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…