windows and the front windshield with a spring loaded center punch. It’s a handy little tool, a little quieter than a hammer, wouldn’t want to wake our lovely neighbors after all. The picture’s pixelated, but if you look closely you can see the holes on the side windows. ICE is ramping up activity in NY right now, IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING! Cover your tracks.
An Army veteran has been arrested after allegedly setting a fire outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, also known as 26 Federal Plaza, in New York on the morning of July 20. Andrew Arrabaca, 43, was tackled by federal officers after allegedly igniting fireworks, pouring gasoline, and setting fire to an entrance of the building.
Authorities said Arrabaca was carrying anti-ICE signs at the time of the alleged arson. The building houses several federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and an immigration court. It is used daily by thousands of federal employees.
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), at about 8:20 a.m. on July 20, Arrabaca ignited fireworks outside an employee entrance to 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. He then allegedly poured what appeared to be gasoline on the entrance stairs and set them on fire.
Surveillance video showed federal agents tackling and apprehending a man shortly after the fire was started. Another person quickly extinguished the flames. According to authorities, Arrabaca was carrying a cart with a sign that read, “ICE off our streets.”
He allegedly had several weapons in the cart, including knives, two pellet guns, a hammer, and a machete. Authorities said Arrabaca also fired five to seven pellets from an airsoft rifle. Three people were injured in the incident, including two federal officials and one immigrant who had arrived at the building for a hearing.
Following the attack, James Barnacle, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, described Arrabaca as an anti-government extremist who intended to harm people.
Authorities said Arrabaca continued shouting anti-ICE slogans during his arrest.
26 Federal Plaza has seen several ICE-related incidents after federal agents began arresting immigrants who appeared there for scheduled immigration hearings. Since the summer of 2025, several protests against the agency have been held outside and near the building.
The alleged arson occurred as ICE faces renewed scrutiny following fatal shootings involving two civilians by federal agents in Texas and Maine.
Federal vehical NYJCD8996 was back and all fixed up, so on monday night I cut one of its tires. Since (frustratingly) I wasn’t able to get the other 3 tires (and since it came back after getting messed up before) I went back a few nights later but it seems like they moved it. Maybe it’ll show up somewhere else, if you see it fuck it up more I guess.
In the next several weeks there is likely to be a surge of ICE enforcement in New York state and NYC. Although ICE has been operating with increased frequency in the city since last year, the DHS seceratary has now made clear they will be surging the city in response to some very tame anti-ice legislation that was passed in the recently .
This is an opportunity for anarchists to make clear the state of play here, and this anarchist thinks its important for ICE to meet organized and loud resistance from the jump. There is infrastructure here through the likes of community patrol and rapid response networks that allows for notification of active ice raids as well as more stationary ICE infrastructure that is throughout New York that is already known.
Its important that any confrontations with ICE are material from the jump. In Minneapolis though the surge there was met with a wide community response it was mostly led by liberal groups supporting the democratic state government. A surge in New York is an opportunity to address ICE presence in a way that actually works to decrease deportations long term and widen antogonistic struggle against the state here.
Liberal and radlib groups opposing ICE as well as likely the city government will be out doing what they do, and the only counter to that is direct action that pushes the confrontations beyond liberal capture & betrayal.
Tom Homan (DHS seceratary) has made clear that they will approach NYC from a different angle tactically to avoid the difficulties from the Minneapolis surge. That means we are much more likely to see large amounts of targeted warrant kidnappings as opposed to broad street sweeps, though that’s possible too.
Regardless of what form it takes anarchists in new York should take the opportunity to check in with friends, pack up their gear and be ready for what might happen soon. Keeping fellow New Yorkers safe means direct action, and that means being ready for that.
On Saturday May 1st at Wyckoff Heights hospital a large crowd attempted to stop the deportation of a local man by ICE. As the feds attempted to leave the scene, several of their cars got fucked up. They were able to hobble most of the way back to Manhattan, but one of the cars did not make it and broke down on the Williamsburg Bridge. That car had flat tires, a smashed out back window and electrical problems. After several hours of trying to jumpstart the car and change its tires, the ICE agents began calling towing companies. The company that showed up is called Richmond Towing, and it’s located in Jamaica Queens.
maybe someone else will submit more of a report back, but for now, it was nice to see an ice vehicle’s windshield smashed by a skateboard, in bushwick saturday night.
“Exclusive video shows a protester break the back windshield of an ICE vehicle with a skateboard. This was in Bushwick last night as protesters gathered outside Wyckoff Hospital to protest the arrest of a Nigerian man who was taken to the hospital for evaluation after being detained by ‘force necessary to make the arrest.'”
spotted on local mainstream news’ social media: https://imginn.com/p/DX5CqPEPr2h/
This past week a federal vehicle NYJCD8996 responsible for kidnapping our neighbors in an ICE raid was found and dealt with. Tires slashed, tailights smashed, and “FUCK ICE” message left in red paint. ICE thinks it’s safe go wherever it wants in the streets of NYC inflicting fear. Fuck that and inflict the fear back.
To ICE: You are not safe from the people. You will be held accountable. The people hold you accountable for lives you terrorize, destroy, and end. This is in retirbution for Aled Amien Carbonell-Betancourt, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, Tuan Van Bui, Jose Gudalupe Ramos, Royer Perez Jimenez, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, Emanuel Cleeford Damas, Pejman Najafabadi, Alberto Guttierrez Reyes, Jairo Garcia Hernandez, Lorth Sim, Victor Manuel Diaz, Heber Sanchez Dominguez, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and Keith Porter Jr.
These are just names of those murdered by ICE in the first 4 months of this year. ICE has been detaining and murdering people for over 20 years. This is just a part of an interitance of vioelnce that is not new in the “United States”. These names echo the long legacy of “America” turning human beings in bodies to be contained, controlled, exploited, and exterminated. Private detention centers came from private prisons. And prison is a descendant of slavery, Jim Crow, indigenous “reservations”, and genocide. This is the legacy ICE sits in, the legacy of white supremacy.
And this white supremacist violent control does not stop at the borders. “USA” has a foreign policy defined by the overwhelming force of a bully who dehumanizes their enemy. The same way ICE treats human beings as disposable is playing out in bombs in Iran and Palestine. This is who “America” is. What happens abroad is a mirror of what we allow here. They will continue to do what we allow them to. So let’s stop allowing it.
“No soy un libertador. Los libertadores no existen. Son los pueblos quienes se liberan a si mismos.” Stop ICE wherever they are. Find them and let them know that they can fuck off.
ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, monthslong expansion campaign. WIRED is publishing dozens of these locations.
Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
In New York, ICE is moving into offices on Long Island near a passport center.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal buildings and functions as the government’s internal IT department, is playing a critical role in this aggressive expansion. In numerous emails and memorandums viewed by WIRED, DHS asked GSA explicitly to disregard usual government lease procurement procedures and even hide lease listings due to “national security concerns” in an effort to support ICE’s immigration enforcement activities across the US.
Since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, ICE has more than doubled in size. DHS claims the agency now has 22,000 officers and agents stationed around the country and is still in the process of hiring more. The agency received nearly $80 billion in funding as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, giving it virtually unlimited resources to combat what the administration has consistently portrayed as an “invasion.” With new employees comes a desperate need for office space, and the possibility of deployment to new areas of operation.
In September, as NPR and The Washington Post reported, a number of GSA employees were added to an “ICE surge” team responsible for finding new office locations and expanding preexisting offices for ICE employees. More specifically, according to documents viewed by WIRED, workers at the Public Buildings Service (PBS), the department within GSA that handles government buildings and leases, were assigned to actively support ICE’s physical expansion and told to find leasing spaces for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) divisions across the country. ERO is tasked with immigration enforcement, including the arrest, detention, and removal of immigrants, and previously operated out of only 25 field offices in the US; OPLA is the legal arm of ICE, and lawyers with OPLA litigate “all removal cases including those against criminal aliens, terrorists, and human rights abusers,” for DHS, according to ICE’s website.
Records reviewed by WIRED show that the ICE surge team has successfully found spaces for ICE across the country. In addition to expanding previously held ICE offices, it has moved or is moving ICE into new buildings, or into space the government controlled under the terms of existing leases, in almost every US state and major city.
Starting in September, GSA was pushed to bypass the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA) that requires open competition among bidders for federal building and lease procurements, because ICE requested that leases fall under the “unusual or compelling urgency” government statute. The statute states that the procuring agency’s “need for the supplies or services is of such an unusual and compelling urgency that the Government would be seriously injured unless the agency is permitted to limit the number of sources from which it solicits bids or proposals, full and open competition need not be provided for.”
A training kickoff for PBS staff assigned to the ICE surge team the same month cited the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the aim of hiring 13,000 new ICE employees, as the “trigger event” for the new team. These team members were told that around 250 new locations were needed for ICE employees, and this would be potentially achieved by new lease acquisitions and by locating ICE in existing federal spaces. The “primary focus is securing a space. Renovations are secondary,” shows documentation viewed by WIRED. Employees were instructed to move as quickly as possible, without getting “hung up” on issues like “needing paint and carpet before occupancy.”
In a memorandum dated September 10, 2025, an OPLA representative asked GSA’s office of general counsel to look past the usual leasing procedures with the “unusual and compelling urgency justification,” in accordance with Trump’s executive order on immigration. “In the next three months, OPLA will grow to more than 3,500 attorneys and 1,000 support staff,” the memorandum states. “OPLA has critical space needs that require the ability to identify office locations nationwide that OPLA can readily occupy as soon as possible.”
GSA’s ICE surge team began visiting potential leasing locations and worked to finalize deals within days. A DHS official sent GSA an email on September 24, 2025, asking that the agency not publicize leasing information, recognizing that this request was outside of the “normal” process. “Due to national security concerns and recent attacks against ICE, publicizing new lease locations puts our officers, employees, and detainees in grave danger,” the email stated.
GSA was instructed in January 2025 to pause most acquisitions, deliveries, and modifications, except for projects under $50,000 and those related to supporting security measures for the president’s office. But on September 25, 2025, a GSA commissioner emailed other leaders at the agency that “an exception to the acquisition pause has been approved for all actions supporting the ICE hiring surge, regardless of dollar value.”
By September 29, GSA had already awarded leasing projects, and the ERO division at ICE had sent the ICE surge team a list of requirements for specific leasing locations, including sally ports—a secure entryway system with interlocking doors used by military troops, prisons, and police stations—and other security measures. ICE also came to GSA with a specific request: that any new location be within a 10-mile radius of an existing ERO facility.
By early October, the ICE surge team was working through the government shutdown, even as other critical government work was put on hold. Days after the shutdown began, GSA was still awarding leases. On October 6, 2025, a signed internal memorandum stated that GSA should “approve of all new lease housing determinations associated with ICE hiring surge,” in light of ICE’s “urgent” space requirements and the purported impact of delays on the agency’s ability to “meet critical immigration enforcement deadlines.”
On October 9, the same day that Trump announced in a cabinet meeting that the government would be making “permanent” cuts from “Democrat programs” during the shutdown, GSA received a list from OPLA with requests for office locations, including expansions and new leases, in 41 cities around the country.
In a memorandum dated October 29, 2025, a representative from Homeland Security Investigations—one of the two major departments within ICE, along with ERO, and tasked with a wide range of investigative work in cases ranging from human trafficking to art theft—asked GSA’s office of general counsel to engage in nationwide lease acquisition on behalf of DHS “using the unusual and compelling urgency justification,” in accordance with Trump’s executive immigration order.
“If HSI cannot effectively obtain office space in a timely manner, HSI will be adversely impacted in accomplishing its mission—a mission that is inextricably tied to the Administration’s priority in protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the memorandum states.
By early November, according to documents viewed by WIRED, 19 projects had been awarded in cities around the US, including Nashville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Sacramento, California; and Tampa, Florida. Multiple projects were days away from being awarded in Miami, Florida; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and New Orleans, Louisiana, among others, and emergency requests for short-term space had been made in eight cities, including Atlanta, Georgia; Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; and Newark, New Jersey.
In documents viewed by WIRED, ICE has repeatedly outlined its expansion to cities around the US. The September memorandum citing “unusual and compelling urgency” for office expansion states that OPLA will be “expanding its legal operations” into Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Florida; Des Moines, Iowa; Boise, Idaho; Louisville, Kentucky; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina; Long Island, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; Spokane, Washington and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The memorandum also states that the existing offices are at maximum capacity and will “require additional space” to accommodate the new employees hired. At the time, the memo states that OPLA had selected almost 1,000 attorneys to hire.
Months after the “surge” began, ICE’s expansion to American cities is well underway, according to documentation viewed by WIRED. The table below gives a detailed listing of planned ICE lease locations as of January, and includes current ICE offices that are set to expand and new spaces the agency is poised to occupy. It does not include more than 100 planned ICE locations across many states—including California, New York, and New Jersey—where WIRED has not viewed every specific address.
A Trump administration official recently told WIRED that California and New York are “next” for the type of fraud investigation that culminated in 3,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis.
In New York and New Jersey, ICE is expanding its physical footprint rapidly. In Roseland, New Jersey, less than an hour’s drive from New York City, ICE is moving into a building at 5 Becker Farm Road. The building is located near the Roseland Child Development Center. In Woodbury, New York, a hamlet in Long Island, ICE is moving into offices located at 88 Froehlich Farm Boulevard, near an expedited passport center. In New Windsor, New York, a town within driving distance of New York City along the Hudson River known for the Storm King Art Center, ICE is moving into offices at 843 Union Avenue. All three of these locations are within an hour and a half from a warehouse [at 29 Elizabeth Drive] in Chester, New York, that DHS is pursuing as an immigrant detention center.
Together, the leasing plans give a clear picture of where ICE is going next in the US: Everywhere.
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be moving ahead with a new immigrant detention facility to hold as many as 1,500 detainees in Chester, New York — just over an hour from New York City.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s push to ramp up mass arrests and deportations using cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed last year at the president’s behest.
In an online advisory posted on Jan. 8, DHS laid out its proposal “to purchase, occupy and rehabilitate a warehouse property at 29 Elizabeth Drive, Chester, NY in support of ICE operations,” including erecting a small new guard building.
The advisory, which was required because part of the 35.9 acre property sits in a flood plain, does not explicitly reference a jail. But The Washington Post reported last month about DHS’ plans for several new large-scale “processing facilities” for detainees, including one in Chester.
Those new facilities are intended to hold immigrant detainees for a few weeks, according to the Post, before they are sent to large-scale warehouses in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri that will each hold between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
The presumed location of the Chester processing center was first identified by The Monroe Gazette. The property is owned by an LLC linked to former Trump Advisor Carl Ichan, according to the Albany Times-Union.
The likely lock-up has triggered protests and contentious community meetings in Orange County, where Congressmember Pat Ryan (D) is circulating a petition to attempt to block the facility.
Town of Chester Supervisor Brandon Holdridge said he was working with Ryan to “disincentivize this rogue, unlawful, and un-American agency from stepping foot in our town.”
Asked about their plans for the Chester warehouse, a spokesperson for ICE declined to provide specifics.
“Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe,” a statement from an unnamed spokesperson read. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
“These will not be warehouses — they will be very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”
Since Trump took office last year, ICE has opened a new 1,000 person facility in Newark called Delaney Hall, entered into new contracts with several upstate county jails to detain dozens more, and sent around 100 detainees at any given time to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
The Chester facility would continue this trend and further enable ICE’s efforts to make more arrests in the New York City area, said Rosa Cohen-Cruz, the director of Immigration Policy at Bronx Defenders.
“Any increase in local bed space for ICE detention enables ICE to be more aggressive in their raids and their enforcement tactics because they have beds to immediately put people,” she said. “So we’re extremely concerned that New York City residents, New York State residents will really be at heightened risk by this increase in capacity.”
