A man locked up by ICE says agents questioned him about his run-in with MAGA YouTuber Nick Shirley while taking him into custody last month.
The claim appears in a declaration filed in Manhattan federal court by Mamdou Ndoye. Ndoye, from Mali, is one of ten West African immigrants swept up during an ICE raid on the knockoff-goods stalls of Lower Manhattan’s Canal Street in October 2025.
A federal judge had ordered him released in early February, ruling that ICE had “failed to follow its own regulations” during the arrest. A week later, on Feb. 12, Ndoye was summoned to what he understood to be a standard check-in about his GPS ankle monitor—but he was then jailed again.
“When I asked them why, they said they could not tell me,” Ndoye wrote in the declaration, which was filed on Tuesday and reported by Courthouse News. “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.”
Speaking to Courthouse News from detention on Monday, Ndoye added: “They said I was being mean to Nick.”
Shirley, 23, is a Utah-born conservative content creator whose anti-immigrant videos have made him a darling of the MAGA right. Among his fans are Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, and billionaire Elon Musk. The Daily Beast has previously reported on Shirley’s history of staging content. He has no journalism background.
Shirley posted a video on Sept. 25, 2025, visiting the sidewalk stalls of Canal Street—beloved by tourists for their knockoff goods—and accusing the largely immigrant vendors of being “dangerous migrant scammers.” It has racked up around 900,000 views on YouTube.
Ndoye confronted him on camera that day, and Shirley subsequently posted the footage. Ndoye appears in the video’s thumbnail, with an arrow pointing at him and a caption reading “update he got deported.” He has not actually been deported.
Speaking to Courthouse News from detention on Monday, Ndoye said Shirley personally identified him to ICE agents during the October raid. “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,” he told the outlet. “And then he put up his camera and recorded the arrest, posted it online and got a million views.”
When agents rearrested him months later, Ndoye told Courthouse News that they told him he had been out of line. “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,” he said.
The government has not referenced Shirley in its legal justification for keeping Ndoye detained.
Shirley’s influence on federal immigration enforcement has been most dramatically on display in Minnesota. On Dec. 26, 2025, he posted a 42-minute video alleging widespread fraud at Somali-run childcare centers in Minneapolis. The claims were largely unsubstantiated—state officials said inspectors had found no evidence of fraud—but the video amassed more than 135 million views on X.
Vance reposted it, declaring that Shirley had “done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that ICE had “surged resources” to Minnesota in response. In the weeks that followed, two American citizens—unarmed mom Renee Nicole Good, and VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti, both 37—were shot dead by federal immigration agents.
Ndoye said that in the six days between his Feb. 12 rearrest and his transfer to Orange County, he was held at 26 Federal Plaza, a controversial Lower Manhattan immigration detention facility that federal judges have scrutinized for poor sanitary conditions and overcrowding. “They had me in a small room with 11 other people,” he wrote in his declaration. “I was not able to shower once during that time.”
Barack Obama appointee U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick, who first ordered Ndoye released, had been sharply critical of his original October arrest, calling it “cursory” in a 20-page ruling.
The government now argues Ndoye’s removal is “reasonably foreseeable”—a claim Ndoye disputes, saying it is based in part on inaccurate travel documents.
He is representing himself in his ongoing bid for release, with assistance from his wife, a U.S. citizen with whom he has seven children. The couple owns a Canal Street West African restaurant.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and Nick Shirley for comment.
