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MANHATTAN (CN) — A Malian man, who told Courthouse News last week that right-wing content creator Nick Shirley told ICE to arrest him, has been ordered released from immigration custody by a federal judge.
U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “violated their own regulations” and due process in detaining Mamadou Ndoye, who was one of 10 West African immigrants arrested during raids on Lower Manhattan’s Canal Street last fall.
In a 12-page order filed Tuesday night, Broderick found the government unlawfully revoked Ndoye’s order of supervision — a release mechanism for noncitizens to live and work in the United States, despite having a final order of removal.
“In light of this posture, where the agency has refused to comply with the plain text of its own unambiguous regulations, I have little trouble concluding that the government has failed to provide petitioner with the necessary process due to him under the constitution,” wrote Broderick, a Barack Obama appointee.
The judge demanded that Ndoye be released by 5 p.m. Wednesday.
It’s the second time this year Ndoye has been freed from ICE detention since his initial arrest in October 2025, which he said was due to Shirley, a 23-year-old MAGA YouTuber, pointing him out to law enforcement during a raid on Canal Street vendors.
“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 told Courthouse News from detention last week. “And then he put up his camera and recorded the arrest, posted it online and got a million views.”
Ndoye had a run-in with Shirley weeks prior. Shirley, who is famous for posting anti-immigration content online, was making a video about the often immigrant-run shops on the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan and decried 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 in a court filing last week. “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 can be seen in the 22-minute video arguing with Shirley, who was filming the vendors on the sidewalk. He’s even featured in the thumbnail, with an arrow pointing to his head that says “update he got deported,” which he has not been.
After more than three months in ICE custody, Broderick ordered him free in February. The judge called his October 2025 arrest “cursory” and criticized the government for failing to explain why he, specifically, was arrested during that raid.
But Ndoye was rearrested just a week after his release at what he was told was a routine appointment to adjust his GPS monitoring device. He said he was never given a reason.
“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 in a court filing.
The claim comes amid increasing suspicion that the Trump administration is taking cues from right-wing influencers and blogs during immigration actions. In a statement last week, the Department of Homeland Security insisted that it “does NOT enforce the law based on content creators.”
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a statement request on Wednesday. Shirley has not responded to several requests for comment since his name came up in court filings last week.
Broderick didn’t mention Shirley at all in his latest ruling. Rather, he noted that the government didn’t show that it would be “in the public interest” to deport Ndoye, who cares for seven children — including one who is hospitalized — and owns a West African restaurant on Canal Street with his wife.
“[He] can’t take care of his kids or the child that we have in the hospital,” Ndoye’s wife, Charisse Smith Ndoye, argued during a hearing earlier this month. “How is that in the public interest?”
Finding that the government didn’t sufficiently suggest otherwise, Broderick wrote that ICE “has again disregarded the explicit text of its own regulation and violated petitioner’s due process rights.”
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