Inside an immigration courthouse in the heart of Lower Manhattan, federal agents in T-shirts and caps cover their faces with masks as they discreetly attend routine hearings filled with immigrants.
The agents tip off other officers huddled in the court’s staid hallways as undocumented immigrants on their radar leave the hearings. They then move in to arrest their targets, sometimes leading to disorderly scenes as husbands are separated from wives, and parents from children.
The scene unfolding in New York City has repeated itself in immigration courthouses across the nation, a window into the Trump administration’s accelerating crackdown amid pressure from the White House to ramp up deportations. In Los Angeles, workplace raids have inflamed tensions and led to demonstrations. In New York, the courthouse arrests have emerged as a defining flashpoint.
In June, hundreds came and went at one federal building — for asylum hearings, citizenship applications and mandated check-ins with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Some left in handcuffs.
Immigrants arrested after appearing in courtrooms on higher floors were ferried by agents to holding cells on the 10th floor, an off-limits area where ICE typically keeps a few people for several hours as they are processed and transferred elsewhere.
But ICE agents have apprehended so many people showing up for routine appointments this month that the facilities appear to be overcrowded. Hundreds of migrants have slept on the floor or sitting upright, sometimes for days, said Francisco Castillo, a Dominican immigrant who was held there for three days last week.
Mr. Castillo, 36, said that the four holding cells — two for men, two for women — were so packed that some of the nearly 100 migrants in his cell resorted to sleeping on the bathroom floors. They were held for days without showers or clothing changes.
“Every single one of us slept on the floor because there are no beds,” Mr. Castillo said in a phone interview in Spanish from a detention facility in New Jersey where he was transferred. “What’s human about this?”
Mr. Castillo’s account echoed concerns from two Democratic members of Congress who showed up at the building at 26 Federal Plaza on Sunday to inspect the 10th floor after hearing reports of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. They were denied access by ICE.
The imposing federal building at 26 Federal Plaza — home to an ICE headquarters and one of the city’s three immigration courts — has become a centerpiece of immigration enforcement in New York. ICE agents have arrested dozens of migrants in and around the building, as well as the other two courts in Manhattan, and held them out of view at 26 Federal Plaza before transferring them to detention centers outside the city.
The arrests have drawn protesters to the building’s perimeter, leading the police to arrest several who have tried to block vans carrying migrants out of the building. Inside, the presence of agents in courtrooms that were long considered off-limits to ICE has quickly disrupted courthouse operations and, critics say, eroded their status as a safe space for immigrants to engage with the legal system.
The sight of masked ICE agents in hallways has unsettled the hundreds of immigrants who show up at 26 Federal Plaza each day. There are signs that the arrests may be dissuading some migrants from following the rules by showing up to mandated court dates, worsening their chances of staying in the United States, because missed hearings can lead to deportation.
On Monday morning, 17 of the roughly two dozen immigrants who were required to show up before a judge on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza never appeared — a higher number of no-shows than is usual, immigration lawyers said.
An Ecuadorean family of four living in New Jersey was the first to line up outside the courtroom. The parents clutched paperwork to their chests as they whispered and anxiously eyed the masked agents by the elevators.
“We’re uneasy,” said the mother, Joselyn Titisunta Saavedra, describing the gang threats that they said forced the family to seek asylum in the United States.
Federal officials have said that the court arrests allow agents to detain people in a controlled environment without having to dispatch teams into communities, which takes more time and planning and puts officers and the public at risk. The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, has also said that threats against its officers are up, justifying the use of masks to conceal their identities.
Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the courthouse arrests and the conditions at 26 Federal Plaza. Top Homeland Security officials have previously cast the arrests as a way to quickly remove some of the millions of migrants who crossed the border during the Biden era.
Mr. Castillo, the man detained for three days, entered the United States illegally in 2022 from the Dominican Republic and does not have a criminal record, his lawyers said. ICE agents arrested Mr. Castillo, who is married to a U.S.-born citizen and lives in the Bronx, when he appeared on June 4 for a routine immigration court hearing in Manhattan.
“Emotionally, I’m frustrated because I was doing what they supposedly wanted to me to do” by showing up to court, Mr. Castillo said.
ICE moved to place him in deportation proceedings that moved on a fast track, a tactic that the agency has deployed to swiftly expel migrants without hearings. The agency has also expanded the arrest of immigrants showing up for other immigration-related appointments, not just court hearings.
Last week, a number of immigrants, including families with children, received automated text messages asking them to report to a nondescript office across the street from 26 Federal Plaza to check in with ICE. They were undocumented immigrants in supervisory programs that allow them to live in communities while their cases wind through the courts, so long as they occasionally check in with ICE.
When they showed up to check in last week, many were surprised with handcuffs. Dozens of immigrants were arrested in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan as protesters hurled insults at agents, calling them “pigs” and “Nazis.”
Last Wednesday, Ambar Mujica Rodriguez, 33, and her 12-year-old daughter sobbed and screamed as four agents escorted her husband, Jaen Mawer Enciso Guzman, 30, to an SUV. Their daughter ran after him and tried to hug him. The Venezuelan family crossed the border into the United States in 2023 and had a pending asylum application, according to their lawyer, Margaret Cargioli.
“What’s alarming here and at immigration court is that they’re picking up people who are complying,” Ms. Cargioli said. “He was very cooperative with all the requirements that were made of him, and it’s a real shame that they’re separating them.”
She said he was probably targeted because he had entered the country about two years ago. The Trump administration has begun placing immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years into a deportation process known as expedited removal proceedings, which were previously used only for migrants encountered near the border.
Immigration courts are different from criminal courts. People are typically summoned to immigration courts because the federal government has initiated deportation hearings against them for entering the country illegally, not to face accusations of committing other crimes.
The arrests, in and near courts where millions of foreign-born individuals nationwide showed up last year so that judges could determine whether they could stay in the country, have turned the once unexceptional government offices into a daily political spectacle.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a candidate for mayor, sat in on several hearings at a different immigration court, at 290 Broadway last week, and escorted out migrant families who seemed to be at risk for arrest. On Sunday, the two members of Congress, Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez, were denied entry to tour the 10th floor at 26 Federal Plaza.
Inside the city’s three immigration courthouses — at 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway, just a few blocks from City Hall, and at 201 Varick Street, on the West Side — the atmosphere has grown tense.
Fliers in Spanish and English encouraging self-deportation await arriving families. ICE agents and activists, some of whom also wear masks, occasionally taunt each other. Immigration judges and court staff express consternation over the disruption that the arrests — and the media attention — has wrought on typically sleepy immigration proceedings.
On Friday, one such arrest turned chaotic after ICE executed the administration’s new playbook. Inside a courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza, ICE prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the immigration case against a Dominican man, a legal maneuver to allow ICE agents in the hallway to detain him and place him in expedited deportation proceedings.
The man, Joaquin Rosario Espinal, like many, showed up without a lawyer and expressed confusion when the government asked that his case be dismissed.
“What do you mean, dismiss my case?” Mr. Rosario Espinal, 34, asked in Spanish. “Do I need to leave the country, or not?”
The judge tried to explain. An immigration lawyer in the chambers sought to intervene on his behalf, to no avail. News photographers gathered in the hallway to capture the imminent arrest, leading the judge to admonish them for being a distraction.
“I wish you the best of luck,” the judge told Mr. Rosario Espinal.
When he exited into a cramped hallway, at least six agents tackled him to the floor as they also grappled with activists.
“Stop resisting!” one agent shouted as Mr. Rosario Espinal, who an acquaintance said arrived in the United States last year, was arrested. He was eventually whisked away to a detention facility north of the city in Orange County, N.Y.
In the lobby of the building, which also houses offices of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a family of three from Gambia emerged from the elevators dressed in colorful dresses, smiling and holding American flags.
They had just become American citizens.
Olivia Bensimon and Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration, focused on the influx of migrants arriving in the New York region.
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