A coalition of civil rights groups sued the Department of Homeland Security this week, claiming federal immigration agents are stopping and arresting immigrants across New York based on nothing more than how they look or what language they speak.

The class action complaint, filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of New York, names the New York American Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and the Legal Aid Society as plaintiffs’ counsel. Eight immigrants around the state are represented in the suit, each alleging they were arrested and detained without probable cause.

The stories behind those eight cases are striking. Juan Carlos Quintero, 41, was watching a dominos game in Staten Island when three unmarked federal vehicles surrounded him. Agents handcuffed him after he said he didn’t have ID on him. No warrant. No prior contact. Just a man watching a game on a sidewalk.

A 36-year-old Hispanic man was grabbed while entering his apartment building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on his way home from work. A 24-year-old Hispanic man, a graduate of the City University of New York, was arrested near the Long Island Rail Road in Hempstead. All three have since been released after lawyers filed emergency legal challenges.

Not a coincidence. A pattern.

“ICE is profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance,” said Meghna Philip, Director of the Special Litigation Unit at the Legal Aid Society. “This is an egregious violation of their civil rights that has caused fear and panic to ripple throughout New York’s immigrant communities.”

The suit puts it more bluntly. “DHS agents routinely stop Latinos for no other reason than their appearance and the language they are speaking,” the complaint states.

Homeland Security pushed back hard. A DHS spokesperson said the agency arrests people on the basis of reasonable suspicion, consistent with Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “Any allegations ICE law enforcement engages in racial profiling are FALSE,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Still, the numbers are difficult to dismiss. The lawsuit cites data showing that 800 New Yorkers who were not intended targets of immigration enforcement were arrested here between October and March. In 85 percent of those cases, the people detained had no prior criminal record. Eight hundred people swept up as bystanders, most of them with clean records.

The legal landscape here is genuinely unsettled. Last September, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion to an emergency order, noting that federal immigration officials may use factors like language, ethnicity, or type of work as one consideration in determining whether someone might be in the country without authorization. The key word is one. Not the only factor. The lawsuit argues that in practice, appearance and language have been the only factors agents use.

That’s the crux of the constitutional fight ahead, and it matters enormously for a city like New York. Brooklyn alone holds one of the largest immigrant populations of any urban county in the country. Bushwick, where one of the plaintiffs was arrested at his own front door, is home to tens of thousands of Latino residents, many of them long-established community members, citizens, and permanent residents who now share public space with federal agents who may stop them on sight.

The Eastern District filing comes months after reporting from The City documented an uptick in street arrests last fall and uncovered the scope of collateral arrests in the city this spring. That reporting is now woven directly into the legal record.

For immigrant communities in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach, Jackson Heights, and Sunset Park, the practical effect of these enforcement patterns is already visible. People don’t want to leave their apartments. Parents walk their kids to school with their phones ready. The fear isn’t abstract.

The ACLU’s history of challenging immigration enforcement on constitutional grounds runs decades deep, and the Eastern District has seen similar suits before. Whether this one moves fast enough to affect enforcement on the ground is another question.

What’s clear right now is that three men were grabbed off streets and out of doorways in New York, held without adequate cause by the government’s own account, and released only because lawyers moved quickly. The lawsuit asks a federal court to put a stop to it.