Lawsuit Exposes Racial Profiling in Trump’s Mass Deportation Blitz on Long Island

The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has crossed a new line, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed this week. The suit alleges that immigration enforcement agencies, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection, are conducting racial profiling on an unprecedented scale, targeting Latino immigrants in New York with suspicionless stops and arrests.

Five of the lawsuit’s eight plaintiffs hail from Long Island communities such as Brentwood, Hempstead, and Greenport, where the fear and disruption caused by these raids have reached a breaking point. Brentwood resident Rene Antonio Benitez recounts being pulled over by agents while driving his 17-year-old daughter to school — not for any traffic violation, but simply because his darker skin and hair led agents to assume he was undocumented.

Benitez’s experience is far from isolated. The lawsuit describes federal agents roaming neighborhoods in unmarked cars and on foot, heavily armed and masked, stopping and arresting thousands of Black and Brown people without warrants or probable cause. Many arrested have no criminal records, and some hold legal protections like Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Yet agents continue to detain them, sowing terror and tearing families apart.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James called the policy “illegal and unconscionable,” emphasizing that no one should fear being targeted by federal agents because of their race or ethnicity. The lawsuit names top officials and agencies responsible for these practices and demands an end to the “state of siege” imposed on immigrant communities.

This comes despite a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing federal agents to consider apparent race or ethnicity during stops—effectively greenlighting racial profiling while the courts sort out the legality. Meanwhile, arrest numbers have skyrocketed, with ICE arrests in the New York metro area tripling compared to the final months of the Biden administration.

The Trump administration insists its deportation efforts focus on dangerous criminals, but evidence shows most detainees have no criminal record. The campaign’s brutality reached a tragic peak when agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, underscoring the deadly consequences of unchecked immigration enforcement.

Advocates like Paige Austin of Make the Road NY and Meghna Philip of The Legal Aid Society demand accountability and an immediate halt to this lawlessness. For Benitez and countless others, the hope is to reclaim a sense of normal life free from fear—a basic right stripped away by an administration weaponizing race to fuel its deportation quotas.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York is a critical step toward exposing and dismantling the Trump administration’s racially biased immigration crackdown. But the fight for justice and civil rights in immigrant communities is far from over.