Inside the Manhattan Court Where ICE Fights to Keep Immigrants Locked Up
The Varick Street immigration court detention docket, reserved for the highest-risk cases, includes many people with scant or nonexistent records of criminal conduct, sent to far-flung jails with little hope of release.
The judge presiding in nearly half the new cases on the New York immigration courts’ docket for adult detainees was finally fed up.
Immigration Judge Dara Reid had granted bond twice to a 31-year-old Venezuelan man, flatly rejecting the “unsubstantiated assertion” from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that he was tied to the gang Tren de Aragua. The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed with her.
Yet he was still held at Orange County Jail in Goshen, despite having no criminal record, nearly five months after ICE agents arrested him on Jan. 30 in a Bronx rooming house while looking for someone else who wasn’t there. The Department of Homeland Security prevented his release by twice invoking its secretary’s power to impose an “automatic stay” on a bond ruling, an authority rarely used in the past but increasingly common in the Trump administration.
And now, on June 26, DHS attorney Matthew Reiter was back in Varick Street court — where the detainee immigration cases in New York City are decided — and asking to go ahead with “significant” new evidence against the man, whom we’ll identify as Jose H. But by then, lawyers from Brooklyn Defender Services had filed a habeas petition for Jose H. at U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where the judges have powers that immigration judges lack.
Jose H.’s lawyer, Ilana Herr, assailed DHS for another “frivolous appeal,” and asked the judge to postpone the case. She agreed.
“I’m pretty sick of the shenanigans, so I’m going to let a federal judge go figure it out,” said Reid, herself a DHS lawyer for 14 years before being appointed an immigration judge during the first Trump administration. Then she sent a message through Reiter: “When you guys do stuff like this it impinges on your representatives going forward in every case I see. You just may want to relay that to your management.” (She added she considered Reiter himself trustworthy.)
The judge swiveled her chair to face the video monitor, where Jose H. appeared from jail. “I really do believe your due process rights are being violated,” she told him.
“Regardless, I’m going to fight my case to the end,” said the Spanish-speaking Jose H., who’d shaved off a beard since his last courtroom appearance and now wore smart-looking eyeglasses. “I’m going to prove I am not a member of Tren de Aragua.”
But as of today, he remains in jail. DHS filed yet another bid to the immigration appeals board — with evidence of supposed Tren de Aragua involvement that included emojis of a train and ninja posted to TikTok, papers filed in federal court show. This time the board blocked Jose H.’s release.
Slim Basis for Detention
This scene from the hundred or so cases THE CITY has observed in the Varick Street immigration court over the past four months illustrates the lengths federal authorities in New York are going to carry out a pledge President Donald Trump made in his Jan. 20 inaugural address: “We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
The New York immigration courts’ detainee dockets are based in the 96-year-old federal building at 201 Varick St., making it the local arena in which the Trump administration’s claims about immigrant criminality are put to the test, case by case.
The hearings open a window on the insular world of immigration detention — and a pattern in which DHS pulls out all the stops to detain even people who have no criminal record or with minor criminal cases, sometimes from decades ago.
What attorney Herr says about her client Jose H.’s case could be applied broadly: it “shows how the goal of DHS right now is to keep people in detention by any means, even where immigration judges have ruled that they are not a public danger or flight risk.” And, she said, it demonstrates “how baseless gang allegations are being used against people without real evidence supporting them.”
The cases are overflowing the Varick Street court, where the number of detainees brought in for deportation proceedings has tripled from last year. Detained immigrants brought into the two larger New York immigration courts — at 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway — are more likely to face transfer to jails as distant as Texas or Louisiana as they are to Varick Street.
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In many cases, they lose the opportunity they’d have in New York for free legal counsel paid for by the city. More people were moved from the New York courts to the Joe Corley Detention Facility in Conroe, Texas (62 from Jan. 20 through June 30) than were sent to the Orange County Jail (30), the major immigration lockup in the New York court’s jurisdiction, records show.
Looking ahead, there are many signs that the first six months of this second Trump administration have been the warmup for a much fiercer regime of mass detention, expanding with ICE’s ballooning budget. A July 8 memo from ICE’s acting director, Todd M. Lyons, directed his officers to detain anyone who crossed the border illegally without granting bond, the Washington Post reported.
But even before the memo, DHS lawyers were taking this position in the Varick Street court.
Sent Far From the City
Justice Department data compiled by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the courts, show the impact of the new administration in the New York immigration courts by the numbers:
- From Jan. 20 to the end of June, the new detainee cases the Trump administration’s DHS filed more than tripled — to 560 — from the previous year's count at Varick Street.
- Over a thousand people held in ICE custody were transferred from the New York courts to jails in other jurisdictions. Those transfers are up 164% over the same period a year earlier.
- Many are moved to Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pa., a five-hour drive to the west from Varick Street, and since June, to Delaney Hall, the controversial Newark detention center. Both are connected to the Elizabeth, N.J., immigration court. That influx of New Yorkers in custody has helped boost the number of detainee cases filed in Elizabeth to more than triple 2024’s number, to 3,941, for Jan. 20 through the end of June.
- While ICE data indicates that a third of the removal arrests ICE’s New York office made from the start of the Trump administration through June 10 were for people with a criminal conviction of some kind, DHS uses criminality as the basis for deportation charges in few cases. Even in the adult detainee cases on the Varick Street docket, there is no criminal allegation in 9 out of every 10 filings.
ICE did not respond to numerous requests to comment for this story.
Bond Not Allowed
Even now, under 3% of the 25,671 cases the Trump administration DHS has filed with the three New York immigration courts through June 30 are listed as detained. In 2024, it was less than one half of 1%. It’s still far from the mass detention Trump and the ICE leadership seem to envision, but the number of immigration detainees nationally has climbed steadily to over 56,000, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
As recently as 1995, the government held just 7,500 immigration detainees. That began to change with a new definition of “mandatory detention” in the 1996 immigration overhaul that President Bill Clinton signed into law the month before his re-election. It required detention for those convicted of an “aggravated felony,” which currently applies to a broad number of charges, some as serious as murder, and others that are neither a felony nor aggravated; shoplifting is a recent addition.
Over time, the courts expanded the definition of “aggravated felony,” and Trump pushed it further when he signed the Laken Riley Act on Jan. 29. The Board of Immigration Appeals, an arm of the Justice Department, gave DHS further leverage with release of a May 15 decision in Matter of Q. Li; it applied mandatory detention to people released into the U.S. on humanitarian parole after being arrested at or near the border.
Damaso Gonzalez Sanchez, an older Dominican man, found out about the Q. Li ruling at his June 5 hearing — it meant that the lawyer he’d hired was not allowed even to make a request for bond. Gonzalez, bald with a white goatee, tearfully pleaded with Judge Reid by video from the Orange County Jail: “My family, my children. Do not separate me from my family. What would I do without my family? I have been with my wife for 35 years.”
Executive Office for Immigration Review records show that on June 17, the judge granted what’s called voluntary departure, requiring him to leave the country while still allowing some hope he could one day return to visit the U.S.
In some cases, DHS used long-ago crimes to justify holding people for mandatory detention. That’s what happened to Shawn Ffrench, who was recognized in the Jamaican community as a classic immigrant success story. To DHS officials, the 49-year-old restaurant owner was a criminal alien.
Ffrench, who migrated to the United States from Jamaica at age 16, started and owns nine Golden Krust restaurant franchises that, according to his lawyer, employ 250 people. In 2021, the Consulate General of Jamaica in New York gave him its Heritage Award, “because of his tenacity and culinary aid to the Jamaican community,” an official said at the ceremony. “His philanthropic contributions to our events and other affairs within the Jamaican community have served our people immensely.”
When it was Ffrench’s turn to speak, he spoke of his childhood in rural St. Andrew, Jamaica. “I grew up surrounded by hardship and poverty and one of my biggest dreams was to be able to make it out and somehow be able to impact the lives of families that look like me,” he said.
The nightmare part of his American Dream came later. As a legal permanent resident since 1991 — DHS renewed his green card in February — Ffrench had left the country and returned freely in the past, his attorney said. But the Customs and Border Patrol arrested him at Kennedy Airport on April 12 as he returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic. He was turned over to ICE three days later and sent to Pike County Jail in Pennsylvania.
The CBP officers “conducted an immigration inspection and deemed Ffrench inadmissible to the United States due to his criminal convictions for marijuana possession in Texas, 2002; criminal possession of a forged instrument in New York, 2006; and credit card fraud in Connecticut, 2017,” an ICE spokesperson said.
Normally, someone with such deep roots in the community would be a good candidate for bond. But the notice to appear that ICE served — the charging document, like a complaint in a criminal court — treated his convictions, all misdemeanors, as the basis for mandatory detention.
That meant the immigration judge found she could not grant bond. When the case surfaced before Judge Reid at the Varick Street court on April 22, Ffrench’s lawyer at the time told her that the 2002 marijuana case had actually been expunged after Ffrench did community service. That didn’t help.
“I do understand the frustrating circumstances but unfortunately my hands are tied,” Reid said.
The other two misdemeanors were treated in the notice to appear as “crime involving moral turpitude,” a broad category of criminal offenses that made for another basis for mandatory detention.
Ffrench’s case was moved from New York to the Elizabeth court. Unable to get bond, he waited in jail for a total of 79 days before getting a chance to tell a judge his side of the story.
On June 30, Judge David Cheng granted Ffrench relief through cancellation of removal, which requires a finding of “good moral character.”
Earl Williams, an attorney for Ffrench, said the judge weighed all the circumstances of his client’s life to reach that conclusion. He added that DHS didn’t actually have to hold his client in jail. As a lawful permanent resident with a clean record for at least the past seven years, he qualified for release if DHS chose, he said.
“In the past, they would not have arrested him,“ Williams said. He added: “They have the power under the law to use discretion.”
‘I’m Cuffed Here’
Likewise, a judge found that DHS stretched the mandatory detention law to hold a Queens man who’s been, according to his lawyer, a legal permanent resident for 35 years.
Sheldon Wilford smiled broadly at his wife and daughter from the video screen in the Varick Street courtroom as they waited for his bond hearing to start before Immigration Judge Charles Conroy, who splits the adult detainee docket with Judge Reid, presided. Wilford, dressed in blue prison scrubs over an orange T-shirt, was in an immigration jail in Oakdale, La.
“Raise your right hand,” the judge told him, to which Wilford twisted in his seat to raise his wrists: “I’m cuffed here.”
The Trinidad native had made the mistake of leaving the country for a short vacation in the Dominican Republic with his wife and daughter, both American citizens. They were celebrating the master’s degree his daughter, a member of the military, had just achieved, and trying to recover from the trauma of the death of a close family member, his lawyer says. He was arrested at Kennedy Airport as he returned on May 19. ICE moved him to the Orange County Jail, and then, over the objection of his lawyer, to confinement in Louisiana.
Typically, ICE moves a detainee first, and then asks the court to change the venue. Wilford’s lawyer, Catherine Reilly, opposed the change of venue. Judge Conroy denied the DHS request, she said. But he was still in Louisiana.
Wilford’s largest obstacle to release was his guilty plea, in 1996, to a narcotics conspiracy charge at federal court in Brooklyn. He’d had a job cleaning aircraft at the airport when he was drawn into playing a minor role in a scheme to allow luggage containing marijuana or cocaine to pass through. But his role was so insignificant that a federal judge sentenced him only to probation and a $50 fine, court records show.
As a Queens homeowner for some 20 years, and with a job as a doorman to return to, he had the kind of roots that would make him a candidate for bond — but for the mandatory detention provision. DHS asserted he was ineligible.
After hearing testimony from Wilford on June 16, Conroy was reluctant to continue holding him. He’d pleaded guilty to a serious crime, the judge said, but added, “We’re looking at 30 years” since then. He found a way out: While Wilford’s drug conviction was finalized shortly after the mandatory detention law was signed in 1996, it so happened that he’d reached an agreement with the prosecutor to plead guilty prior.
As a result, Judge Conroy allowed Wilford to be released on $5,000 bond. His wife and daughter left the courtroom jubilantly, and he soon returned home to Queens.
Reilly, who’d been an attorney in DHS for 15 years, said afterward that the agency’s more aggressive tactics were counterproductive. “When you want to prioritize everyone for removal, you prioritize nothing,” she said, recalling the human-trafficking investigations she was once been involved in. “You’re diverting resources away from where we should be placing resources.”
Bond hearings often reveal that people detained have no criminal record, much less one that requires mandatory detention. Among them is Maysam Khabazha, an Iranian who requested bond from Conroy on July 7.
He testified by video from Orange County Jail, with a row of relatives watching tensely from the courtroom in New York, one of them a woman holding prayer beads to her lips.
Khabazha had no criminal record in the United States, as the DHS attorney acknowledged when the judge asked.
Khabazha entered the United States in November 2022. Records show that a removal proceeding commenced against him the following month. Without contradiction from the government lawyer, Khabazha said he’d shown up for all his hearings at the 290 Broadway immigration court in the meantime. When he went to ICE’s office for a May 23 appointment the agency had requested, he was arrested and sent to jail.
The DHS lawyer tried to trip him up by asking Khabazha, who testified he was well settled in the Bronx, why his income-tax filing said he lived in Westchester County. No, Khabazha corrected. He lived on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. Still, the attorney contended Khabazha had failed to prove he was not a flight risk.
“I see nothing here,” Conroy said, noting Khabazha had been appearing in court and had no criminal record. Further, he had reason to show up — “he has a viable asylum claim.” The judge set a minimal bond of $1,500.
“As far as we can tell, the only reason he was arrested is that he’s from Iran,” said Kendal Nystedt, legal director of the nonprofit Unlocal, who represented Khabazha with attorney Steven Vivas.
Similarly, a Venezuelan immigrant from Queens had been attending his removal proceedings when ICE decided to arrest and detain him during a check-in at 26 Federal Plaza in April. (THE CITY is withholding his identity to protect him from reprisal.) ICE transported him to a jail in Conroe, Texas. Having moved him 1,650 miles away from Varick Street, DHS then asked Judge Reid to change the venue for his case.
“This is a government strategy, to move people around to get them deported,” the man’s lawyer, Ana Juneau, told the judge at an April 15 hearing. She said that under a federal court decision in effect at the time, her client had the Temporary Protected Status extended to Venezuelans.
Reid granted bond of $2,000, which freed the man to leave the Texas jail and return to Queens.
To be sure, there are deportation cases against hardened criminals. When Richard DeJesus Jaquez appeared by video from Orange County Jail on June 16, Judge Conroy took note of convictions for robbery and extortion, and said he’d been in prison from 1995 until June 4 — 30 years. He was then turned over to immigration authorities.
Jaquez — a tall, 50-year-old Dominican man with a shaved head, a beard and mustache, and glasses with silver-colored rims — told the judge with a trace of amusement that he just wanted to be deported. No one disagreed.
Vanishing Attorneys
On June 5, two Ecuadoran men calendared to appear in Judge Reid’s courtroom by video from the Orange County Jail couldn’t be found. The judge and the DHS lawyer ticked through several possible jails where they might have been transferred suddenly. But in any case, DHS requested a change of venue — to send one to the court in upstate Batavia, and the other to Oakdale, La. Hearing no opposition, the judge granted it.
Minutes later, an attorney from Brooklyn Defender Services who’d been waiting on other cases spoke up (from the video screen).
Speaking as a friend of the court, attorney Melinda Sheild asked the judge to reconsider the change of venue she’d just granted. “Both those individuals have families here” and are seeking representation, she said.
If the case stayed in New York, they would likely qualify for a pro bono attorney. That’s thanks to the city- and state-funded New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, which represents indigent immigration detainees from New York. Brooklyn Defender Services, Bronx Defenders and the Legal Aid Society handle the cases for New York City, and their attorneys represent a large number of the people on the Varick Street detained docket and many transferred nearby, for example, cases heard in Elizabeth, N.J. Those dispatched to more distant venues, especially at the big immigration jails in the Deep South and Texas, will have a hard time finding free legal services.
Reid said she couldn’t hear the request because Sheild did not formally represent them. The two men were gone.
ICE and EOIR records show that one of the men, Jimmy Ponton Carrion, was sent to the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, La. On June 23, a judge at the immigration court in nearby Oakdale ordered his removal. The other man, Tomas Quezada, was sent to the Buffalo Federal Detention Center in Batavia. After weeks that left his family “desperate,” as his daughter put it, he was able to get counsel through the New York program. His next hearing is Aug. 15.
This practice of dispersing New Yorkers far from home intensified in recent years. A 2021 New Jersey law barred counties from entering contracts to house immigration detainees, limiting the number of beds in North Jersey that were available for cases assigned to the Varick Street court. But ICE’s decision to detain so many more of the people it arrests has contributed to the trend.
And yet, despite the hardness of the system, one often hears the detained immigrants politely thank the judges, and sometimes offer blessings.
A Glen Cove restaurant worker who had testified that he feared gang violence if returned to El Salvador did just that after Reid denied asylum. He asked the judge to grant him voluntary departure, which would let him make his own way back, rather than have ICE transport him.
Reid said she could only do so if DHS approved, but its lawyer said he wouldn’t because of the man’s criminal conviction. (Voluntary departure requires a finding of “good moral character.”)
“I would love to grant it, but if he opposes it, I don’t really have much of a leg to stand on,” Reid said, noting that DHS said he had a very high blood alcohol content of .32 when arrested for drunken driving. “That decision will never get upheld. Sir, I really wish you the best of luck.”
“If something is going to happen, it’s going to happen,” he responded. “I just want to say thank you, thank you for listening, and God bless America.”
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