A federal agent shoved a woman and pushed her to the floor in front of what appeared to be her two young children on Thursday during a confrontation at an immigration courthouse in Manhattan.
A pair of videos show a wrenching encounter in a hallway of 26 Federal Plaza in which the woman and a girl are desperately clinging to the woman’s husband, who is being detained. Agents pull the hair of the woman and the girl to get them away from the man.
After agents pry the family apart and lead the resisting man away, the woman yells, “You guys don’t care about anything!” in Spanish at an agent who is trying to get her to leave and telling her, “Adios, adios.” She puts a hand on his chest, and he shoves her. When she tries to grab onto him, he pushes her down.
The woman told reporters she and her family arrived from Ecuador last year.
The altercation happened at a courthouse where agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies have apprehended hundreds of migrants showing up for routine court hearings this year.
The building has become the epicenter of President Trump’s immigration crackdown in New York City. It houses immigration courts and the ICE field office in New York, making it easy for agents to arrest migrants showing up for court and then process them in temporary holding cells.
The courthouse arrests, a Trump administration practice that has been challenged in court, often unfold in narrow hallways crowded with masked agents, volunteers and reporters and have sometimes turned volatile, as agents separate families or tackle immigrants.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller, a Democrat and frequent ICE critic who was arrested in June while trying to escort a migrant whom agents were trying to arrest, denounced the agent who manhandled the woman. Mr. Lander was arrested again last week, along with other Democratic elected officials, at 26 Federal Plaza after the officials demanded access to cells used by ICE to detain migrants.
“An ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids,” he wrote on social media. He added: “She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital.” On the video, the woman can be seen standing up from her fall, and agents lead her and the children away. Mr. Lander said the agents who detained the man did not show a warrant or give lawful grounds for detention.
The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, did not respond to an email seeking information about the incident.
A protest by “New Yorkers against ICE,” already scheduled before the courthouse confrontation happened, drew hundreds of demonstrators to Foley Square, across from the courthouse. Mr. Lander spoke. “We are not going to stop showing up until they stop abducting our neighbors,” he told the crowd.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, castigated the agent who pushed the woman, too. “Sickening behavior by this agent,” he wrote on social media. “The fact that Mayor Adams has rolled out the red carpet for ICE is a stain on the city.”
Mayor Eric Adams, whom Mr. Mamdani is trying to unseat, has publicly supported some aspects of the president’s immigration crackdown and drawn criticism for cozying up to Mr. Trump as he lobbied the government to drop a corruption case against him. But he also demanded last month that the federal government stop making arrests at the city’s immigration courts.
ICE has arrested so many people at the courts this year that the holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza, typically meant to hold a small number of migrants for just a few hours, grew overcrowded, leading to complaints about unsanitary conditions.
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. Following lengthy hearings, which can drag on for years because of a backlog of cases, immigration judges ultimately decide whether someone can remain in the country or be granted asylum.
The courthouse arrests have disrupted many of those proceedings, with federal agents detaining migrants in the middle of the proceedings to swiftly deport them.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration in the New York region.
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