New York Signed a Sanctuary Package. The Border Czar Answered: “It’s Coming.”

On Monday morning, June 8, 2026, Border Czar Tom Homan went on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” and made New York City a promise. “You are going to see more ICE agents than you have ever seen in New York City. And it’s coming,” he said. “I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming.”

The trigger was specific. Ten days earlier, on May 29, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a package of immigration measures into law as part of the state budget — bans on local jails honoring ICE detainers, a prohibition on masked law enforcement, walls around “sensitive locations” like schools and hospitals, and a new right for individuals to sue ICE. Homan’s stated logic is mechanical: take away cooperation inside the jails, and the arrests move into the neighborhoods.

This is the same federal-versus-sanctuary collision that played out in Chicago and Los Angeles over the past year — only now aimed at the country’s largest city, run by a mayor, Zohran Mamdani (D), who has called for ICE to be abolished. No agent count, no start date, and no operation name has been officially released. What is on the record is a vow, a signed law that prompted it, and a city government that says it will not cooperate.

• “It’s coming” — Border Czar Tom Homan, on Fox & Friends, vowing the largest ICE deployment NYC has ever seen — no number or date officially given · Source: The Hill, amNewYork
• May 29 — the date Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed the sanctuary package — detainer bans, a mask ban, sensitive-location limits — that Homan cites as his trigger · Source: Bloomberg, Gothamist
• 1,000+ — illegal aliens ICE said it arrested in the comparable Chicago surge, Operation Midway Blitz, by early October 2025 — the template for what NYC may face · Source: DHS

Homan’s appearance was short and pointed. Co-host Brian Kilmeade teed it up by noting that New York is “saying abolish ICE and zero cooperation.” Homan’s reply was to confirm that a plan already exists on paper. He did not announce numbers. He did not announce a date. He announced certainty: a deployment larger than any the city has seen, and the assurance that it is on its way.

That distinction matters for how this story is reported. As of this writing, the agent count and the timing are not officially stated— they are deliberately withheld. Outlets from The Hill to the Washington Examiner have reported that Homan said he “reviewed an operational plan,” but the operational details themselves remain undisclosed. What is concrete is the cause-and-effect chain Homan laid out, and the law that set it in motion.

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The trigger Homan named is no abstraction. On May 29, 2026, Gov. Hochul (D) signed a slate of immigration protections folded into the state budget. The package bars local jails from holding individuals on behalf of ICE and prohibits the formal 287(g) agreements that deputize local officers for immigration work. It forbids law-enforcement officers — including federal agents — from wearing masks while interacting with the public. It requires state and locally operated “sensitive locations” — schools, hospitals, houses of worship — to deny immigration authorities access to nonpublic areas without a judicial warrant. And it creates a private right of action letting individuals sue ICE over alleged constitutional violations.

Homan’s objection is operational, and he made it before the bill was even signed. Strip out jail cooperation, he argues, and you don’t reduce enforcement — you relocate it. “Rather than one guy arresting one bad guy in a jail,” he warned, “now we’ve got to send a whole team into a neighborhood.” The sanctuary law, in his telling, is precisely what converts a quiet custody transfer into a visible street operation.

“Rather than one guy arresting one bad guy in a jail, now we’ve got to send a whole team into a neighborhood.”

Border Czar Tom Homan · paraphrased from his on-air remarks on the effect of NY's detainer ban

What Homan is threatening in New York already has a precedent. In September 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in and around Chicago — explicitly framed by DHS as a crackdown on sanctuary Illinois. By early October, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (R) traveled to Chicago to mark more than 1,000 arrests; the department later put the operation’s overall figure in the thousands. The Trump administration ran a parallel surge in Los Angeles. The pattern is consistent: a Democratic-run sanctuary jurisdiction passes or defends non-cooperation rules, and the federal government answers with a high-visibility enforcement wave.

That precedent also carries documented friction. In Chicago, a federal judge found that ICE agents had made warrantless arrests in violation of a long-standing consent decree, and an Illinois commission flagged misconduct during the operation; reporting noted that a large share of those arrested had no criminal convictions. We cite those findings to be straight with readers about how these surges have actually unfolded — the administration frames them as targeting “the worst of the worst,” while courts and local reviews have raised real questions about execution. New York would be the next, and biggest, test of the model.

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On the city side, Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) has gone further than almost any big-city executive in the country. He has called outright for the agency’s elimination: “I believe that ICE as an entity is one that should be abolished,” he said, arguing “there is no way to reform this kind of cruelty.” In February, he signed an executive order barring local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE on immigration enforcement absent a judicial warrant, and his administration has built out a citywide “know your rights” push. As recently as June 7, he was urging fellow Democrats to stop fearing the “Abolish ICE” message and embrace it.

Gov. Hochul (D), for her part, has dared the administration to come. Recounting a conversation with President Trump (R), she said he told her, in a room full of governors, that he would not send federal forces to New York unless she asked. Her answer: “I’m not asking.” The result is a genuine standoff — a federal government with a deployment plan in hand, and a state and city government on record promising zero cooperation. That is the collision Homan is daring into the open.

Precision is the whole game on a story like this, so here is the dividing line. Officially stated by Homan: a deployment is coming, it will be the largest New York has seen, and an operational plan has been reviewed. Officially withheld: the number of agents, the start date, and any operation name. Reported but not confirmed by the administration: that Customs and Border Protection personnel would not assist this time — a departure from the Chicago model, where ICE and CBP worked side by side under Secretary Noem (R).

The clash is not new, either — it has been building for nearly a year. In July 2025, after an off-duty CBP officer was shot in Washington Heights and the suspects turned out to be in the country illegally, Homan declared at a press conference that “sanctuary cities are now our priority” and vowed to “flood the zone.” The Hochul package and the Mamdani administration’s posture turned that general priority into a specific target. The June 8 vow is the escalation, not the opening move.

Strip away the rhetoric on both sides and the structure is simple. New York’s Democratic leadership made a deliberate policy choice to wall the city off from federal immigration enforcement, and the federal government has made an equally deliberate choice to respond with the most visible enforcement tool it has. Each side is doing what its constituents elected it to do. The friction is the design, not an accident.

What remains genuinely unknown is scale and timing — and, given the Chicago record, whether the operation stays within the lines courts have drawn. Until ICE puts numbers and dates on the table, “it’s coming” is exactly as much as has been officially confirmed. We will update this page when the administration states the specifics, when the deployment begins, or when New York’s leaders or the courts respond. The vow is real; the particulars are not yet public.

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Last updated June 9, 2026