Mamdou Ndoye, who was ordered released by a judge in February, says he was arrested again by ICE later that month by agents who asked him why he was “aggressive toward Nick Shirley.”
MANHATTAN (CN) – Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, while arresting an immigrant from Mali in New York last month, questioned him about his interactions with right-wing content creator Nick Shirley, according to court documents filed Tuesday.
Mamdou Ndoye was one of 10 West African migrants arrested during the ICE raids on Lower Manhattan’s Canal Street last fall. After he was ordered released on a GPS monitor on February 5 by a federal judge who ruled that ICE “failed to follow its own rules” during the raid, he was jailed again a week later in what he was told was a routine appointment to fix his GPS monitoring device.
In an affidavit filed Tuesday, Ndoye says ICE officers did not tell him why he was being detained again on Feb. 12.
“When I asked them why, they said they couldn’t tell me. The only thing they asked me about is why I was aggressive towards Nick Shirley in the video he posted of me before I was arrested by ICE in October,” Ndoye wrote.
Shirley, whose conservative content has been championed by prominent Republican politicians such as Vice President JD Vance, did indeed post a video featuring Ndoye on September 25, 2025, which has been viewed approximately 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 shoddy wares, and chides the supposedly “dangerous immigrant crooks” who staff them.
“At that time, 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 shortly after that ICE came and arrested us in October 2025.”
Ndoye even appears in the still of that video, with an arrow pointing at him that says “update he was deported”. Ndoye has not been deported and is currently incarcerated at the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York, according to court documents.
The government did not refer to Shirley in its legal justification for keeping Ndoye detained. But ICE agents’ alleged takedown of the YouTuber comes amid growing 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 federal court in Boston that the Department of Homeland Security used the Canary Mission — a conservative, anonymously run blog known for its outspoken critics of Israel — to pull the names of pro-Palestinian protesters like Mahmoud Khalil to target for deportation.
And the White House itself has used other Shirley videos to justify immigration operations. After Shirley’s best-known work, a 42-minute video from December documenting alleged fraud at day care centers run by Somalis in Minnesota, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said ICE had “increased resources” for the state to “hold fraudsters accountable.”
Two American citizens were was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in the weeks that followed.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Shirley’s influence in Ndoye’s arrest, nor did a representative for Shirley.
Ndoye is representing himself in his ongoing bid for release.
The government justified its latest detention of Ndoye by claiming that his departure is now “reasonably foreseeable”. But Ndoye says this is partly based on travel documents he says are inaccurate.
After his re-arrest in February, Ndoye says he spent six days in 26 Federal Plazaa controversial lower Manhattan immigration detention center designed for short-term stays that has been reviewed by judges for poor sanitation and overcrowding.
“They had me in a small room with 11 other people,” writes Ndoye. “I couldn’t shower once during that time. They gave me dish soap and told me if I wanted, I could wash my face.”
US District Judge Vernon Broderick, who released Ndoye from his initial stint in ICE custody, criticized the first arrest in October as “hasty”. In a 20-page ruling, nominee Barack Obama said the government failed to explain why he was specifically arrested during that raid.
“In the absence of such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in premeditated decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or simply randomly arrange ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions,” it wrote.
Subscribe to our free newsletters
Our weekly newsletter Closing arguments provides the latest on ongoing trials, major litigation and decisions in courts around the US and the world, while monthly Under the lights feeds legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.
