As ICE agents continued arresting immigrants leaving their hearings at city courts, attorneys, advocates and lawmakers joined them in the narrow hallways ahead of the Fourth of July holiday, bearing witness to what they say is an obliteration of due process.
Democrat lawmakers filed into courtrooms on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza Thursday morning where they watched asylum seekers’ hearings and several of their subsequent arrests as they left the courtrooms.
“What I witnessed was deeply alarming. Families, children, couples, all who had shown up to court, shaking with fear and anxiety — many with legitimate asylum claims and credible evidence that they face danger if returned to their home countries,” Assembly Member Grace Lee wrote in a statement.
Lee said a judge rescheduled hearing dates for two West African immigrants when it was determined there was no interpreter available to translate to their first language.
But as they stepped outside the courtroom with Lee walking ahead of them, a plainclothes officer wearing a Nike cap grabbed the first migrant by the arm, pushing him ahead to a second uniformed U.S. Border Patrol agent wearing a ski mask. He led the migrant down a hallway before disappearing into a stairwell.
The second asylum seeker exited, and another masked U.S. Border Patrol agent grabbed him, holding his hands at his back as he rushed him down the hall to the same stairwell.
Lee said she saw one of the men weep as he was whisked away.
“This is not justice. These courts are functioning as traps,” Lee said in the statement. “Immigrants are being denied basic due process — the right to counsel, to present evidence and to have their claims heard. What is happening is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American.”
“Clearly, there is no due process,” Council Member Julie Won told reporters in the hallway after the pair’s arrest. “They were supposed to have a hearing and they were adjourned because they did not have the proper translation services, which is what is due to them by the court of the United States of America. This is not the U.S. anymore.”
Since the blitz of courthouse arrests began in late May, Department of Homeland Security attorneys have routinely moved to dismiss immigrants’ cases in court in hopes that the judge would grant it, stripping them of their status as asylum seekers and rendering them subject to expedited removal. Federal agents have been staging themselves outside the courtrooms with printed photos of their targets in hand and arresting these people as they leave the courtroom.
City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has observed immigration hearings on numerous occasions, told reporters last week that this process was “already a travesty of justice,” saying it did not have “adequate legal basis.”
But now it has become clear federal agents are arresting immigrants whether their case was dismissed or not.
Alexa Aviles, who serves as the Chair of the City Council’s Committee on Immigration decried the ongoing courthouse arrests, plainly characterizing what she witnessed as “facism.”
“What we see is Trump again directing agents to break the law. These are people that are following the legal right and their proceedings that they are being asked to do. They are doing the right thing and they are being abducted by masked, armed agents,” she told reporters outside the courthouse. “This is not democracy. This is lawlessness. This is facism. ICE is arresting whoever they want.”
Marco Chipantiza, an Ecuadorian immigrant whose 20-year-old daughter Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema was arrested by ICE while leaving her June 24 court hearing, joined electeds outside the courthouse, making an emotional plea for her release. The heartbroken dad said his daughter faces persecution and certain death if deported back to Ecuador.
A judge gave Chipantiza-Sisalema, who has no criminal history, another court date at her hearing. Regardless, federal agents arrested her when she stepped outside the courtroom.
Since then she has been in a detention cell on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, sleeping on the floor with 50 other women, without access to a shower, still wearing the same red shirt and blue jeans she was arrested in.
“I still don’t understand why they detained my daughter.” Chipantiza, 40, told reporters in Spanish.
“I’m begging the authorities to understand my situation, and the situation of many immigrant families who are here looking for a better life.”
Advocates said Chipantiza-Sisalema was pursuing her GED through a DOE funded program.
While detained, she has only been able to phone her parents three times, for roughly one minute each time. She has not been allowed to contact a lawyer.
Attorney Paige Austin with Make the Road New York filed a “habeas corpus” petition for Chipantiza-Sisalema in federal court, calling for her immediate release and arguing her “initial detention and her incommunicado confinement are unlawful.”
Austin argued that her detention violated her right to due process, given there was no change in her case warranting a change in her custody status.
On Tuesday the New York City Law Department filed an amicus brief backing a detained 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant and former Queens high school student.
Similar to Chipantiza-Sisalema, Jose Luis Rojas Figuera was arrested by ICE after his June 2 hearing at 26 Federal Plaza, despite the judge denying the government’s move to dismiss his case and granting him another court date.
The city’s filing, made in federal court in the Eastern District of New York argued that Rojas Figuera was “detained without cause and in violation of his right to due process.”
Rojas Figuera, who attended the Pan American International High School in Elmhurst for roughly a year after arriving in New York in October 2023, has no criminal history and was pursuing a green card, according to the brief.
Rojas Figuera attended high school for a year before leaving to work in order to support and care for his mother, who has severe diabetes, according to Austin, who reps him.
Austin previously told The News Rojas Figuera has had “a really hard time in detention,” noting that he’d first been held at 26 Federal Plaza before being shuffled off to a detention facility in Nassau County and then another in Texas. He was later returned to New York, where he was being held in an upstate jail.
A DHS spokesperson said Rojas Figuera entered the U.S. “illegally” and was released into the country by the Biden administration.
“Claims his due process rights are being violated are false,” the spokesperson said. “All of his claims will be heard before an immigration judge. This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
Those detained with pending court cases will have to fight their cases from a cage, sometimes thousands of miles away from their families and often without legal representation, which is unaffordable for many.
Data has shown that detained immigrants face a much lower success rate avoiding deportation compared to their non-detained counterparts.
New York Senator Julia Salazar, who was among the electeds observing hearings Thursday called for New Yorkers to reject what is happening inside lower Manhattan immigration courts.
“That is unlawful. It is unjust. We all have a responsibility, not only elected officials, but all of us as New Yorkers, as Americans, to object to this,” she said outside the courthouse. “To fight this with everything we have. And to demand that every single person who is being detained in this building who is being unlawfully detained, that all of them are released and reunited with their families.”