This story was originally published by Documented. Sign up for their newsletter at documentedny.com/newsletter.

At Fleur de Lis Beauty & Esthetics in Flatbush, Brooklyn, clients typically arrive with an appointment. But in the nearly 10 years the luxury medical spa has been in the community, co-owner Wendy Jules says daily walk-ins weren’t unusual.

“You would get like at least five to 10 people come in and say, ‘What services do you offer over in the neighborhood’ or ‘We’re visiting from out of town,’” said Jules.

In recent months, those casual drop-ins have become much less common. In July, Jules said there were weeks when only about four people stopped in — a drastic change, especially in a neighborhood where summer typically brings more people outside.

“You can definitely see there’s a downturn on the activity in the street,” she said. “There’s usually more people out, more people shopping, or people stopping in to see what services are being offered.”

Jules first noticed the slowdown around the end of May, roughly the same time businesses and residents began sharing concerns about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area.

“I haven’t seen it because I don’t know if they’re in uniform or not,” she recalled, “but there have been other businesses who would say, ‘Hey, there’s some activity on this street. Stay vigilant and keep your eyes open.’ It’s scary.”

That fear extends beyond Fleur de Lis, and has affected businesses across Flatbush, one of Brooklyn’s largest immigrant communities. The neighborhood is home to roughly 20% of New York City’s Caribbean community and many of its businesses are immigrant-owned. 

A recent survey conducted by the Flatbush-Nostrand Junction Business Improvement District found that 70% of local business owners who responded reported a decrease in foot traffic within the last year. Fifty percent said customers had explicitly raised concerns about ICE and 33% anticipated a likely reduction in their workforce. This has been a trend across New York City, where immigrant-heavy neighborhoods have seen a decline in business and foot traffic, Documented previously reported.

Kenneth Mbonu, president and executive director of the Flatbush-Nostrand Junction Business Improvement District, said those numbers are especially concerning for the corridor’s smallest stores.

“Many of these businesses are brick-and-mortar,so they have a location on the commercial corridor and many of them survive primarily by the foot traffic,” Mbonu told Documented.

More than 80% of businesses in the district are minority-owned, according to Mbonu, who estimates that of those minorities, more than 70% are immigrants.

Many of the businesses, Mbonu said, were already adjusting to seeing fewer customers, a trend that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People were working from home, so the commute to and from work was less,” he explained. “But with those slight declines in foot traffic in the area, that affected a lot of us, more businesses that can’t really transform directly to these kinds of changes.”

Smaller businesses have fewer ways to adapt when customers stop showing up in person, Mbonu said, including limited online and social media infrastructure.

Those pressures have since been compounded by tariffs and heightened immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. The BID survey published in July asked merchants about both.

Among owners willing to disclose financial details, Mbonu said some reported significant losses.

“We saw that a lot of their revenues had dropped by even up to 50%. And that’s a drastic situation for many of these businesses because many of them would not be able to pay their rent, which is usually their biggest cost,” he said.

The decline in foot traffic has led some merchants to begin delivering products directly to people. “But that is an added cost on them,” Mbonu said. “But they don’t have a choice. They have to keep their clients happy.”

Immigration enforcement is also affecting staffing. Mbonu said some merchants have reported multiple ICE raids, while workers with pending immigration applications who are allowed to work still fear leaving home or reporting to their jobs.

“Many of them did not want to take any risk due to the indiscriminate nature of the ICE arrests and so on,” Mbonu said. “It’s just not a healthy environment for a lot of the small businesses and their challenges.”

That fear is not confined to people without legal status, he added.

“Some of them even have green cards or some of them even have their U.S. passports. They’re legal. But just the fear of being arrested in error and finding themselves in Venezuela and having to go through the process could be quite intimidating and frightening,” he said. “So they just don’t want to come out.” More than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in 2025, according to ProPublica. 

In Flatbush’s large Caribbean immigrant community, these conversations have also included uncertainty surrounding Temporary Protected Status and what changes could mean for Haitians who have spent years building lives in the United States. Many businesses have lost staff or closed because of TPS work authorization terminations, as Documented previously reported.

For Jules, a child of Haitian immigrants, the end of TPS work authorization has hit particularly close to home. It has affected her business, her customers, her neighborhood, and her family. 

“They [Haitians who no longer have TPS] have homes, they have cars, they have careers. Like, now does everybody just get up and go to Haiti and start over? Like, how does this work?” Jules said, adding that some have chosen to leave the country rather than risk detention.

The consequences can ripple through entire families, particularly in immigrant communities where relatives may pool resources, financially support one another or send money to family members in the Caribbean.

“Now all of the money that you’ve saved or your resources are drained through lawyers. You’re concerned about if your parent is eating, is your cousin eating? What if the person is pregnant and you know they’re not getting the best treatment? It’s not like you’re saying, ‘OK, let’s put you on a JetBlue flight and send you home.’ You’re going from facility to facility, far away to be processed and documented and all this stuff,” she said.

While immigration enforcement has not changed the services Fleur de Lis provides, Jules has found herself using the business as another place to share information with people worried about what could happen to them or their relatives.

“I always tell  people who are dealing with that situation, ‘Be very careful. Make sure you’re walking with your documents. If you have to report to somewhere, please let your family know. Get a power of attorney so if something does happen that you can have someone speak on your behalf,’” she said.

For the BID, documenting those experiences is a first step toward helping merchants. Mbonu said the organization hopes to use the survey findings to work with agencies and community partners on solutions for businesses confronting lower foot traffic, staffing concerns, higher costs and an increasingly anxious customer base.

“The small micro businesses are the crux of our community and nobody really actually appreciates the impact they have on the business community and on the community and the vibrancy of the neighborhood as a whole,” Mbonu said. “But once this has been challenged, the impact is quite seen here. And it’s just that we need to come up with flexible approaches to help solve many of these problems.”

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post Flatbush Businesses Report Less Foot Traffic Amid Trump Immigration Crackdown appeared first on The City Reporter.

Federal officials belatedly confirmed the death of a third immigrant at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, more than a week after a local member of Congress told the public he had been informed of the man’s death.

But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security account conflicted with what its subagency Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously told U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez during an impromptu oversight visit on Aug. 3, he said, raising new questions about the timeline of the man’s death and when he was formally released from ICE custody.

A spokesperson for DHS said in a statement Thursday night that Guatemalan national Jose Chajon-Raxon suffered what medical staff thought was a seizure on July 19, a day after he was booked into the ICE facility.

Emergency services took Chajon-Raxon to University Hospital in Newark and ICE later “released” him, the department said.

“The nurse gave a comprehensive report to first responders and Chajon-Raxon was taken to the hospital and released from ICE custody on July 22,” the statement said. “ICE was not notified of his death.”

ICE personnel had previously told Menendez they made a discretionary release before Chajon-Raxon was taken to University Hospital, and that he died shortly after arriving there, according to the congressmember.

“They can try to evade accountability, but the American people deserve answers and transparency, which is exactly what I intend to deliver alongside my House Democratic colleagues,” Menendez said in a statement. 

The immigration enforcement agency said that, due to a recent policy change, it is no longer required to report or monitor deaths after detainees are released from its custody.

“Per ICE policy, when an individual is no longer in ICE custody, then ICE will no longer be responsible for monitoring or reviewing deaths that may occur,” the agency said. “This is common sense. ICE is not responsible when an individual passes away weeks after leaving their custody.”

It’s still not clear when exactly when Chajon-Raxon died, though Menendez, who initially informed the public about the fatality, said he first learned of the death on July 24.

Menendez brought this third death at the controversial detention center to light in an Instagram video and briefing with reporters on Aug. 3, which was reported by The City Reporter. 

Health Care Complaints

That day, Menendez had paid an impromptu oversight visit to Delaney Hall in the wake of the death of Edwin Lopez Cornejo, a Salvadoran father to a 12-year-old U.S. citizen daughter, the second known Delaney Hall detainee to die since the facility opened in the spring of 2025.

Lopez Cornejo had a series of complex medical conditions — including high blood sugar, high blood pressure and epilepsy — which were described in extensive habeas corpus filings seeking his release. His family and attorneys have said they were unsure if he’d been getting his medicine regularly in detention.

An investigation by The City Reporter in June identified dozens of lawsuits by detainees describing difficulty getting proper medical care while held at Delaney Hall, along with problems accessing medicine regularly to manage complex conditions. 

Menendez said ICE told him ambulances from University Hospital took more than 30 minutes to respond to emergency calls for both Chajon-Raxon and Lopez Cornejo. 

A spokesperson for University Hospital disputed the ambulance response times, but refused to confirm any additional details about the deaths, citing patient confidentiality.

Additional information about Chajon-Raxon’s family or his time in the United States wasn’t immediately available.

The deaths of Chajon-Raxon and Lopez Cornejo follow that of Delaney Hall detainee Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian immigrant who died last December. An autopsy later determined Wilson Brutus died of natural causes, namely a pulmonary embolism, according to New Jersey’s Health Department.

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post ICE Belatedly Confirms Death of Third Delaney Hall Detainee appeared first on The City Reporter.

A third detainee died after being held at Delaney Hall, according to Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ), who said the death wasn’t disclosed to the public by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because the agency recently changed how it reports deaths of detainees. 

Menendez described the reported death, which took place in late July, on a phone call with journalists and in an Instagram video Monday, after ICE and private prison contractor GEO Group confirmed details to him during an unannounced oversight visit on Monday. That same day, news broke about a second death at the facility, that of Edwin Cornejo Lopez, which took place over the weekend.

In total, three detainees are known to have died at the facility, including Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian immigrant, who passed away last December.

Menendez said his office initially heard about this third death on July 24, but hadn’t been able to confirm additional details until Monday. ICE did not return a request for comment on Menendez’s account, and his office was not able to confirm the person’s name or any other details right away.

In late July, a detainee who had recently arrived at Delaney Hall started experiencing what medical staff thought was a seizure, ICE and GEO Group officials told Menendez, according to the representative’s account. Emergency services were called, and the person was taken to University Hospital.

“The ICE field office in Newark makes a determination to provide a discretionary release in which the individual is released to University Hospital. Because of the release, they were technically no longer in ICE custody, which is why there’s no notification,” Menendez said. An ambulance came after about 30 minutes and the person passed away shortly after arriving at University Hospital, he added.

Menendez pointed to a June Washington Post story noting ICE would stop reporting deaths within 30 days of a detainee’s release from custody, undoing the new method of counting deaths in ICE custody that took effect in 2021.

University Hospital, a state-funded teaching hospital, declined to comment on Lopez Cornejo’s death, citing patient privacy, and didn’t return a request right away for additional comment on the second death or ambulance response times. 

Delaney Hall, the largest ICE detention facility in the New York metro area, is run by GEO Group. A strike by detainees over conditions there kicked off in late May and sparked days of protests outside, which ICE agents greeted with pepper spray and batons.

The City Reporter previously reported on dozens of federal lawsuits in which detainees described difficulty accessing medical care at the facility. 

Menendez offered additional details about Lopez Cornejo’s death on the call with reporters Monday, saying staff at Delaney Hall told him Lopez Cornejo was having lunch in the cafeteria Saturday when he complained to guards he was feeling tired and dizzy. He walked to the medical unit where he collapsed.

“He coded. He was given CPR. 911 was called. EMS arrived at Delaney Hall 37 minutes later,” Menendez said.

Cornejo Lopez made it to the hospital by 2:40 p.m. and was pronounced dead by hospital staff at 3:24 p.m, Menendez said. 

Cornejo Lopez called his family Friday saying he didn’t feel well and his hand and part of his face were numb, according to an interview with his mother that was released Monday on Facebook by several New Jersey-based immigrant rights groups. His mother then said she got a call Saturday evening from the hospital asking her to identify her son’s body.

A federal lawsuit seeking his release reviewed by The City Reporter detailed his complex regime of daily medications to treat epilepsy, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. But attorneys did not allege he had been denied medication while being held at Delaney Hall, and his mother said she wasn’t sure if her son had lacked access to his medication.

While details are still emerging in Lopez Cornejo’s case, difficulty accessing lifesaving medication with regularity was a common complaint for detainees held at Delaney Hall, The City Reporter’s investigation found.

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Lopez Cornejo’s 12-year-old daughter spoke to the crowd.

“I will not let his story be unheard, I want his voice to be heard loud and clear,” his daughter told reporters. “He’s still here with us in spirit.”

“There should be justice for all,” she added. “No one here is illegal.”

Mourners planned a vigil outside Delaney Hall for Tuesday night.

The number of deaths in ICE custody have surged to historic levels nationwide, with at least 34 deaths this year. The number of people held in custody as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign was more than 65,000 in July.

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post A Third Delaney Hall Detainee Has Died, New Jersey Congressman Says appeared first on The City Reporter.

A Salvadoran man held for the past six weeks at Delaney Hall, the largest ICE detention center in the New York metro area, has died, his mother and attorneys say. It is the second death at the facility since it opened a year and a half ago.

In a lengthy interview posted to Facebook on Monday by New Jersey-based immigrant rights groups Radio Jornalera and Radio Cosecha, Maria Cornejo, the man’s mother, described the death of her son Edwin Jeovanny Lopez Cornejo over the weekend. 

Madalyne Atenco, a paralegal at the law firm representing Lopez Cornejo in a federal habeas corpus lawsuit, also confirmed his death with The City Reporter. After the initial publication of this story, ICE released its own statement confirming his death.

Lopez Cornejo was a 39-year-old who immigrated from El Salvador nearly 20 years ago and the father of a 12-year-old U.S. citizen daughter, according to legal filings. His mother Maria said in the Facebook interview that she had last heard from her son on Friday, a day before his death.

He had called from Delaney Hall saying he didn’t feel well and that part of his face and his right hand had gone numb. 

A federal habeas corpus filing submitted on Lopez Cornejo’s behalf late last month described a detailed medical regimen to manage focal epilepsy, high blood pressure and high blood sugar, among other chronic conditions. The petition did not allege he was being denied regular medicines.

“He had a consultation and they were going to do some exams, but they didn’t say when,” Maria recounted in Spanish. 

She next heard about her son the following day in a call from the hospital, which asked her to identify his body. Hospital officials told her that her son had arrived lifeless.

“His heart had stopped,” she said. A spokesperson for University Hospital in Newark didn’t return a request for comment right away. 

No one from ICE or private firm GEO Group, which operates Delaney Hall, had called her to tell her what had happened, she said.

Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for GEO Group, deferred to ICE.

In a statement posted online, ICE said Lopez Cornejo had a medical emergency at the facility.

“GEO facility staff and medical staff responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services. The official cause of death remains pending further medical examination,” the statement read. “While in custody, Lopez-Cornejo received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals.”

“I’ve lost my son,” Maria said. “If there isn’t justice, they are going to continue this way forever, and we don’t know how many more people we have to lose in this country, working people.”

Lopez Cornejo’s attorney said he had no criminal history and was most recently working as a landscaper and also in a warehouse in Jackson, New Jersey, according to attestations in his support submitted by colleagues as part of the lawsuit seeking his release.

He was arrested by ICE on June 18, as he was walking to get his car from a towing company in Plainfield, New Jersey. He’d been deported after crossing the border as an 18-year-old in 2006, according to his habeas filing. He crossed again the next year and has remained in New Jersey ever since.

“Edwin Jeovanny Lopez Cornejo should be alive today. His death was preventable, and his family deserves answers, accountability and justice,” said Jorge Torres, organizing director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, one of the groups working with Cornejo’s family.

Lopez Cornejo’s death was the first at the facility since Delaney Hall shot into the national spotlight in late May, when detainees mounted a protest inside the facility while heavily armed ICE agents met protesters outside its gates with pepper spray and batons for days on end. 

One of the prime demands was the release of medically vulnerable detainees, who strikers said were being denied access to proper medical care.

The City Reporter detailed the accounts of dozens of those detainees, who had reported severe medical neglect while being held at the facility. They included a pregnant woman suffering from severe stomach pains who was denied prenatal care, a man with leukemia who missed two months of treatments and a Haitian woman with a throat tumor that obstructed her breathing.

Multiple detainees described difficulty accessing routine medication to manage treatable medical conditions like epilepsy and diabetes. Detainees also described having to make repeated requests over days and weeks to see a doctor on staff before finally getting an appointment.

“We are seeing regular denial of care at this facility,” said Sally Pillay, director of the immigrant advocacy group Mami Chelo. She said there should be an independent investigation into Cornejo’s death and an immediate review of all people’s cases who had severe medical needs at the facility.

Lopez Cornejo’s death followed that of Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian immigrant, who died last December, shortly after his arrival at Delaney Hall. Brutus suffered a medical emergency and staff tried to resuscitate him, according to ICE’s report on his death.

At least 32 people have died in ICE custody so far this fiscal year, which runs through October, more than any other full fiscal year on record. The prior record was 28 in fiscal year 2004.

The surging death count comes as ICE is detaining a record number of people as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. As of mid-July, there were 65,765 people in ICE detention, down slightly from a peak of 70,766 in January.

Only 29% of those in ICE custody as of mid-July had been convicted of a crime. The remaining 31% had pending criminal charges, while 40% had never been charged or convicted with a crime. 

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post Salvadoran Man Held at Delaney Hall Dies in ICE Custody appeared first on The City Reporter.

Throughout the summer, inside a small, fluorescent-lit courtroom in Lower Manhattan, hundreds of migrant children, some as young as three, faced deportation hearings. Most appeared virtually. Some sat around desks in a classroom, while others bounced on bunk beds or rocked in chairs inside small offices or storage closets. 

Detained in nearby shelters for unaccompanied minors, the vast majority did not have lawyers as they appeared before the court. 

Internal federal regulations have long barred deportation proceedings from moving ahead when children don’t have legal representation, and federal law requires the government to make every effort to fund those attorneys or facilitate pro bono counsel. But inside the courtroom of Judge Lisa W. Ling, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor appointed to the court by President Trump in 2018, none of those safeguards seemed to matter. 

Over a series of hearings observed by The City Reporter in July, Ling, dressed in a black robe, peppered unrepresented children with questions that could profoundly impact their cases: “Why did you come to the United States?” “Are you afraid of returning to your country?” “Were you able to go to school?” “When you left Guatemala, were you running away or afraid of anything?”

When Ling began to question Evan, a preteen boy from Guatemala with sideswept dark bangs, a child advocate tried to intervene. (Child advocates are assigned to particularly sensitive cases but aren’t lawyers. The City Reporter has withheld Evan’s full name and those of other children described.)

“Your honor, if I may, we understand the court’s wish to expedite proceedings,” said Nicole Guerrero of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. Evan, she pointed out, “is not represented and does not understand immigration law.” 

“Without legal representation, he is denied a full and fair hearing,” Guerrero warned. 

The judge pressed on, despite the admonition.

Ling oversees what’s known as the “detained juvenile docket,” where all children held in shelters overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in New York City, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley must appear for their deportation proceedings. Of more than 300 cases involving detained children before her between late June and the end of July, just over a quarter of those had attorneys assigned to them, according to court records. 

What’s happening in Ling’s courtroom is already playing out across the country — and is about to kick into overdrive. On Friday, the Trump administration will allow a $356 million-a-year contract for such legal services to expire, barring any last-minute agreements. As a result, some 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation across the country, including 1,300 in New York, could lose access to federally funded legal services.

“It’s an all-out war on their due process rights,” said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that oversees the nationwide contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is responsible for the care of unaccompanied migrant children. From the federal contract, Acacia then subcontracts with dozens of legal service providers across the country, nine of which are based in New York. 

“We’re going to see a lot of kids railroaded into taking voluntary departure, aka self-deport, even where their protection needs are acute and where they would be facing real danger to their lives in their countries of origin,” Aber said.

For decades, across Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government funded legal service providers, in accordance with a 2008 law that required HHS to “ensure to the greatest extent practicable” that minors had legal representation in deportation proceedings. 

But that funding came under attack last spring when the Trump administration attempted to cancel Acacia’s contract. A federal judge intervened, requiring the administration to continue the contract temporarily. 

Then late last year, HHS started delaying payments and requested new information about the children Acacia represents. Advocates decried the request as a breach of attorney-client privilege, and the millions in stalled payments are the subject of another ongoing lawsuit. In legal filings, the government has argued its requests were an effort to better account for how federal funds were being spent. 

The funding cliff comes at a perilous time for unaccompanied migrant children. They’re staying longer in federal shelters, as the Trump administration has found ways to slow-walk their release from detention, from where it is much more difficult to find legal support. At the same time, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, has sped up proceedings for unaccompanied children. 

That haste was apparent inside Ling’s courtroom. Instead of adjourning cases for several months at a time, which attorneys said had been the norm, she scheduled children to return to court every two or three weeks.

An analysis of immigration court records by The City Reporter shows a spike in the number of deportation hearings for unaccompanied minors detained in New York this year, with 1,400 to date, already surpassing the total for 2025.

“They’re cutting off access to lawyers for these children, but they need lawyers now more than ever,” said Beth Baltimore, the deputy director of the Legal Services Center at The Door, one of nine New York nonprofits with an expiring federal contract. “It was never a system that a child could navigate alone, but now it’s so much more complex and so much more difficult.”

With the wholesale cessation of all federal funding for their legal representation, advocates warn that deportations of vulnerable children are all but certain to climb.

“The feeling that we’ve been getting in the community that there’s a bit of a like closing in and targeting of children in a way that we didn’t see under the first Trump administration,” Emily Norman, the regional director of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) who oversees its New York City office. 

Asked about the end of the Acacia contract, an unnamed spokesperson for HHS said the agency had asked the group for additional data on the people it represents, which the nonprofits declined to provide. 

“The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) works to ensure the safety, well-being, and appropriate care of all children in its custody,” a statement read. “ORR remains fully compliant with legal and regulatory obligations and does not act in any way that could dissuade a child from seeking appropriate legal relief.”

‘The Court Has Given You Plenty of Time’

Apart from federally funded legal services, the Executive Office for Immigration Review has its own protections in place for unaccompanied children. Immigration judges are not supposed to “accept an admission of removability” from any child without an “attorney or legal representative, a near relative, legal guardian, or friend.” 

That admission would happen at what’s called “pleadings,” an early step towards deportation in which the Justice Department lays out its case against a migrant, and an immigration judge determines whether or not the migrant could be deported. If pleadings can’t go ahead for an unaccompanied child without a lawyer, none of the other steps in the deportation process can happen, including a deportation order, Aber of Acacia Center for Justice explained. 

“The regulations are very clear,” said Aber.

But child advocates and attorneys in New York say that practice changed several months ago, when Ling appeared to stop following the department’s internal guidance, moving ahead on the cases of detained children whether or not they had attorneys.

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for EOIR, said the agency does not comment on the decisions of individual judges and called immigration judges independent adjudicators who make their own decision on a case-by-case basis. Advocates, however, say that what’s happening in Ling’s courtroom is taking place in other courtrooms where unaccompanied children appear. 

Aber said judges across the country started moving ahead in cases involving children with no lawyers this spring, as EOIR also started scheduling unaccompanied children on “mega master” dockets and decreasing the time kids had in between hearings. 

Mattingly declined to comment on any policy shift related to unrepresented children more broadly.  

During a recent hearing, an attorney with Catholic Charities named Tonya Putnam, acting as “friend of the court,” someone who assists proceedings but does not legally represent any client, repeatedly interjected, telling Judge Ling she was out of step with current EOIR regulations. 

“Per regulations, the court should not take pleadings from an unrepresented child,” interjected Putnam, urging Ling to pause proceedings in the case of a Guatemalan teen named Ambrosio, who appeared virtually from a room lined with butterfly wallpaper and book shelves.

“The court properly took pleadings,” Ling replied, giving Ambrosio, who was in a shelter and doesn’t have a lawyer, three weeks to fill out an asylum application in English. 

The same exchange repeated in the case of Nilmar, a boy with shaggy bangs wearing a beaded necklace, who looked around the age of 15.

“Per regulations, an unrepresented child should not have pleadings taken without counsel,” Putnam repeated. 

Ling continued the proceeding anyway, asking Nilmar if he was afraid of returning to Guatemala, to which he responded “No.” Ling repeated the question several times, with Nilmar responding negatively each time.

“Why did you come to the United States?” Ling then asked. 

“To have a better life,” the child responded, through a translator.

Nilmar’s admission to the court during pleadings meant one of the only outlets of relief available to him while detained, applying for asylum, would no longer be an option.

Putnam tried to interject, “Your honor, as a friend of the court, I’m not sure the child understands the implication of what he’s saying.”

Ling asked Nilmar if he understood what she was saying, to which he replied he had, and again asked if he would feel unsafe returning to Guatemala, to which he replied again that he wasn’t afraid.

“I don’t know if you can give me some extra time to fill out what I was given, the asylum,” Nilmar asked through the translator. 

Ling said it didn’t appear he was eligible for asylum, and began to explain that she would grant him voluntary departure and he would have to leave the country by Nov. 19 or have to pay a fine of up to $5,000. 

“Can you give me more time to find a lawyer?” he wondered.

“Unfortunately I can’t do this any further. This is the 8th time that we’ve adjourned your case,” Ling said. “The court has given you plenty of time to find a lawyer.”

Nilmar ran his fingers through his hair and fidgeted in his seat, then asked Ling what would happen in his case and if he would be released to his sponsor, an uncle. She replied the court had nothing to do with his potential release to an uncle. 

“This court is granting you voluntary departure,” Ling replied. “I wish you all the best.”

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw a non-detained juvenile docket at immigration court at 290 Broadway before she was fired last fall, said piecing together whether a child has a potential asylum claim can take time, as children may be the victims of trafficking or abuse.

“It’s just so wrong just to ask a kid generically, are you afraid of going back,” Cassin, who now serves as legal director for Immigrant Children Advocates Relief Effort, said. “Maybe they don’t understand what that really means. Maybe they don’t want to admit it in that context. Maybe they were abused by their own parents, and they don’t want to say it.”

Children with attorneys aren’t typically asked in immigration court if they’re afraid to return to their countries, because their lawyer would have already screened them to determine what type of immigration relief they might be eligible for including asylum, advocates said.

‘So Why Wasn’t It Done?’

For the unrepresented children who told Judge Ling they were afraid to return to their countries, Ling set tight timelines of two or three weeks for them to fill out asylum applications in English, a difficult task for an adult in their native tongue, let alone a child who doesn’t speak the language. 

On a recent morning, a 17-year-old from Guatemala named Xavi sat with his head resting on his hands as he listened to his deportation proceedings through a Spanish translator. He’d spent months trying to reunite with his brother in New York after crossing the border and being held in a youth shelter in The Bronx. 

While there are fewer children in ORR shelters, down to just 1,700 nationwide, the time they’re spending in them has gone up dramatically to 194 days on average in June, up from just a 30 day average last fiscal year, according to government data.

Ling gave the boy three weeks to fill out an application for asylum in English, though Xavi had no lawyer. 

Sarah Caspari, a child advocate assigned to the case, begged Judge Ling for more time given the lack of attorney and the fact that, “Xavi does not speak, read or write in English.”

“This case will be proceeding,” Ling replied.

In other cases, Ling scolded children who hadn’t finished their asylum applications on the deadline she’d given them, as she did with Abimal, also from Guatemala. 

“I told you at the last hearing with or without a lawyer you had to submit the application,” Ling stated. “So why wasn’t it done?”

“I haven’t done it yet, I wanted to have a lawyer,” Abimal replied through a Spanish interpreter.

“With or without a lawyer you have to file it,” Ling warned. “I’m going to give you one more week.”

Haidee Chu contributed additional reporting.

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post Inside the NYC Courtroom Where Detained Children Face Deportation Without Attorneys appeared first on The City Reporter.

Our friends at the Documented newsroom translated this story into Mandarin. To read it, click here. 我们的合作伙伴“Documented”将这篇报道翻译成了中文。如需阅读中文版本，请点击此处。

When Pingzhu Wan, 77, bought her condominium on the northeastern tip of Staten Island more than 40 years ago, hers was the only Chinese family among the 100-odd units in the apartment complex. Her neighbors were mostly Italian and Jewish, and the nearest Chinese grocery store was across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, in southern Brooklyn. She raised her now-51-year-old daughter on the island from age three. The girl was the only Chinese child in her class.

Now, the arrival of new Chinese immigrants has significantly changed the composition of Wan’s neighborhood — and that of the island.

“As soon as a unit opens up in our complex now, the buyers are Chinese,” she said in Mandarin. “Most of them come from Brooklyn.”

Chinese residents are now the largest foreign-born group in New York City at roughly 397,000 people, surpassing Dominicans at 390,000, according to the Department of City Planning’s 2026 “Newest New Yorkers” report, which drew from census data between 2019 and 2023.

The once-a-decade account of the city’s immigrants found that while the pattern of immigrant migration in four of the five boroughs either declined or stayed level, Staten Island’s immigrant population grew from 20.4% of the borough’s overall population in 2013 to 25.5% in 2023. The island gained 28,500 foreign-born residents over the decade, a 30% increase.

Chinese people led that growth, with China becoming Staten Island’s top country of origin among the borough’s foreign-born residents. The island had more than 28,200 Chinese immigrants in 2023, or 17% of its foreign-born population, the report found. Mexicans and Ukrainians follow at 6.8% and 5.5%.

“We can hear Chinese anywhere now,” said Gary Tai, president of the Chinese Society of Staten Island, a cultural association dedicated to serving the community. “On the ferry, on the buses.”

Some neighborhoods, especially those near the Verrazzano Bridge, have seen a particularly high rate of Chinese people move in. In Rosebank, Shore Acres and Park Hill, Chinese residents represent 28.7% of the total foreign-born population. In Arrochar, South Beach, Dongan Hills and Grasmere — all with easy access to the bridge — 26.9% of the foreign-born population is Chinese. 

The City Planning report called those neighborhoods “common destinations for immigrants relocating from Brooklyn,” and said the pattern of moving from southern Brooklyn to Staten Island “mirrors a similar trajectory taken by Brooklyn’s Italian immigrant community” a half-century earlier. The growth of Chinese businesses and services on the island has also helped recent arrivals build an independent neighborhood, apart from southern Brooklyn’s Chinese community and other city Chinatowns.

Frank Morano, the City Councilmember for Staten Island’s South Shore, said the borough has always been a place where people “come looking for a little more space, a good education for their kids [and] a home they can call their own,” including his own family.

“Italians did that in enormous numbers a generation or two ago, and today more Chinese families are doing it,” said Morano, a Republican. “That’s not a departure from Staten Island’s story. It’s just a continuation of it.”

Bryan Li, a 40-year-old employee at Ya Ya Roasted, a Hong Kong-style restaurant on Hylan Boulevard in New Dorp, made his move across the Verrazzano four years ago. He left Sunset Park, where he lived for a few years after coming from China, and paid about $500,000 for a house on Staten Island. 

“You come to a new place, you put down roots,” he said in Mandarin. “It’s the traditional Chinese way of thinking. Before anything else, buy a home.”

Homeowner Haven

Each of the more than a dozen Chinese Staten Islanders interviewed by The City Reporter pointed to the same force that pulled them to the borough: the chance to buy a house and put down roots.

“The main reason is affordability, to buy a whole one-family house that’s still affordable and still part of New York City,” said Tianting Huang, a real estate agent who has helped people sell and buy houses on the island since 2014. 

Huang said the Chinese buyers he’s worked with prioritize good school zones first, then a yard and parking. The buyers are usually young families buying their first home, though some of the more expensive properties go to Chinese Brooklyn transplants trading up for more space and a slower-paced environment.

Census data from the American Community Survey in 2024 analyzed by John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, shows how home ownership has defined the community. 

Of Chinese-led households on Staten Island, 95% own their homes, the highest rate of any borough and far above Manhattan’s 22.9% rate for the same demographic. Meanwhile, the average value of a Chinese-owned home in the city, about $626,000, is the lowest in the five boroughs, compared to a citywide average of $848,000 for all Chinese-owned households.

The Chinese families who settle on Staten Island are also younger, with 25% of the population having children younger than 18 years old, compared to 18% on average among Chinese-led households across the city. 

For Bryan Li’s generation of millennial Cantonese people, moving to the island was a practical choice. Previous waves of New York’s Cantonese community shunned Staten Island for decades, he said.

“The old-timers looked down on it. It used to be a dump,” he said, referring to the Fresh Kills Landfill that closed on the island’s western shore in 2001. “And the [bridge] toll was expensive.” 

But as home prices in Brooklyn climbed past what working families could pay, Li said, “The first wave moved in, and it turned out it wasn’t as bad as people imagined. They told their friends, and their friends came.”

The median home sale price for Staten Island is $710,000 today, while the median for Brooklyn is $771,500, according to Realtor.com. But measured by price per square foot, Staten Island comes in much cheaper at $485, compared to $778 in Brooklyn.

New Businesses and Services 

As Staten Island’s Chinese population boomed, more Chinese businesses and services cropped up, mainly concentrated around one street — New Dorp Lane on the island’s east side.

“Every time my husband and I wanted dim sum, we had to drive to Manhattan,” Pingzhu Wan said of her first decades on the island. 

Now, along the New Dorp commercial strip, an array of restaurants, pharmacies, dentist’s offices and clinics operate under Chinese-language awnings.

“A new Shanghainese restaurant just opened the other week,” Wan said, complimenting the food at Little Kitchen on Hylan Boulevard. “It’s a wonderful place to gather with friends and eat.”

Many new healthcare businesses targeting Chinese residents have also opened in the area,  including adult daycare centers that provide “a space for people to get services and gather,” Tai of the Chinese Society said. 

HL Market, a large Asian grocery store with a fresh seafood aisle and an in-store butcher, arrived in 2022. The excitement around the store was so high that its opening weekend reportedly jammed traffic on the surrounding blocks.

“It used to be, when you had to go shopping or you needed services, you had to go to Brooklyn or Chinatown,” Tianting Huang said. “With the supermarket opening up a couple of years ago and the new community developing in New Dorp, there’s less need to leave the island. It’s becoming more of an independent community instead of just a satellite of Brooklyn.”

Yuqi Shao, 42, opened a dumpling and noodle shop near New Dorp Lane, modeled on the Shaxian Snacks chain she knew from China, after leaving Sunset Park in 2024. 

“A friend lived here and said that there are increasingly more Chinese residents,” she said, noting she saw potential in catering to the population and decided to launch her business there. 

The clutch of Chinese storefronts along New Dorp Lane does not resemble the city’s denser Chinatowns in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens where businesses are concentrated on several streets. Instead, they are loosely spread out over three blocks in a relatively residential area.

“We don’t really call it a Chinatown yet,” Tai said. “People live all over.” 

A Longstanding Community

Although the uptick in Chinese immigrants on Staten Island is relatively recent, there has been an established Chinese community there for decades — and many of its members are expanding their services and community groups to accommodate the more recent arrivals.

New Dorp’s Staten Island Chinese School began in 1972 as what the Chinese Society calls the first Chinese school incorporated on the East Coast. The school says it runs eight or nine classes of varying levels at a time and saw a 45% increase in enrollment in 2023, its first year back to in-person classes, compared to the year before, and an 18% gain in 2024.

Linda Chan, the school’s incoming vice principal, said parents are choosing to enroll their children because they want their kids to have friends with similar backgrounds, so that Chinese culture “isn’t just a home-based thing.” 

The families also find community through the school, she said. “It definitely fostered a lot of friendships within the community. When we have our Chinese New Year events, it’s just that much more festive, because there’s a large number of people participating.” 

Another longstanding institution for Chinese families is the Staten Island Chinese Christian Church, which held its first Sunday service in 1975 in a rented chapel and spent two decades in borrowed rooms before buying its current property in Mid-Island in 1994. 

Jojo Williams, the church’s secretary, joined the institution the year it moved onto its own property. The congregation has grown from 250 to 400 members in the past three years, according to Williams, and holds separate Sunday services in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as weekly youth fellowship activities and programming for older people. 

Williams described the array of programming with pride: “We don’t ask for government help. No funding. We do our own funding.”

Integration and an ‘Invitation’

As more Chinese households start to live on Staten Island, many have remained apart in one key way: their language. Roughly 40% of Chinese-speaking households in the borough are linguistically isolated, with no adult who speaks English well, according to census data. 

When Gary Tai’s parents moved to Staten Island in 1991, the borough’s sparse Chinese community was a selling point for their children to pick up the language quickly, he said. 

“Since there were not many Chinese people, it would be easier for us to learn English here,” Tai said of his parents’ logic. 

Nearly 40 years later, he’s working to smooth the way for newcomers, building out more bilingual services on Staten Island, especially in hospitals and in government services.

“If someone gets sick in the middle of the night, they should go to the emergency room first, even though they don’t speak English, because they will receive translators,” Tai said.

To address the language gap, some city officials have tried to engage the growing population in small ways. Councilmember Morano said his district office posts signs in Mandarin and Cantonese for constituents who “may never have interacted with an American government official before.” 

On Staten Island, Chinese-language ballots appeared for the first time in last year’s General Election, where 184 election districts out of 254 now require Chinese translations, according to the Board of Elections.

“When a community grows quickly, civic engagement may take a bit of time to catch up with population growth,” he said. “I’d like to see even more participation in civic associations, in community boards, in all the political parties and merchant groups. But that’s not a criticism, that’s an invitation.”

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post ‘We Can Hear Chinese Anywhere Now’: Behind Staten Island’s Immigrant Boom appeared first on The City Reporter.

Inside a New York City immigration courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza on Friday morning, 90 people had cases before a single immigration judge. People described hastily making plans to get to court, some from hundreds of miles away, having learned about their new hearing date only days in advance.

By the end of the morning, dozens of people still hadn’t shown up and the judge ordered them removed from the country.

These removal orders of immigrants who didn’t show up to court reached record heights in June nationwide and more than doubled in New York City last month, according to a new report released by bklg.org, a nonprofit that analyzes immigration court data to help immigration attorneys keep on top of their clients’ cases. The increase occurred during the first few weeks of a new Trump administration effort to speed up deportations through large-scale court proceedings known as “mega master” hearings.

In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the city “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia. 

The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. Mega master hearings ramped up in cities including Chicago and Boston beginning in May. 

In absentia removal orders have been increasing annually since 2021, as the number of people crossing the U.S. border and the number of deportation cases rose, but June showed a dramatic jump and surpassed any month on record, going back to the late 1990s when the government started keeping track.

The mass immigration hearings picked up in New York City in early June, The City Reporter reported at the time. They were dubbed mega masters because a single judge could be assigned a docket of more than 100 cases a day, about double a regular master calendar docket before.

In addition to the large number of cases, many of these hearings were scheduled just weeks in advance and replaced hearings people might have had on the books months or years away.

The City Reporter observed one such mega master hearing where, on a docket of 121 cases, 39 people and their family members were ordered removed for failing to show up to court. In some instances, family members’ cases were linked.

Bklg.org’s report found that across the country, hearings were scheduled around 180 days in advance going back several years. But in May that dropped to 98 days in advance, and by June that had fallen again to a median of 42 days before hearings.

The federal government is required by law to send written notices of any new hearing dates by mail, but many attending these hearings told The City Reporter they’d only learned of the date change because they happened to check the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s online portal or another similar app that helped them monitor their cases. People who miss hearings in deportation proceedings are subject to automatic removal orders, clearing the way for the government to deport them.

Once a person has been ordered to be removed in absentia, they can file a motion to reopen their case and argue they didn’t get proper notice of their hearing date. But that’s another uphill battle in court for immigrants facing deportation, many of whom don’t have lawyers.

“People are getting these last-minute changes on the portal, oftentimes not actually getting the paper notice saying that they have the hearing,” said Benjamin Remy, an immigration attorney at the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group. “I’ve seen people arrive late and just say, ‘Hey, I checked this morning and it said I had court, so I had to run in. I had to leave work. I had to leave my family. I had to find childcare.’”

Immigration advocates have been urging anyone in deportation proceedings to double-check EOIR’s portal daily to monitor their case for any changes.

‘Steamrolled by the System’

Advocates contend the mega master hearings are another attempt by the Trump administration to chip away at immigrants’ due process rights.

“It seems really targeted to kick people off the minimal existing pathways to [legal] status by pulling the rug out from under them,” said Amelia Neumayer, program director of South Brooklyn Sanctuary, which runs a small clinic to help people file asylum applications. Thirty-one of the group’s clients had hearing dates that were abruptly moved up by months, to June and July, and most of those people didn’t get notices in the mail, they said.

“People are just confused and steamrolled by the system,” Neumayer said.

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for EOIR, didn’t comment on the nationwide surge of in absentia removal orders, but pointed to earlier statements the agency made when mega master hearings expanded last month that touted the Trump administration’s attempts to reduce the immigration court backlog.

“EOIR prioritizes the timely completion of all cases, including those of unaccompanied alien children, and makes scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish,” she said in a statement. “Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible.” 

Mega master hearings are one of the latest changes in a tumultuous year and a half for the nation’s immigration enforcement system under President Donald Trump. That period has been marked by mass firings of immigration judges, and ICE agents targeting immigrants in the hallways of court for arrest as well as on the streets.

Dozens of Cases, Hundreds of Miles

On Friday morning, several dozen people managed to make it to a courtroom inside 26 Federal Plaza for their mega master hearing where Immigration Judge Thanos Kanellakos appeared virtually from a courtroom in Maryland, overseeing a docket of 90 cases.

Most of the people who made it to court had traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee, Georgia, North Dakota and Illinois to attend. Many had filed change of address forms — required within five days anytime someone moves — telling the court they no longer lived in New York, but hadn’t filed a subsequent motion to change venue to switch their deportation case to a court closer to their new home. The latter filing is a step many people without lawyers often don’t realize they’re supposed to take, immigration attorneys said.

Several people at court told The City Reporter they’d had a court date scheduled months or even years away when they happened to double-check the online portal recently and learned they had a new hearing scheduled a few days away.

“It shouldn’t be this way. This is a disaster,” Erika Valero, 35, said in Spanish. She’d moved from New York to Chicago since her last hearing and learned a week ago she had a new, earlier hearing date on Friday. She’d quickly bought plane tickets for herself and her daughter, spending more than $1,000 on the last-minute trip, she said. The two slept in the airport Thursday night ahead of their morning hearing.

Valero’s appearance in court lasted just a few minutes after she filed a motion to change her deportation case to an immigration court in Chicago.

“Now I have to go running to the airport,” she said.

‘People’s Rights Are Not Being Respected’

Juan Guaregua, a 38-year-old from Venezuela, had flown to New York from Texas with his wife and young child the night before his hearing on Friday morning. He’d previously had a court date scheduled in 2028, but saw on the online portal and received a letter telling him his court date had changed. He’d tried calling the court to get the date pushed back or his appearance switched to a Texas court — with no luck.

Guaregua said all he wanted was a fair chance to present his asylum claim to the court. 

“I ask that my rights be respected and that my asylum application be evaluated fairly and impartially,” he said. “People’s rights are not being respected, but every day I ask God to guide us.”

After a few hours Friday morning, Judge Kanellakos had made it through the people who’d come to court. A legal assistant then rattled off a list of 56 who hadn’t.

“That’s a lot. Sorry, judge,” the assistant said.

“It’s not your fault. You showed up,” replied Judge Kanellakos, who ran down the list, ordering them removed from the country.

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post Deportation Orders Soar in NYC as Trump ‘Mega Master’ Hearings Accelerate appeared first on The City Reporter.

ICE has been holding a child in an ICE detention center meant for adults for nearly two months due to a clerical error, the boy’s attorneys allege in a federal lawsuit filed in May. 

Federal Judge Marilyn J. Horan in Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered ICE to transfer the individual, known as A.D. in legal filings, into the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement, while ICE conducts a reassessment of his age. 

Arrested in mid-May, A.D. will have spent nearly two months at an ICE facility in Pennsylvania, where he turned 17, according to documentation provided by his attorneys.

“We are pleased the Court has recognized the irreparable harm our client will continue to suffer at Moshannon Valley Processing Center,” Tania Cohen, the Legal Director at Safe Passage Project, one of the lawyers working on A.D.’s case, said in a statement to The City Reporter. “This is a child who has been detained in an adult carceral facility for almost two months…We will continue to fight for the rights and safety of this client and for every child entitled to protection under the law.”

Originally from Guinea, A.D. had been living in a foster home overseen by New York City Administration for Children’s Services on Long Island. Suffolk County Police arrested him there in relation to an alleged attempted assault several months earlier and then quickly passed him off to ICE agents several hours later, according to federal filings and state court records.

His attorneys urgently tried to explain to ICE officials that he was a child and immediately filed a habeas corpus lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan seeking his release. But ICE had already sent the teen to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center and refused to release him in the weeks that followed. Children in ICE custody are supposed to be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which runs its own shelters intended for children.

“ICE mistakenly believes he is over 18 years old despite federal and state documents to the contrary,” his attorneys wrote in a habeas corpus petition filed on May 17, the same day as his arrest. “His detention in adult ICE detention contravenes federal law and is endangering his physical and mental wellbeing.”

The origin of the confusion over A.D.’s age stems from a secondary school entrance exam document from Guinea that erroneously stated his birth year as 2000, which would put him at 26-years-old at the time of his arrest, his attorneys said in federal filings.

But copies of A.D.’s passport, his birth certificate from Guinea, New York family court records and the federal government’s own Health and Human Services record of his entry into the United States in 2023 — all submitted into federal court as part of his lawsuit — showed he was born in May 2009, making him 16 at the time of his arrest. 

Judge Horan had earlier instructed ICE to keep A.D. separate from other adult detainees while his age was being verified. Since mid-June, he has been held in a medical unit at Moshannan, sometimes in conditions similar to solitary confinement, court records described. 

On Thursday Horan ordered ICE to transfer A.D. into HHS custody and told them to reconsider his age determination yet again, this time “considering the totality of the circumstances” which included testimonials from multiple family members and New York State Family Court records.

In a statement to The City Reporter in June, ICE disputed A.D.’s age, saying he “is NOT a minor.” On June 17, ICE subjected the teen to dental x-rays, which they claim determined he was an adult, and suggested in legal filings that his passport and other identifying documents from Guinea were forged. 

“He is a 26-year-old criminal illegal alien from Guinea with multiple arrests for robbery, assault and possession of a weapon,” the unnamed spokesperson said. 

A spokesperson for ICE didn’t return a request for additional comment right away following the judge’s order in A.D.’s favor.

Lost in New York

A.D.’s tumultuous time in the United States began in December 2023, after he fled Guinea when local police broke into his family home and threatened to burn it down because of the family’s Fulani heritage, legal filings said. 

He was taken into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which determined he was 14-years-old at the time, based on his passport and other travel documents. He was later released to the custody of an adult brother who lives in Queens. 

There the boy endured several months of abuse, according to his federal lawsuit, and after an incident in which his brother beat and strangled him until he vomited, the teen managed to escape through a window and fled to a nearby school. 

A security guard called the police, and A.D. was taken to the hospital and then to a shelter for children in Manhattan. But he left the shelter the next morning, wandering through the streets of New York City and eventually making his way to Times Square. 

“He had no money and no phone, but was amazed by how beautiful Manhattan was,” one of his attorneys Maria Possidente, wrote in legal filings. In Times Square, he met other African migrants who were staying at a shelter in the Candler Building. An older man from Guinea befriended him and bought him pizza. He spent several nights sneaking into the Candler shelter using his older friend’s ID, his lawsuit says. 

Several days later, the friend took A.D. to 26 Federal Plaza to try to help him get help with “minor immigration.” He had a brief conversation with ICE agents there and handed over all of his documents, including his passport, birth certificate, the HHS record that showed his 2009 birth date and the erroneous school document from Guinea.

Wanting to stay with his new friends at the adult shelter, the boy told officials there, “my passport is not good, and this paper is good,” referring to the school document. A.D. barely spoke English at the time, his attorneys pointed out, having arrived from Guinea only a few months earlier. 

After a brief conversation, ICE agents there issued a new Notice of Appearance in immigration court and a parole document that showed his birth year as 2000. A.D. then used that paper at the Times Square shelter, where staff allowed him to stay.

“After showing the Times Square shelter staff the paper he had been given, they let him stay at the shelter,” his attorney said. 

In their account of this interaction, an ICE spokesperson said A.D. had “admitted to ICE officers that his brother purchased him a counterfeit passport from Guinea showing him to be a minor.”

A.D. then spent several months bouncing between adult migrant shelters in Times Square, the Hall Street shelter near Brooklyn Navy Yard and the massive tent on Randall’s Island, his attorneys wrote.

His time in New York City coincided with the peak of the migrant crisis, with more than 60,000 newly-arrived migrants living in a patchwork of ad hoc shelters. At the time The City Reporter covered how the city’s specialized youth shelter network was overwhelmed. 

It was not uncommon, advocates told The City Reporter, for unaccompanied children to end up living in mosques or shelters meant for adults, as was the case of A.D. 

Conditions Like Solitary

By the summer of 2024, word that a child was living in an adult shelter spread through networks of activists and mutual aid volunteers who were providing direct relief at city shelters. Charlotte Soehner, who at the time worked at the Asylum Seeker Help Center and was also involved with various mutual aid efforts, got A.D.’s contact through WhatsApp networks and met with him. 

“This kid is alone and someone has to do something about it,” she recalled thinking. With his permission, Soehner started talking to other advocates and the Administration for Children’s Services, who eventually placed him in foster care. 

“It’s really really sad to hear where he’s ended up now,” Soehner said, who said she hadn’t been in touch with A.D. since 2024.

His ACS caseworkers didn’t let him attend an immigration hearing virtually because he was supposed to be in school, and an immigration judge ordered him removed in absentia last fall, his new immigration attorneys said in federal filings. His current immigration attorneys are attempting to reopen his case. 

A.D. had been arrested several times over the past several months, twice for robbery and a strangulation charge. On May 16, he was arrested by Suffolk County Police for a third degree assault that occurred months earlier, court records show. 

According to a declaration submitted in court by ICE supervisor Derek Lynch, Suffolk County Police Department notified ICE he was in their custody, and ICE came to pick up from the precinct several hours later. A spokesperson for the Suffolk County Police Department, who are not subject to the strict sanctuary protections as New York City police, said they’d initially arrested A.D. in February charging him as a juvenile with attempted robbery and later rearrested him in May charging him as an adult. 

“The Department is responsible for notifying federal immigration authorities, the prosecuting attorney, and the judiciary when an undocumented individual is arrested for a criminal offense,” the spokesperson said. 

In the nearly two months A.D. has been in ICE detention for adults, his mental health has deteriorated, according to his attorneys and incident reports from staff at Moshannon. 

After Judge Horan told ICE to separate A.D. from other adults on June 17, ICE placed him on the medical unit. Horan gave further instructions that A.D. be held “within the least restrictive setting of the medical unit,” but after a confrontation with staff there, it appears A.D. was sent into conditions similar to solitary confinement.

Two incident reports from June 24 describe that A.D., while being held in what was referred to as a “suicide cell,” covered a security camera inside his cell in own feces and then smashed it until it broke, flinging it across the cell. He was later barred from using phones or tablets for two weeks.

“They are locking me in here for no reason,” he told an officer investigating the incident, in a report submitted in court. “They are treating me like an animal.”

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post ICE Held a Minor in Adult Detention for Nearly Two Months, Attorneys Allege appeared first on The City Reporter.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested at least five people inside New York City immigration courts in recent weeks, despite two federal court orders banning the practice in most cases. 

Advocates are asking a federal judge to step in, saying the arrests may violate those orders. In response, in court filings this week, ICE justified the arrests by citing the criminal histories of those targeted.

“At-large arrests in sanctuary cities like New York tend to trigger protests and intervention by agitators and bystanders, making alternative locations in New York unsafe and [the Executive Office of Immigration Review] the safest location for the arrests,” wrote Roberto Rodriguez, an Acting Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer for ICE in a declaration filed Monday night. “ICE believes that a safe alternate arrest location does not exist or it would be too difficult to effectuate the arrest at an alternate location.”

The justification echoes language from ICE’s 2021 guidance, reinstated by a judge’s order in May, which allowed courthouse arrests in rare cases of a threat to national security, “an imminent risk of death, violence, or physical harm to any person,” or a “hot pursuit” of an “individual who poses a threat to public safety.” 

That Biden-era policy also said that even without a hot pursuit, ICE could arrest someone considered a threat to public safety inside immigration court if “a safe alternative location for such action does not exist or would be too difficult to achieve the enforcement action at such a location.”

Two of these recent arrests occurred on June 25 and were captured on video by photographer Christina Panagi. Attorneys from the advocacy group Make the Road New York promptly sued on both men’s behalf seeking their release. Three of these arrests were previously reported on by The Intercept.

In a June 29 letter, attorney Katherine Rosenfeld, who is representing African Communities Together and other immigrant groups, asked Judge Kevin Castel, the federal judge overseeing ongoing litigation about ICE’s courthouse arrest policy, to step in. 

“Plaintiffs have become aware of five courthouse detentions in Manhattan immigration courts, all of which have raised serious concerns about Defendants’ compliance,” Rosenfeld wrote. “ICE has also maintained a heavy presence in those courthouses on a near-daily basis, which contributes to precisely the intimidating effect that this Court found constitutes irreparable harm to plaintiffs.”

In their reply Monday, ICE laid out their new justification for these arrests — two of which they said occurred at 26 Federal Plaza and three at 290 Broadway — which they argue are not in violation of Judge Castel’s order. 

Rodriguez cited the criminal histories of the five people targeted in the immigration courthouse arrests and said ICE queries arrest databases and makes a list of arrest targets ahead of their immigration court hearings, though the declaration did not provide specifics in any of the cases.

“In evaluating the EOIR immigration court as the location for the arrest as opposed to another feasible location, ERO views the EOIR immigration court as one of the safest locations in which an arrest could be conducted,” he wrote. 

A spokesperson for ICE provided further detail on three of the arrests saying one of the men had a trespassing conviction, a second had a third degree assault and criminal obstruction of breathing charge, and a third had assault and attempted murder charges pending. The agency didn’t return a request for comment right away about the fourth and fifth arrests. 

“ICE did NOT violate any court orders. These were lawful arrests,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement.  

The City Reporter was able to corroborate one of these three criminal charges with the Bronx District Attorney and state court records. In that case, ICE arrested a man on June 29 inside immigration court at 290 Broadway who was accused of slicing another man on the head with a large kitchen knife in May and was later released while assault charges against him were pending. 

In her letter to Judge Castel, Rosenfeld highlighted another one of the cases, where the man’s only criminal history was a trespassing charge related to his initial entry into the United States in 2024.

“Since then, he has complied with immigration supervision; appeared for immigration-court hearings at least three times; and had no contact with the criminal system,” Rosenfeld wrote, adding she thought his arrest “appears to flout” Judge Castel’s order. 

“The government cannot reasonably contend that an individual whose sole criminal history stems from a charge arising from his entry into the United States poses a threat to public safety, necessitating his arrest at an immigration courthouse, particularly when he has been fully compliant with immigration authorities since that time,” she wrote.

The back and forth follows Judge Castel’s ruling on May 18 that struck down the Trump administration’s policy of targeting immigrants en mass inside immigration courthouses, a tactic that The City Reporter showed was more prevalent in New York City than any other major city. 

With masked ICE agents walking the hallways for months starting last May, these arrests sent shockwaves across the city’s busy immigration court, and forced immigrants to make an impossible calculation — showing up to court and risking arrest, or skipping their hearings and being subject to immediate deportation orders. 

Castel’s ruling followed a striking development in the months-long litigation over the policy, where federal prosecutors walked back much of their earlier justifications for immigration courthouse arrests, admitting ICE had no policy in place to justify the practice. 

In late June, a federal judge in California issued a similar ruling that barred most of these arrests nationwide.

But neither of these rulings barred immigration courthouse arrests outright. Instead they forced ICE to revert to earlier guidance in effect under the Biden Administration from 2021 that laid out certain caveats for when immigration courthouse arrests would be allowed. 

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post ICE Finds New Justification for Immigration Courthouse Arrests, Despite Court Orders appeared first on The City Reporter.

As the U.S. Supreme Court ruling came down ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants Thursday morning, Doudgy Charmant was painting a mural honoring Haitian heritage at the corner of Newkirk and Nostrand avenues in Flatbush, Brooklyn. 

The 27-year-old told The City Reporter he had immigrated to the United States as a child with TPS — a humanitarian immigration status that allows holders to stay and work in the country. He now has a green card, but many of his family members still rely on TPS to avoid deportation. The court’s ruling would upend their lives, he feared. 

“They are lost. They’re wondering, ‘What is next?’” he said. “We are hurting.”

“We came here for a better opportunity. Living is all that we seek,” he said. 

The Supreme Court’s ruling allowed the Trump administration to end TPS for an estimated 330,000 Haitians across the country. In the coming days, they will no longer have legal status to remain in the county or authorization to work here, and could face potential deportation. TPS for Haitians first went into effect in 2010, in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that killed an estimated 220,000 people and wounded and displaced many more. It’s been extended continuously by presidential administrations ever since.

The court’s decision also ended protections for around 6,800 Syrian immigrants living in the United States.

New York State is home to an estimated 40,000 Haitian TPS holders, and the ruling swiftly sent shockwaves across New York’s Haitian community, the heart of which lies in Flatbush’s Little Haiti along Nostrand Avenue, renamed Toussaint L’Ouverture Boulevard in 2018 after the Haitian revolutionary. 

Haitians who rely on TPS could potentially find other legal routes to remain in the country, like trying to adjust their status through a U.S. citizen relative or applying for asylum. But these avenues have also become increasingly perilous under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, with ICE agents targeting immigrants for arrest inside immigration courts as well as those attending appointments with USCIS.

“I’ve got to figure out now that the shoe has actually dropped,” said Pascal Antoine, the station director of Dodor Vibe, a Haitian community radio station on Nostrand Avenue that doubles as a community center offering tax prep, translation, real estate services and English classes.

For weeks Antoine said he’d been fielding questions from residents about what to do if TPS ended, and he’d just been telling them to be patient. As the news came down, Antoine said he was at a loss as to what to say.

“I got to do a little research myself and I got to figure out exactly what to tell people because they’re going to start coming in,” he said. “They’re gonna start asking questions.”

Herold Dasque, a community liaison for Haitian-Americans United For Progress, Inc., a local nonprofit, said he had a more dire warning. 

“Prepare themselves to leave the country because there’s not a fight. There’s nothing else to tell them,” Dasque said.

“Don’t let yourself be deported or put yourself in a situation where you’re going to be placed in prison or kept indefinitely,” he added. “You have no work permit. You are illegal. They can arrest you, put you in jail, and you don’t know when you will be released.”

The Supreme Court decision split 6-3 along ideological lines, and is the first ruling from the top court on the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS for many countries who had the designation. Now, TPS could end for immigrants from around a dozen countries that still have the protection. 

The court had previously sided with the administration’s effort to end TPS for Venezuelans on the so-called shadow docket, without a full explanation of the ruling. Around 605,000 Venezuelans will lose TPS later this fall, even as two earthquakes in quick succession this week created further instability in a nation that’s suffered from years of economic and political turmoil. 

President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, which has been attempting to end TPS for immigrants from Haiti and other countries since shortly after Trump took office last year, championed the Supreme Court’s ruling. 

“NOT TIRED OF WINNING,” the Department wrote on X. “Temporary Protected Status is meant to be TEMPORARY.”

Last fall, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “determined that Haiti no longer met the conditions” required for the TPS designation and allowed the protection to expire this past February instead of extending it. DHS has broad authority to issue TPS protections to immigrants from countries experiencing the fallout from armed conflicts or natural disasters. 

Despite Noem’s finding, the U.S. Department of State still warns against any visits to Haiti, deeming it Level 4, the highest possible threat level for U.S. travelers, due to “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.”

Jessica Bansal, an attorney with the National TPS Alliance, said the ruling will take effect in the coming days, though the exact timeline is still unclear. 

On Thursday afternoon, the healthcare union 1199 SEIU convened an impromptu press conference to condemn the ruling with immigration advocates, Attorney General James, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Hochul said the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown would “cripple” the state’s healthcare system with many TPS holders working as home health aides and as nursing staff in hospitals, though the union could not say how many of its members have TPS status or come from either country impacted by Thursday’s executive order. 

About 25,000 TPS holders are in the state’s work force, adding an estimated $800 million in annual economic contributions and $280 million in federal, state and local taxes, often as caregivers, nursing assistants, mechanics, security guards, and hotel cleaning staff, according to estimates by the policy group FWD.us.

Mamdani said the city is working to understand the implications of the ruling and urged New Yorkers who need legal assistance to reach out to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs legal hotline.

1199 SEIU member Sandra Britto, a patient care technician at NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital, condemned the high court’s “inhumane decision.”

“This ruling is going to create terrible suffering to my Haitian people, who are only here striving to do better,” she said, as she emotionally invoked the image of earthquake survivors with no home to return to.

“We are not criminals,” she said. “We are law-abiding human beings.”

Back on Nostrand Avenue, clothing vendor Melissa Denaud, 41, said the Supreme Court ruling had broken her heart. She just had a client pass by who had told her she was getting let go from her job because her work authorization was tied to her TPS status. Denaud had immigrated from Haiti over a decade ago and had legal status, though she felt for friends and family with TPS.

“Even if you have papers, you have family, you have friends. It’s the same blood, you know,” she said. “I can’t help them, you know. We can’t do anything about that.”

Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.

The post NYC’s Haitian Community Reels in Wake of Supreme Court TPS Ruling appeared first on The City Reporter.