It's Wednesday, you deserve a treat, like an episode of the Hell Gate Podcast! Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rows of the unmarked white vans that masked federal agents use to kidnap New Yorkers sit waiting in a parking garage at Hudson River Park.
Hudson River Park Trust—the organization that manages the strip of parkland that runs from Battery Place to West 59th Street on Manhattan's West Side—took nearly $170,000 from the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security last year in exchange for providing parking spots for Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles.
According to publicly available federal contract data, the Trump administration paid the Hudson Park River Trust $169,035.79 in 2025 to "provide secure parking spaces" to DHS, ICE, and ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations at the 24-hour parking garage at the river's edge at Pier 40, near West Houston Street.
The deal is part of a five-year, $797,358 contract that began June 30, 2021, and ends June 30, 2026.
The trust's contract with the Trump administration was first published in a database on Sludge last Friday as part of an interactive map the outlet made detailing every ICE contractor working with the Trump administration since January 20, 2025. For example, in New York, ICE has paid $48.8 million to the NYC-based consulting firm Deloitte, $7.5 million to a small company based upstate that makes tents for detention camps, $3.75 million to a local facial recognition company that will help ICE identify people who assault agents, $1.5 million to accountants Ernst & Young, and millions to various New York-based crypto investigation companies, social media monitoring firms, and mapping softwares.