For years, federal immigration agents had a reliable place to find undocumented immigrants they wanted to deport: New York City jails.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would target immigrants in police custody or serving short jail sentences and request that the city hold them for up to 48 hours after they had served their time. The agents would then pick them up to place them in deportation proceedings.
The city’s cooperation — which sometimes resulted in immigrants being detained well beyond a day or two — led to a class-action lawsuit that was resolved by a judge on Wednesday, with the city agreeing to pay up to $92.5 million in damages.
The plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit over a decade ago, argued that the city unlawfully detained more than 20,000 people after their scheduled release dates — for days, weeks and even several months, between 1997 and 2012 — after receiving requests from ICE to temporarily hold them.
Those immigrants will be able to claim a share of the $92.5 million — one of the city’s largest class-action settlements, according to the city comptroller office — with payouts of up to tens of thousands of dollars.
The city’s Law Department said in a statement that city officials had “operated with the assumption that compliance with ICE detainers was mandated under federal law.”
The statement continued: “Court rulings eventually clarified that localities could not hold a detainee beyond their release date based solely on the contents of a federal detainer and that a court order is needed. New York City changed its policies in 2012 to conform with these court rulings.”
The civil rights lawyers, who have worked on the case since 2010, will now have to contend with a unique challenge: locating the thousands of eligible immigrants, some of whom were dispersed across the globe or, in some cases, may have passed away.
Debra Greenberger, one of the lead lawyers in the case, said her team was “cleareyed that it’s going to be hard to find people.” She said that people would be able to file online claims and that her team would work with local immigration groups to spread the word.
“The settlement provides a measure of justice for people who were forced to be incarcerated in often horrific conditions when they should have been allowed to go home,” she said. “We think it’s an important statement about this city’s past culpability in turning immigrants, and even sometimes citizens, over to ICE when that was not something they lawfully should have been doing.”
Directly transferring immigrants from jails to federal custody provided ICE with a convenient pipeline to deport noncitizens, even though the practice dried up as the city began bolstering its sanctuary laws in recent years.
New York City now rarely cooperates with ICE after passing a series of laws between 2011 and 2014 that sharply minimized the city’s involvement in deporting immigrants. It is not clear how the city will proceed once President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office; Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat elected in 2021, is seeking to revisit the sanctuary laws to more closely work with ICE to deport criminals.
The settlement capped an uphill legal battle that began 14 years ago with a lawsuit filed by Oscar Onadia, an immigrant from Burkina Faso who was held at Rikers Island for an extra 41 days after serving his time. The complaint was certified as a class-action lawsuit in 2017 to cover thousands of others who might have been improperly detained by the city’s Department of Corrections.
Mr. Onadia was arrested on Dec. 10, 2008, for driving without a license, and should have been released two days later. But ICE had submitted a so-called “detainer request,” a form asking jails to hold someone for up to 48 hours after that person is scheduled for release from jail. The extra time is supposed to give ICE an opportunity to assume physical custody of the person and investigate his or her immigration status.
Mr. Onadia, however, was held in jail for more than a month after his original release date, with the city denying his initial attempts to post bail, which was set at $1, according to the lawsuit, which described the extended period of confinement as “unjustified, illegal and not privileged.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the city was violating federal law and the Constitution by detaining immigrants at the request of ICE, even for just 48 hours.
The class-action lawsuit led to protracted negotiations that outlasted Mr. Onadia: He died last year, in his early 50s, Ms. Greenberger said. His wife will receive $25,000 from the city, in addition to compensation for the 41 days he was detained.
All told, his lawyers believe that the city “overdetained” 20,900 people with ICE detainer requests for a total of 166,475 days in the 15-year period covered by the settlement.
ICE has long worked with jails and prisons across the country to find and deport undocumented immigrants, whose fingerprints are automatically transmitted to ICE when jailed or arrested.
A few years ago, federal and state courts began to rule that detainer requests were not binding for state and local officials, and that detainers did not amount to the probable cause required for keeping people in jail. So-called sanctuary cities and jurisdictions also began implementing policies to limit their cooperation with federal immigration officials.
In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation to stop the city from honoring ICE detention requests, unless the person had been convicted of a “violent or serious crime” and the federal government presented a judge’s warrant. The legislation also terminated the presence of immigration officials in the Rikers Island jail complex, where ICE had maintained offices.
The city began honoring ICE detainers less frequently.
From October 2012 to September 2013, before those laws were passed, the Correction Department transferred more than 3,000 people to ICE because of detainer requests. In the year leading up to June 30, 2023, the department received 201 detainer requests from ICE and transferred 10 people, all of whom had been convicted of violent or serious crimes, “without additional detention,” according to an annual report.
ICE officials have said that detainer requests allow the agency to more easily deport dangerous individuals and to ensure they are not released from prisons and jails into communities. They have also said that judicial warrants are difficult to obtain.
Mitchell J. Danziger, a State Supreme Court justice in the Bronx, preliminarily approved the settlement agreement in the class-action lawsuit on Wednesday. Final court approval, after class members are notified and have had a chance to weigh in, would take place after a hearing in October 2025, lawyers said.
A settlement administrator — a third-party entity appointed by the court — will try to find claimants using a spreadsheet, provided by the city, of former inmates with ICE detainer requests who were held for longer than 48 hours. The payouts will depend on how many people file claims and how many days each person was held for.
In settling the lawsuit, the city denied that its agencies had, or currently has, “a pattern or practice that deprived persons of rights, privileges or immunities” protected by the state and federal laws, as well as the Constitution, according to the settlement.
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