NEW YORK — Ahmed knew he faced arrest if he continued to sit in the waiting room outside Courtroom 34, on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza. The man sitting across from him told him so.
The man, a concerned federal worker who’d come to immigration court in his free time and compared ICE officers to Nazi Gestapo, had practically begged Ahmed, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect his privacy, to stand up and walk out of the room with him.
“You didn’t bring any water?” the man whispered, suggesting Ahmed leave with him to get a drink. He overturned his pointer and middle fingers, scurrying them along his palm to mime Ahmed leaving the room.
Since late May, federal agents have swarmed immigration courts across the country, arresting people who show up to their appointments, pass through metal detectors and identify themselves by name in open hearings. It was my fifth day attending court, and I’d seen plenty of these arrests already.
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“He thinks that you’re at risk of being arrested,” I told Ahmed, referring to the man trying to entice him to leave. I motioned to the clutch of agents, most of them wearing masks, who’d been eyeing us from a few feet away. The waiting room wasn’t bigger than a shipping container. A few minutes earlier, I had seen one of them glance at the name listed on the paperwork Ahmed was holding, checking it against another document. “The paper they’re pointing to, it’s a list of people to be arrested.”
Ahmed was steadfast. He said that he had come all this way — from Africa through Turkey, Spain, Colombia, Central America, Mexico, and finally to the U.S. border, where he was taken into custody by a Border Patrol agent and was now pursuing an asylum claim. Over two years working at a corner store in Queens, he’d picked up a lot of English. And he was committed to following the legal process. Besides, he said, if he left now, he could face a deportation order for missing the hearing. He wasn’t turning back: “I came here to be allowed to immigrate.”
The federal worker was despondent. “That road leads one direction,” he said.
Within a few minutes, officers executed a half-dozen arrests in quick succession, almost all of them from among the crowd of Spanish-speaking immigration court respondents who had just checked in with a judge and were about to leave the building. Ahmed was next up, scheduled to coincide with an Arabic translator.
By the time a court clerk entered the waiting area and asked if the Arabic-speaking respondent was present, the agents had ferreted Ahmed to a holding cell downstairs. He’d missed his hearing after all.
I witnessed 20 such arrests over five scattered days in immigration court this month.
There were many more I didn’t see. Multiple vinyl-tiled hallways inside 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway, neighboring federal buildings in lower Manhattan, are dedicated to immigration courtrooms. An attorney who has worked in both buildings for years estimated agents have averaged around a dozen arrests per building per day since President Donald Trump began aggressively pursuing courthouse arrests in late May.
“We aren’t some medieval kingdom, there are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law. Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, wrote in a lengthy statement to HuffPost.
In New York, those arrested in courthouses generally get whisked away to the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza. Hundreds of them have spent the night — or many nights — there, without beds or showers, before being transferred to other facilities around the country.
For some, deportation will be rapid, given the Trump administration’s expanded use of “expedited removal,” in which people who’ve recently arrived in the United States can be removed from the country without an immigration judge’s order. Under the Biden administration, the designation was constrained to people who had arrived at the border within the past 14 days. Now, the time limit is two years — or even longer in some cases, according to a class-action lawsuit challenging the courthouse arrests — and Trump has applied it nationwide.
Others could languish in detention. While Trump has so far crammed nearly 60,000 people into overcrowded detention facilities, with certain exceptions, the millions of people with open immigration cases in the United States have been allowed to attend hearings without being detained. (Claims of overcrowding and subprime conditions in ICE facilities are “categorically false,” McLaughlin said, adding that detainees were provided proper meals, medical treatment and “opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”)
But things are changing. Earlier this month, the administration declared that people who crossed the border without authorization aren’t eligible for a bond hearing — a policy that means millions of people are potentially vulnerable to detention in notoriously poor conditions while they fight their cases for months or years. At the same time, Trump now has billions in new funding from Congress, and expanded detention capacity at military bases and new, privately built tent camps around the country, such as “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. And, on order from the White House, immigration agents — not just ICE, but special agents across several Cabinet agencies — are working every day to meet Trump’s sky-high arrest quotas.
Advocates believe the threat of detention, even for those with valid immigration cases, has motivated many immigrants to simply not show up for their hearings. During the Biden administration, the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge — which, like all immigration judges, answers to the executive branch, not the judicial one — issued a memo formalizing a ban on immigration court arrests, except in rare circumstances.
The chief immigration judge at the time, Sheila McNulty, wrote that such arrests would create a “chilling” effect and “disincentivize noncitizens from appearing for their hearings.” When the Trump administration took power, a new memo rescinded that policy, saying it had failed to “explain why, contrary to logic, aliens with valid claims to legal immigration status would be disincentivised from attending their hearings, even when they had no reason to fear any enforcement action by DHS.”
These developments are all downstream from what, for the past decade, has been the central political message of Trump and the Republican Party: that undocumented people are rapists and murderers. And during his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to act on that racist generalization, calling for “mass deportation” of millions of “criminal illegals,” even those whose only offense was overstaying a visa, which is not a crime. In office, Trump has erased the Biden administration’s policy that prioritized serious criminals and recent arrivals for arrest and deportation. Now, ICE officers make no such distinction, and every undocumented person is eligible to be detained simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The result of these trends, in practice, is a massive spike in immigration arrests for people who have no criminal record at all, and a 50% increase in people in immigration detention since the end of Joe Biden’s presidency — a figure expected to continue increasing.
“This is fishing in a stocked pool,” one federal agent involved with immigration court arrests told me. “You tell them, ‘Show up at this location,’ and then they show up and you grab them.”
He noted that special agents who typically investigate complex crimes were being pulled onto courthouse arrest duty.
“If you are a criminal,” the agent added, “now is an easier time for you.”
PATRICK T. FALLON via Getty Images
In lower Manhattan, it only takes a couple of seconds for agents to transform New Yorkers attending appointments into detainees. I learned in the hallways of 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway that people react to being spontaneously arrested quite differently.
One young person taken into custody had full make up on and was styled like a modern David Bowie, with press-on nails, a dramatic cinched corset over a white collared shirt and red tie, and rimless sunglasses. As they exited Courtroom 34 and spotted the waiting federal agents, they casually lifted a glowing, battery-powered fan to chin height. They had no visible reaction as officers whisked them from view.
Another woman, wearing a white vest and heels with hair slicked into a ponytail, responded to being escorted into an elevator by masked agents with no more than casual annoyance, even boredom, as if she were in a long line.
Far more common were reactions you might expect: panic, horror, yelling, tears.
At the end of one large “master calendar” hearing, in which a few dozen people fill the same courtroom for a routine check-in with a judge, ICE officers gathered outside with lists of names and faces. One-by-one, people passed the courtroom threshold and were stopped by the agents in the waiting room — an impromptu checkpoint.
One man, hearing his name, tried to retreat into court, out of an agent’s reach. But there was nowhere for him to go: The agent lunged across the threshold, grabbing him. A few minutes later, I witnessed a man pinned to the ground by four agents. “Auxilio!” he yelled, over and over. His cries for help reverberated through the hallway outside, growing louder and higher-pitched, turning into shrieks — “Auxilio! Auxilio!” — before officers pulled him away.
Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty Images
Trump has tasked law enforcement officials from across government with immigration enforcement, and that includes the agents I saw in New York immigration court. While some wore plainclothes and others had vest patches that simply said “federal agent,” most had some identifiable agency marker, whether a badge or patch.
Many were from ICE, but that included both branches of the agency: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which generally enforces immigration law, and Homeland Security Investigations, which is usually busy pursuing complex criminal investigations that include an immigration component, like weapons trafficking. Many agents were from Border Patrol or its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (HuffPost recently reported on a Trump administration memo marked “sensitive,” which detailed the diversion of roughly 2,000 CBP agents and officers to interior immigration enforcement.)
Other agencies represented included the ATF, including one agent with an “ATF Police Negotiator” patch, and at least one agent with a Treasury Department badge who declined to explain further. A few agents I saw were from the Diplomatic Security Service, the State Department’s law enforcement agency that, at least in New York, is tasked with protecting foreign dignitaries at the United Nations.
None had their names easily visible. Most wore masks, but some didn’t; one agent who coordinated several arrests told me he thought it was important people see his face while he was detaining them. Most carried guns, but some didn’t. Some carried other items, like tourniquets. The back pockets of a few bulged with the outlines of Zyn containers. One, wearing a hat that said “goober” on it, prominently displayed a fixed-blade knife on his belt.
“Where I work, I need it,” he told me when I asked about it. “I’m not going to take something off my belt just because I’m working in a new place.”
Most made small talk with lawyers and journalists. Some let their true feelings slip.
“I’m here a month,” one Diplomatic Security Service agent told me, after explaining that the standard rotation in immigration court was two weeks. “My office must be pissed at me. ‘A month for you!’”
Another said he’d just gotten back from Chad, where he was doing embassy security and aid monitoring at refugee camps. I asked what he thought about the fact that some people he arrested could end up in dangerous, unfamiliar countries if they received a final removal order.
“It sucks in general,” he said. “I would not want to be dumped in Chad, let alone South Sudan or Somalia.” The Trump administration, pursuant to a third-country agreement with South Sudan, recently sent eight U.S. immigration detainees to the country, though only one was South Sudanese. Several other countries have also accepted non-national detainees, most notably El Salvador, and the administration has pursued similar deals with dozens more.
Once, I recognized an ATF agent on immigration court duty with their mask off. I said I’d heard from others that they’d rather be doing their real jobs.
“I think that’s a good way of putting it,” they said, after noting they hadn’t volunteered for the rotation.
Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review — the Justice Department body that oversees immigration courts — declined to comment on a detailed list of questions, and directed HuffPost to DHS “regarding their enforcement operations.”
McLaughlin said courthouse arrests were beneficial because law enforcement officers “already know where a target will be” and because people attending court “have gone through security and been screened to not have any weapons.”
Seeing the agents in action made me think of a recent Atlantic article, which quoted ICE agents describing how the push for thousands of immigration enforcement arrests had taken agents off of complex investigations.
“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” one agent told the publication. And another: “[Homeland Security Investigations] personnel are being picked off the investigative squads, and there’s only so many people to go around… There are national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed.”
It’s difficult to know how common this dissatisfaction is. Obviously, none of the agents I’d observed arresting people unlucky enough to be on their list had quit their jobs over the assignment. But some seemed conflicted. On July 14, agents stood by as a mother led two children to the elevator bank after a court hearing. They weren’t on the list, and were allowed to leave. One Border Patrol agent who typically wore a mask and baseball hat — and who had not responded kindly to my prodding questions — crouched down to the kids’ eye level, removed his mask, and grinned at the children before the elevators swallowed them up.
Another agent, Hell Gate reported, had loudly announced to a hallway of journalists, “If I had to describe the last two weeks, I’d say ‘sunshine’!” But later, in an unguarded moment speaking to a colleague, he was more frank: “Every day I set my alarm for 5, and every morning I still find myself looking at my phone at 4:50.”
After an arrest, the family members linger.
On July 3, there was a mother with a stroller and two children, maybe 1 and 4 years old. Many immigration court respondents are new parents, and waiting rooms are often filled with babbling infants and toddlers. The mother was short, with a kind face straining under anxiety. She waited by the elevator bank with the kids while her husband went to his hearing. She worked to keep her kids busy, making circles with the stroller as they rode along. Occasionally, the older child would play with the younger one, wiggling a toy around.
After an hour or two, she grew serious. What was going on? Press photographers, from the scrum that hang out in the hallway, began to show her photos they’d taken of men who had been arrested that day. The second photographer she approached scrolled through his photos, checking her reaction. Eventually, she twitched and began to cry. One of the photos showed her husband being taken under arrest. She’d missed it. She turned away and looked at the ground, collecting her children and making a beeline for the exit.
The crowded hallway, which had been filled with mindless chatter throughout the day, witnessed the entire exchange and fell silent.
A similar situation unfolded on July 8, when an effusive 6-year-old girl, with bright eyes and braids that fell to her mid-back, joined her mother in the middle of a waiting room. Around 20 feet away, a clutch of federal agents leaned on the wall by the courtroom door, making small talk with each other. Several volunteers and clergy kept close to the mother and child, sitting in the buffer seats closer to the agents while providing the family some company.
One volunteer had suddenly furnished, as if by magic, a pad of paper and a large pack of crayons. “Draw where your favorite place would be, if we weren’t here,” the volunteer suggested. The child drew happily. Eventually, more agents appeared out of an adjacent hallway, joining the others by the courtroom door a few feet away. A man, unrelated to the girl or her mother, exited the courtroom and the officers quickly placed their hands on him, taking him under arrest and hauling him into custody.
The girl stopped coloring and took in the scene. Her eyes darted after the action and she leaned forward in her seat, gripping the edge of it with both hands. Her eyebrows twisted from concern into panic. The man was taken out of sight. The girl’s mother turned stone-faced, paralyzed. Eventually, the volunteer muscled out a gentle grin and offered the girl the crayons again. The girl paused, then took them.
The minutes ticked by. The agents talked amongst themselves, the girl colored. “You’re very confident in your drawing,” the volunteer cooed. The mother was concerned. She approached Father Fabian Arias, a yearslong presence in these halls, and together they walked to one of the unmasked agents, who asked for her partner’s name. She said it. “Ha sido detenido,” the agent said. He’s been detained.
As the woman’s life changed, the agents continued chatting in the background. “It’s Prime Day!” one exclaimed.
The detainee’s wife made a few quick phone calls in Spanish, and then broke down crying. The girl didn’t seem to notice, and budged only when the volunteer broke the news to her that it was time to stop coloring.
On the sidewalk outside the federal plaza a few minutes later, the mother and daughter joined various politicians who’d observed court proceedings that day, including New York City Comptroller Brad Lander — who himself had been arrested by these same agents just three weeks prior — and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Temperatures hovered in the mid-90s, and someone produced a strawberry ice cream bar for the girl. She vomited it onto the sidewalk before being taken to an air-conditioned SUV.
Spencer Platt via Getty Images
The logic behind the arrests was inscrutable. I heard of several instances of people being arrested despite judges assigning them another appearance months in the future. For people further along in the asylum process, an arrest could mean being transferred across the country and appearing before new judges in different courts who have no idea of your case history, after months or years in a different region.
On July 3, one man in a flowing white robe was arrested despite making no progress in his immigration case that day because there had not been a translator available for Wolof, the West African language, said Julie Won, a New York City Council member who sat in on the hearing.
Presumably, the man was on the lists that federal agents walking the halls of New York’s immigration courts checked periodically, filled with names and sometimes pictures of their targets. I’d heard of at least one agent dressed in plainclothes, waiting in courtrooms to confirm a given target’s attendance and letting others know to prepare for an arrest. Sometimes, people approached agents asking for help finding their courtroom, unwittingly giving agents the chance to check the name on their paperwork.
But no one seemed to know how these lists came together. Did everyone I saw be detained pose an urgent public safety risk? That seemed implausible. Was it just a matter of nabbing people who qualified for “expedited removal,” and were therefore easier to deport?
The courtroom arrests had begun in May with ICE attorneys asking immigration judges to dismiss a given person’s existing case, clearing the way for ICE agents to arrest them and pursue expedited removal. But from what I saw, courthouse arrests these days aren’t limited to people whose cases ICE has moved to dismiss. A class-action lawsuit challenging the courthouse arrests filed this month included several pseudonymous defendants who’ve been in the United States for longer than two years and were arrested in immigration court, even though they should have been ineligible for expedited removal, the suit argued. The same lawsuit noted that the administration was pursuing expedited removal even in cases where immigration judges do not immediately grant dismissals, a move plaintiffs argued was unlawful.
Even more confusing, the agents’ lists didn’t seem to be the final word on whether someone was arrested.
Last week, a young couple and their toddler son were stopped at the waiting room doorway by an agent who demanded the man identify himself. Benjamin Remy, an attorney with the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group who is a fixture in immigration court alongside his colleague Allison Cutler, told the family in Spanish that they had a right to remain silent.
The agent threatened to detain the man until they identified him, and urged him to pass his son off to his partner, who refused to engage with the agents. In the midst of the brief standoff, the child nuzzled his father’s face lovingly, and the father tried to reciprocate the attention.
“Just go,” I heard someone say. At that point, the family appeared to simply walk past the agents, and were seemingly allowed to leave. I got up to follow them to the elevator bank, but they turned a corner while more arrests were ongoing behind me. I wasn’t able to confirm they were able to leave, but it seemed they had.
“Absolute authority executed in the most arbitrary and unpredictable way possible,” Remy texted me later, describing the stand-off, and the courthouse arrests more generally. He said he’d seen one-off instances of agents letting people go before, if they had serious medical conditions or if they were the sole provider for kids at home. But these were extremely rare exceptions.
That trend has continued for those behind bars.
“I personally have not seen anybody get out on any sort of ICE parole since this began” in late May, Remy said.
He added that agents were especially rough with targeted court respondents in the early days of the courthouse arrest wave, but that the violence had subsided somewhat after volunteer observers and photojournalists started lining the immigration court hallways. And to that end, the presence of sometimes dozens of volunteer observers in lower Manhattan does provide a real public service to the respondents in immigration court.
Beyond that, the observers — from groups including the New Sanctuary Coalition, Make the Road New York, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — offer basic information on legal rights, reminding people that they have a right to remain silent and that they don’t have to sign anything, such as deportation documents.
Once in detention, this information can really make a difference. Indigent immigration detainees aren’t guaranteed an attorney, and those who have one are often only allowed to speak with them for a few minutes. It’s common for detainees to be pressured to sign hugely significant documents.
I saw volunteers handing out know-your-rights fliers in various languages, and sometimes, taking down the information of an emergency contact they could follow up with in the event a respondent was detained.
“It’s important to witness and tell the story of what’s happening,” New York Episcopal Bishop Matthew Heyd told me one morning, when he and others in a group of faith leaders were on hand to observe the court. “This should be a safe place, a place of sanctuary, and instead, our government has made it a place of chaos and cruelty.”
Remy said it would be helpful to have more multilingual people — such as those who speak French, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Mandarin, or Cantonese — as well as attorneys, especially those who are multilingual, in the court hallways.
And I saw why. During my days in immigration court, the volunteers and attorneys were numerous, but they couldn’t keep pace with the arrests. Many people I saw arrested hadn’t interacted with any of the volunteers beforehand. Like thousands of other immigration detainees before them, they were headed into a byzantine, dehumanizing system without many people in their corner. Watching their arrests felt like a dirty secret I wouldn’t soon be able to wash away.
An image from July 17 haunted me. As I sat with Ahmed, I glanced inside Courtroom 34. The court’s doors were open to the waiting room, where the federal agents were waiting. The people inside might not have known who was up for arrest, but they seemed to know anything was possible. They glanced out nervously at the agents, trying to keep focused on the judge.
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” one attorney had told me earlier, referring to the dilemma these respondents faced: Show up and face potential detention during the duration of your immigration proceedings — maybe a few hours, maybe years — or skip the hearing and risk joining the million-plus people in the United States with final removal orders from immigration judges.
Those like Ahmed, who show up despite knowing about the arrests ongoing in court buildings, are making a bet on America — that it will respect their legal rights, and that maybe it has room for them, too.
Having seen what happened to so many of them, I’m not so sure.