Between July 2025 and June 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent the New York City Police Department nearly 10,000 detainer requests — formal federal notices asking the city to hold an illegal immigrant long enough for ICE to pick them up. The NYPD honored exactly zero.

Not one.

That number comes from an interim staff report released by House Judiciary Committee Republicans, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. The report doesn't just cover last year. It tracks detainers going back to July 1, 2018, and the full tally is worse: 20,255 ICE detainers sent to the NYPD over eight years. The department didn't comply with a single one of them.

The NYPD wasn't alone. The NYC Department of Corrections received nearly 3,000 detainers during the same July 2018 to June 2026 window. Their compliance rate matched the police department's. Zero.

So here's what that looks like in practice. ICE identifies someone in NYPD custody — someone already arrested for something — and files a detainer saying, "Hold this person for 48 hours so we can come get them." The city looks at that federal request, looks at the person in handcuffs, and opens the door. Over 23,000 times across two agencies in eight years.

New York is a case study, not an outlier. "This interim report provides evidence of the ways in which just one city has implemented policies that allow dangerous foreign nationals to reoffend and avoid deportation," the report states.

That word — reoffend — is the part New York's sanctuary defenders never want to discuss. These aren't people ICE plucked off the sidewalk. They were already in custody. Already arrested. The detainer exists because ICE has reason to believe the person is removable. The city's position is that holding someone on a federal immigration request violates local sanctuary law. The federal government's position is that the city is actively obstructing enforcement. When 10,000 detainers go unanswered in a single year, "obstruction" starts to sound generous. That's closer to a policy of organized non-cooperation — the kind of thing that would get any other government agency hauled in front of a committee.

Which is exactly what's happening. Jordan didn't release this report for archival purposes. It dropped one week before the midterms, and the second quote from the report makes the political frame explicit: "But New York and its leaders are not outliers. They are indicative of a modern, radical, socialist Democrat Party that seeks to erase national borders and place illegal alien criminals ahead of law-abiding American citizens."

The sanctuary crowd's standard defense is that honoring ICE detainers would erode trust between immigrant communities and local police. The theory is that people won't report crimes if they think any interaction with police could lead to deportation. It's a tidy argument — until you notice it requires ignoring that the people in question are already under arrest. They're not witnesses. They're not bystanders who called 911. They're suspects in NYPD custody whom a federal agency has specifically flagged for removal.

New York isn't the only city running this play, but it's the biggest, and Jordan's committee chose it for the math. Twenty thousand detainers ignored across two agencies. Nearly 10,000 in the last year alone. Those aren't rounding errors. Those are individual decisions — made thousands of times — to release someone a federal agency wanted to deport.

Twenty-three thousand times, New York had the person ICE was looking for. Twenty-three thousand times, they let them walk.