That Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents undertook this fakery seemed to have been confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who tweeted that agents had “impersonated NYPD with fake badges” before backtracking with an update that called this “unconfirmed.” In a separate press release, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also referenced ICE agents “impersonating NYPD officers.”
The whole story reminded me of an investigation I published almost eight years ago on ICE’s use of so-called ruses and misrepresentations to make arrests, a tactic that not only was long-standing but had been explicitly included in the agency’s Fugitive Operations Handbook. Yet even then, the question of how legal these tactics were was far from clear. As NYU Law professor Nancy Morawetz told me at the time, “There is a pretty strong argument, I think, that it is impersonating a police officer,” when a federal agent implies that they are NYPD.
Still, even the cases I looked at then weren’t quite as clear-cut as the allegations here. There’s little doubt that federal personnel are allowed to represent themselves generally as “police” or “law enforcement,” and have been doing so for many years. What could set this incident apart are two factors: First, if the agents described themselves as NYPD in particular, that moves from vague insinuation to direct impersonation, and second, if the agents used that impersonation to gain access to private property and a private residence without a judicial warrant, they’ve now used that impersonation to violate due process rights pretty clearly.
