Dylan Lopez Contreras, a Venezuelan public school student, was detained before Mamdani’s administration began — and was left off the White House list
The Student Who Was Left Off the List
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited President Donald Trump at the White House on February 26, 2026, he arrived with a list. The list contained the names of five individuals whose immigration cases he was asking the president to address: Columbia University student Ellie Aghayeva, who had been detained by ICE that same morning, and four other current and former Columbia students — Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia — all of whom had been targeted by federal immigration authorities in connection with pro-Palestinian protests. Aghayeva was released within hours, following what Mamdani described as a phone call from Trump after their meeting. But advocates and legal experts noticed something significant about the list: it did not include Dylan Lopez Contreras, a 20-year-old Venezuelan immigrant from the Bronx who was the first New York City public school student to be detained by ICE during Trump’s second-term immigration crackdown.
Who Is Dylan Lopez Contreras
Contreras was arrested by federal agents on May 21, 2025, during a routine hearing in immigration court in Manhattan. He was a high school student at the time. His arrest drew outrage from elected officials across the city, including from Mamdani himself, who was then in the final weeks of his primary race for the Democratic mayoral nomination. “This is where Eric Adams’ silence and complicity has led us,” Mamdani wrote on X at the time, calling the arrest a case of “kidnapping New York City high school students.” Last month, Senator Chuck Schumer brought Contreras’s mother as his guest to Trump’s State of the Union address. Contreras remains detained.
Why Was He Left Off the List?
All five individuals Mamdani brought to Trump’s attention had connections to Columbia University. Four of them had participated in demonstrations over Israel’s war in Gaza — a political cause that Mamdani has expressed sympathy for. Contreras has no such connection. He is, by all accounts, a young man whose only offense was being in the United States without documentation while attending public school and caring for his family. Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president and prominent immigrant advocate, said she communicated concerns directly to a Mamdani administration official after the White House meeting. “Dylan should be at the top of the list,” she told Gothamist. “It’s the most outrageous detention. All for the sin of going to school and taking care of his family.” When asked about Contreras by reporters, the mayor’s press secretary sent a statement about the Columbia students. The statement did not address Contreras.
The Politics and the Principle
The omission raises questions that go to the heart of how the Mamdani administration will define its immigration advocacy. If the mayor is willing to go to the White House to argue for detained immigrants, what criteria determine who makes the list? The administration’s response to date has not provided a clear answer. The National Immigration Law Center has documented the disproportionate detention of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean under current enforcement priorities. The ACLU has filed legal challenges to ICE detention practices that target students and community members with no criminal history. For the advocates pushing for Contreras to be added to the mayor’s future communications with the White House, the issue is not political: it is a question of whether a child who came to New York to go to school deserves the same advocate as a Columbia student who participated in a demonstration.
