Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security officer who oversaw the controversial 2025 arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka during a detention center oversight visit was given a new job: U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York.
Ricky Patel, formerly Homeland Security Investigations’s Special Agent in Charge in the Newark field office, was designated in January of this year as U.S. Marshal for a district that includes Manhattan, the Bronx, and Westchester County. U.S. Marshals, a law enforcement division of the Justice Department, are the enforcement arm of the federal courts system.
According to his official biography, Patel has had a long career in HSI, one of the two branches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working in the department’s D.C. headquarters and New York field office. He became the leader of the Newark field office in 2022, per his LinkedIn page, making him the top HSI official in the state of New Jersey.
In May 2025, shortly after DHS reopened the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark, Baraka and three Democratic representatives arrived for an oversight visit that became a melee after officers arrested the mayor for trespassing. Patel was the one who ordered Baraka’s arrest, saying that he was doing so “per the deputy attorney general of the United States.”
The ensuing scuffle resulted in still-pending assault charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark); Patel is named as one of McIver’s victims in the indictment. Patel, alongside then-interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, was later named in a lawsuit from Baraka accusing the Trump administration of “violating constitutional rights.”
Patel also wrote a letter in support of Habba during her scuttled Senate confirmation process; Habba has since been booted from the U.S. Attorney’s office by a series of federal judges.
At some point last summer, Patel became special agent in charge of the New York HSI field office, and Michael McCarthy took his place in New Jersey. Then, on January 20 of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi designated Patel as a U.S. Marshal.
U.S. Marshals are subject to Senate confirmation, but Patel’s nomination has not been submitted to the Senate thus far. Under federal law, U.S. Marshal designees can serve until someone else is confirmed, their own nomination is rejected by the Senate, or “the expiration of the thirtieth day following the end of the next session of the Senate.”
