Immigrant says ICE invoked MAGA YouTuber Nick Shirley during arrest

MANHATTAN (CN) — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, while arresting a Malian immigrant in New York last month, questioned him about his interactions with right-wing content creator Nick Shirley, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

Mamadou Ndoye was one of 10 West African immigrants arrested during ICE’s raids on Lower Manhattan’s Canal Street last fall. After he was ordered released with a GPS monitor on Feb. 5 by a federal judge, who ruled that ICE “failed to follow its own regulations” during the raid, he was jailed again a week later at what he was told was a routine appointment to adjust his GPS monitoring device.

In a declaration filed Tuesday, Ndoye says the ICE officers didn’t tell him why he was being taken back into custody on Feb. 12.

“When I asked them why, they said they could not tell me. The only thing they asked me about is why I was being aggressive to Nick Shirley in the video that he posted of me before I was detained by ICE in October,” Ndoye wrote.

Shirley, whose conservative content has been championed by prominent Republican politicians like Vice President JD Vance, indeed posted a video featuring Ndoye on Sept. 25, 2025, that has been viewed roughly 900,000 times on YouTube.

In it, Shirley visits the often immigrant-run shops on the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan, beloved by tourists for their knockoff goods, and decries the supposedly “dangerous migrant scammers” who work them.

“Back then, Nick Shirley … had come with a camera crew to Canal Street and was talking about exposing how ‘illegal immigrants’ are scamming New Yorkers, and I confronted him,” Ndoye wrote. “He then posted the video of that on YouTube and called for me to be arrested, and soon after that ICE came and arrested us in October 2025.”

Ndoye even appears in the thumbnail of that video, with an arrow pointing to him that says “update he got deported.” Ndoye has not been deported, and is currently jailed in Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York, according to court papers.

Speaking to Courthouse News from detention on Tuesday, Ndoye said that it was Shirley himself who identified him to ICE officers descending on Canal Street in October.

“ICE didn’t even try to talk to me, but then he pointed me out to ICE and they ran to me and arrested me,” Ndoye said on the phone. “And then he put up his camera and recorded the arrest, posted it online and got a million views.”

When he was rearrested months later, Ndoye said the ICE officers told him he shouldn’t have reacted to Shirley that day.

“They said I was being mean to Nick,” Ndoye said. “I was just expressing myself because I knew that, most likely, when people come up and record me for a YouTube show, they are going to make money off of my image.”

The government has not referenced Shirley in its legal justification to keep Ndoye detained. But ICE agents’ supposed name-drop of the YouTuber comes amid increasing suspicion that the Trump administration is taking cues from right-wing influencers and blogs in its ongoing immigration enforcement.

Last summer, it was revealed in Boston federal court that the Department of Homeland Security used the Canary Mission — a conservative, anonymously run blog known for doxxing critics of Israel — to pull the names of pro-Palestine protesters like Mahmoud Khalil to target for deportation.

And the White House itself has used other videos of Shirley’s to justify immigration operations. Following Shirley’s most popular work, a 42-minute video from December documenting supposed fraud in Somali-run day care centers in Minnesota, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said ICE had “surged resources” to the state to “hold fraudsters accountable.”

Two American citizens were shot and killed by federal immigration agents in the weeks that followed.

In a statement to Courthouse News, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security insisted that “DHS does NOT enforce the law based on content creators.”

“A person’s immigration status makes them a target for enforcement, not their skin color, race or ethnicity. Law enforcement uses ‘reasonable suspicion’ to make arrests, as allowed under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the spokesperson added.

A representative for Shirley did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Ndoye is representing himself in his ongoing bid for release with help from his wife, a U.S. citizen with whom he has seven children. The couple owns a West African restaurant on Canal Street.

The government justified its latest detention of Ndoye by claiming his removal is now “reasonably foreseeable.” But Ndoye says this is in part based on travel documents that he says are inaccurate.

Following his February rearrest, Ndoye says that he spent six days at 26 Federal Plaza, a controversial immigration detention facility in Lower Manhattan designed for short-term stays which has been scrutinized by judges for poor sanitary conditions and overcrowding.

“They had me in a small room with 11 other people,” Ndoye wrote. “I was not able to shower once during that time. They gave me dish soap and said if I wanted, I could wash my face.”

U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick, who released Ndoye from his initial stint in ICE detention, criticized the first arrest in October as “cursory.” In a 20-page ruling, the Barack Obama appointee said the government failed to explain why he was specifically arrested during that raid.

“Absent such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in preplanned decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or merely randomly stage ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions,” Broderick wrote.

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