This Westchester Village Says it Doesn’t Collaborate With ICE. Data Tells A Different Story.

Port Chester residents wanted answers about a spate of recent ICE arrests in the heavily immigrant Westchester village. At a town hall in April, some 50 attendees confronted the local police chief about his officers’ communication with the federal agency.

“Believe me when I tell you,” Police Chief Christopher Rosabella said, according to the Journal News, “cooperating with ICE or allocating manpower for them is not even on the radar.”

But a New York Focus analysis of data recently released by the Deportation Data Project shows the Port Chester Police Department appears to have honored ICE’s requests to turn people over to the federal agency far more often than most other local law enforcement agencies, with nearly 60 people landing in ICE detention that way since 2024.

Village leadership have said police only contact ICE about people accused of crimes. But 10 immigrants with no documented criminal history were taken into ICE custody shortly after the agency sent detainers to police. That number is by far the highest of any jurisdiction in the state, including ones 50 times its size.

The finding highlights one way local police quietly assist with immigration enforcement, even without the formal contracts with ICE that New York just banned. 

Port Chester, a 30,000-person village that leans Democratic, has never had a so-called 287(g) agreement with ICE, through which local law enforcement can serve immigration warrants and, in some cases, conduct immigration arrests. But that hasn’t prevented the village’s police from helping ICE arrest people after the agency sends them “detainers” — requests that they hold people already in their custody until ICE can pick them up.

Neither Rosabella nor Port Chester Mayor Luis Marino responded to emails or phone calls requesting comment. Marino, who immigrated to the US from Peru in 1985, has said that ICE agents making arrests in Port Chester generally sought people with a criminal record. And local police reached out to the agency only in limited circumstances, he told the Journal News.

“Our Port Chester Police Department is not working with ICE,” he said.  

Police are not required to honor detainers. Many departments around the state, including the New York City Police Department, rarely do so, the data reveals. 

The data doesn’t show explicitly how law enforcement handled the detainers in each case. For this analysis, New York Focus tallied detainers sent to Port Chester that ICE lifted because the person was booked into ICE custody and where the immigration arrest happened within a day of the detainer being sent.

Police are permitted under New York law to communicate with ICE about people in custody. Under a 2018 state court ruling, however, they can’t hold those people longer than necessary so that ICE has time has to show up. 

Experts say it can be hard to know when that rule is violated. “There are certainly a lot of gray areas, and places where law enforcement may be exploiting those gray areas,” said Zachary Ahmad, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office told New York Focus that the office is “in touch” with the Port Chester Police Department regarding the agency’s interactions with ICE. She declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. 

ICE has arrested 57 people after sending detainer requests to Port Chester police since 2024, New York Focus’s analysis shows. Though the agency arrested more immigrants who had been in custody at jails in Nassau, Suffolk, Orange, and Rockland counties, as well as at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, those facilities each received a much larger number of ICE detainer requests and a smaller share of them resulted in detentions.

Based on ICE data, 17 of the people Port Chester turned over had no criminal history until their contact with the local police. Even after their run-ins with the police, ICE still categorized 10 as “immigration violators,” meaning they had not been charged with crimes. Federal court documents and prior reporting indicate that at least some of them were picked up by police on allegations of basic traffic violations alone, which are not considered crimes and do not normally lead to detention.

On Valentine’s Day, a 54-year-old Colombian asylum seeker was riding a motor scooter when he was stopped by a Port Chester police officer for “driving a motor-scooter that was not yet registered,” according to federal court documents. He was then charged with operating a motor vehicle without a license — a traffic infraction, not a crime.

“Nonetheless, the police department arrested Petitioner and notified ICE,” a federal judge wrote in an opinion on the man’s lawsuit, ordering his immediate release after two months of ICE detention.

Port Chester, where most residents are Hispanic, has been a hotspot for ICE activity. Many arrests, like the one last year of a volunteer firefighter and father named Milton Guamarrigra, took place without any local police involvement. But others began with an interaction with police. 

At the town hall in April, Rosabella said that his agency’s only form of collaboration with ICE involves holding people for the agency if a judge has signed a warrant for their arrest. 

“So, I guess you could say that’s ‘cooperating,’ ” he said, the Journal News reported. “But for us, that’s just normal course of business, right?”

The vast majority of ICE arrests involve administrative warrants, which are signed by ICE officers, not judges. 

“I would have a lot of questions about a claim that a rate of honoring detainers of that magnitude reflects only scenarios where a judicial warrant was provided,” Ahmad said. 

Joan Grangenoit-Thomas, a former village trustee, has pressed the town’s leadership to take a strong stance against ICE activity and the police department to answer questions about its interactions with the agency. Many community members already believed the police were working with ICE in some way, she said, adding that the data was “a disappointment, but it’s not a surprise.”

“It leans into this idea that there is some sort of informal cooperation,” she said. 

Grangenoit-Thomas said she was cheered by one of New York Focus’s findings: Since April 21, shortly after Rosabella addressed the town hall, none of the seven detainers ICE has sent Port Chester has resulted in a person being detained.