In the middle of New York City stands a 41-story structure called the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building — the tallest federal skyscraper in the United States — and from the outside, there’s nothing spectacular about it. Built in the 1960s, it sits stolidly among the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan, a plain, massive block. The Department of Homeland Security has offices here, as do the New York-Federal Plaza Immigration Court, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Executive Board, the FBI. Former President Richard Nixon once had an office here — but that was a long time ago.
Gray-clad security guards with calm faces monitor the many entrances and exits. Tourists don’t give the place a second glance. If you linger, however, small scenes begin to stand out. A woman at the main entrance asks people if they’re here for an asylum hearing. If they nod, she hands over a green flyer: “Do you know your rights in immigration court?”
On the corner of Worth Street, a man paces, eyes on his phone, chewing a fingernail. What’s wrong? I ask. “My wife has been in there three hours.” His face is tight with worry. On Thursday mornings, a small group of protesters loops the block with hand-painted signs: “ICE out of New York.” “Stop Trump.”
The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building is the epicenter of the Trump administration’s migration crackdown. Mass arrests of foreign-born residents are happening all over the country, but nowhere can you observe more clearly what the new orders from the White House mean — for migrants, for police officers, for judges, for the Constitution, for society.
Inside the hallways, arrests play out under camera lights. The pattern is simple: Someone comes to court — usually for a minor administrative reason, such as to update an address — and when they try to leave, officers are waiting in the hallway. Families are torn apart while lawyers, court observers and reporters stand next to them. The officers are in plain clothes — masks, caps, sunglasses. You can’t tell who they are. They don’t show warrants. They move fast, grabbing the person they’re after and pulling them toward a stairwell or into an elevator. A last hug for a child? A quick goodbye to a spouse? No. Next stop: a detention facility on the building’s 10th floor. Next come camps in Texas, maybe Florida — and then, a flight back to their former home.
The arrests bring shouting, fainting, insults, shoving, chanting, slogans, threats, more shoving and sit-ins. There’s a lot of crying. It’s been going on like this since May, and by now it’s routine.
Onlookers guess at the backstories. What did that man do? Why her and not the person next to her? One tries to glimpse the lists that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry — names, photos, a few lines about each target. Relatives swear the person taken has done nothing wrong.
For the last 10 years I covered the European migration crisis and reported from all the hotspots in the EU. And while Americans usually talk about “im-migration,” the truth is that the forces driving so many millions to leave their homes to seek new ones in Europe or North America are often the same, part of a pattern of global migration that is similar on both continents. Some of it is caused by war and political persecution, some of it is an effort to flee poverty and the violence and lawlessness that poverty often brings.
As in America, much of western Europe used to welcome migrants, particularly those fleeing violence or persecution. That’s why both continents created systems to provide asylum to such refugees, a system that has its moral roots in World War II when so many countries failed to provide a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi death camps. After the war, the West vowed that would never happen again. To claim asylum, all a migrant was supposed to do was arrive at a border and ask for it.
That system is now under severe strain on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because of the sheer numbers of asylum seekers — since the European refugee crisis began, about eight million foreigners have arrived to the EU. Even in Germany — the main European destination for migrants since 2014 and a country with a particular sense of responsibility on the issue because of its history — the mood has shifted. People no longer stand on train station platforms chanting “Refugees welcome.” The downsides of migration are now the focus, along with a question little considered when this system was built: How do we remove from a country those who are not allowed to stay, especially criminals? Many of the headline-grabbing terror attacksin Europe in recent years were carried out by asylum seekers who had either already tangled with law enforcement for crimes or had forfeited their right to remain — or both.
Europe has struggled for years to figure out how to take these people out of circulation and deport them at scale. And then along comes President Donald Trump who launches a campaign that tries to do exactly that.
I had just moved to New York at the end of August when I heard about the ICE operations at 26 Federal Plaza. Going there was my first reporting assignment. For weeks, I spent time there to find out exactly what was happening, how America was changing the rules and what the fallout would be for the migrants and for the country they had hoped to make their home.
What I learned from reporting both in those hallways and outside them is that whatever direct connection between a migrant’s behavior and a decision to arrest them might once have existed, that connection is now broken. In effect, it seems to me, the United States government has decided mercy is no longer part of the plan, that there is no longer any distinction between “applying for asylum” and “entering illegally.” No new law was needed to make this shift, or for the government to set a goal to increase the numbers of deportations tothousands per day. Millions of people who thought they were following the law are learning the hard way that they are “illegal” and fair game for deportation.
There are more than three million pending asylum cases in the United States. On paper, ICE now has the right to detain every one of them.
12th floor, Room 1237. Judge Barbara A. Nelson’s courtroom. Absolute calm, order, discipline. Dusty pink carpet, three pews of cherrywood. This is not where a final decision on an asylum application is made. In these so-called master hearings, where several applicants sit in the room at the same time, the focus is logistics: taking down personal details, consolidating family cases, changing venue if someone has moved, scheduling the individual hearings at which the asylum application will, at last, be decided. Often, dates are handed out here for 2028 or 2029.
The U.S. immigration court system is not a part of the judiciary; it’s a part of the Department of Justice, which answers to the president. Migrants have one year after their entry to file their asylum application — otherwise they are deportable. The 30 or so judges at 26 Federal Plaza, who are federal employees, are tasked with deciding whether to grant a migrant’s application for asylum, whether they have followed the rules and demonstrated that they have fled persecution in their home countries.
At one point, I witness a woman who had entered the U.S. in April 2024. She has her asylum application, dated April 2025, in a blue plastic folder. But the judge can’t find it in the system, and she has no proof she submitted it. The consequence? Probably a removal order, plus a 10-year bar on reentry.
The door of Room 1237 is open, looking out onto an empty corridor. Those sitting and waiting inside can’t see what’s down the hall on the left toward the elevators and freedom: four ICE agents, masked of course, staring at their sheet of paper.
Nelson shows compassion to the migrants in her courtroom. She says things like: “If you are arrested, you can say that if you are deported you face danger to life.” Or, when someone shows up without a lawyer and says they can’t afford one: “I’ll give you a list of free or low-cost attorneys.”
The immigration court in New York is a problem for the Trump administration because it has the highest approval rate of asylum applicants in the country. The city is a global melting pot, cosmopolitan, Democratic since forever. There’s a whole pack of people who sit in the rooms and serve as court observers. They scribble every single observation into their notebooks, and at the end they share their findings with non-governmental organizations including pro-immigrant groups, church groups and unions. One of the observers, who I agree not to identify to protect him from backlash, is there almost daily and explains the situation this way: “America is so attractive to people from all over the world because there’s an unwritten rule: ‘You get one fair shot.’ And that’s no longer the case.”
I witness dozens of arrests; after a few weeks the episodes blur. Once I’m standing in the hallway when an older gentleman steps out of the elevator and looks around, puzzled: Where is my hearing? The ICE agents see him and let him into the room. When he comes out an hour later, he walks right past me — and is stopped. “Name?” shouts an officer at him. “Ramon.” “Last name?” “Briceno Barrios,” he whispers. They grab his arms; he offers no resistance, follows them, bent over, into the stairwell. Why the arrest only after the hearing and not before?
There’s a man named Bory originally from Ecuador who shows up at 26 Federal Plaza with his wife and their one-year-old daughter. When the family leaves the room, the officers stop the father and take him away. “Why?” Lesley Moran, his wife, asks a masked officer. A little later she sits on a stone bench in front of the building and cries. She points to the paper the judge gave her: information about his next asylum hearing. In 2029.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” she says. “I don’t understand.” A priest known as Padre Fabian Arias, appears and hugs her. “Stay calm,” he says to her in Spanish, and invites her to his service on the Upper West Side on Sunday. After the service, a lawyer would be available to help families with a detained loved one, he tells her, at the church’s expense. Arias tells me later on the phone: “This government is creating a state of terror that isn’t limited to migrants. It’s terrible.” He asks: “What country am I living in? Where is the law?”
There are so many more cases. There’s the father holding his three-year-old in his arms; she kisses him, he kisses her; in front of them an ICE agent says emphatically: “Give your wife the child.” He hesitates, but there is no escape.
There’s the woman who is intercepted in the hallway and says: “I can’t go back to my country. They will kill me. Please help me!”
Just 50 days after Trump took office, ICE had arrested around 33,000 migrants in raids and in public locations, as many as the Biden administration arrested in the entire year 2024. In March, the new U.S. president used a speech to Congress to announce the “largest deportation operation in American history.” The plan was to “return millions and millions of criminal aliens to where they came from.” ICE resources and personnel would be massively increased.
ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is reluctant to engage with reporters on the details. After weeks of asking, DHS sends me a statement from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: “Secretary [Kristi] Noem is reversing Biden’s catch and release policy that allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens to be let loose on American streets.”
I asked, why are the courthouses the location of so many arrests? “The ability of law enforcement to make arrests of criminal illegal aliens in courthouses is common sense,” McLaughlin’s statement says. It conserves valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be. Moreover, it is “safer for our officers and the community” because “these illegal aliens have gone through security and been screened to not have any weapons.”
Since the ramp-up in May, DHS has stopped providing a breakdown of how many people are arrested in specific locations. Instead, every day on its social-media channels, DHS announces what it considers successes: a serious criminal arrested, robber, rapist, finally taken off the streets. The department suggests that all the people arrested are serious criminals, felons.
But does that apply to the people being arrested here at 26 Federal Plaza? In two cases I witness, wives insist their arrested husbands had never done anything wrong. One of them even tells that to their church-funded attorney. But by talking to friends and acquaintances of the family and a priest who is helping affected families, I find out that in one case the arrested man had been riding a motorcycle drunk and was stopped by police, an offense that is usually a misdemeanor in New York; his court case is pending. In another case, I learn the arrested man is said to have hit his wife, in public.
What do the ICE officers themselves say about how they choose their targets? An agent I see often in the hallways speaks Spanish, has Latin American roots. One morning in September he speaks to me at length; I agree not to publish his name because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
“We don’t only have the names of the people we arrest; we also know the reason,” he tells me. These are by no means arbitrary arrests, he insists. They are always people who have something on their record. Does illegal entry suffice as a reason for arrest? No, he says. But if the migrant failed to appear for hearings, that counts as an offense, so do other crimes. Many of those arrested are already wearing ankle monitors, he tells me. Under Biden, illegal migration completely got out of hand. That has to be corrected now: “That’s what this is about.” The masking? Necessary, he says: “Too often ICE agents are doxxed and attacked.”
According to DHS, attacks on officers have skyrocketed tenfold since the arrest campaign began. Critics say those percentages are misleading because the underlying numbers are extremely small: When DHS shared figures in June, they claimed a “690 percent” increase; reporting by Fox News later said that increase was from 10 incidents in the first half of 2024 compared to 79 incidents in the first half of 2025.
On Monday, DHS claimed to have completed 527,000 deportations since Trump took office.
Observers say targeting migrants inside courthouses is a change in policy, one that is being applied disproportionately in New York. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which advocates for “justice and fairness for immigrants under the law,” has looked intensively into ICE policies. I talk to him via Zoom, and ask him how ICE used to decide which migrants to arrest.
“ICE officers would go to local jails, police stations and pick people up who were already in custody,” he tells me. Those arrested and deported were already in the criminal justice system, so they were fairly described as criminals. “That was the majority of ICE arrests for the last 25 years since DHS was created in 2003,” including during the first Trump administration, he tells me.
It was in May, according to Reichlin-Melnick, that the administration’s whole approach changed. At the time, Trump adviser Stephen Miller summoned the ICE leadership to Washington. According to news reports, he criticized their low arrest numbers and demanded that, instead of focusing on prioritized “criminal cases,” officers conduct broad arrests — including at gathering spots like Home Depot and 7-Eleven parking lots. Miller’s goal, the reports said, was 3,000 arrests per day.
“And immediately following that, we saw a number of changes in ICE practices,” Reichlin-Melnick told me. “They basically said, we no longer care whether you have a criminal record. They just started seeing raids, worksite raids. They did start going to Home Depot.”
“The second thing we saw was a shift to courthouses, rather than going to jail.”
That’s one way to drive up the numbers, but there is a second objective, he said: The arrest automatically puts detainees under the jurisdiction of ICE and DHS and takes them out of the more lenient immigration court system under DOJ. This means that asylum seekers who have just been given a date for a final asylum hearing in two or three years are physically taken out of friendly New York and transferred to the jurisdiction of judges in DHS detention centers. The approval rate: much lower. The process: much faster.
It’s always been difficult for asylum seekers to prove they face a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home countries, but Reichlin-Melnick says trying to do that from DHS detention is even harder: “You’re going to be away from your family and resources. You’re going to be away from your lawyer. You’re going to be in a potentially very overcrowded detention center where, you know, verbal abuse might be common. Medical conditions might be dire.”
Many people, everyone tells me, give up. “You’re going to get pressured every single day. ‘This can be over, we let you go, you may even get $1,000’ — or [you can spend] nine months in this detention center,” says Reichlin-Melnick.
Bory, the father and husband detained on September 16, is already back in Ecuador according to his wife. A judge in a detention center denied him asylum, and he was deported straightaway.
In the conversation with Reichlin-Melnick I hear for the first time that ICE agents don’t need any reason at all to arrest people. He tells me that because immigration courts are a removal system — every case is a “removal proceeding” — ICE can detain any non-citizen deemed removable and without a final status, no criminal charge required. A recent Trump-era reinterpretation makes detention even mandatory for all asylum seekers, and U.S. law also lets ICE re-detain people even years after release.
DHS still insists that the vast majority of deportees are “criminal illegal aliens” who have been “charged with or convicted of a crime in the U.S.”
Benjamin Remy and Allison Cutler are attorneys at the New York Legal Assistance Group, which provides legal advice to asylum seekers facing deportation. They are at 26 Federal Plaza almost daily, calling out to migrants what rights they have: They don’t have to answer questions or consent to be searched, for example. Cutler says that all the court observers and journalists who try to find out the reasons for arrests are making unnecessary work for themselves: “I think it’s a natural instinct to try to find rhyme or reason and to try to find a rational explanation for things. But it’s pointless.”
Remy says: “The way that they define criminal is not how you and I are defining criminal. They define criminal as anyone who is here ‘unlawfully’. So if you entered through the border to seek asylum, you’re a criminal.”
I spend weeks asking to see ICE’s side of the operation. Could I accompany ICE agents? Interview them? Have a conversation where I don’t publish names? No. No. No.
Finally, I get a written response to my questions, also attributable to McLaughlin: “Those who are in our country illegally have a choice — they can leave the country voluntarily or be arrested and deported. The United States taxpayer is generously offering free flights and a $1,000 to illegal aliens who self-deport using the CBP Home app. If they leave now, they preserve the potential opportunity to come back the legal, right way.” And: “The choice is theirs.”
I had sent DHS a list of five detainees arrested at 26 Federal Plaza and asked for the reasons for their arrests. Of the five, the DHS response indicated that only one had been arrested for violent crimes and a second had been arrested for forgery and traffic violations; it was not clear from the DHS statement if either had been convicted of those crimes. The remaining three were simply accused of entering the country “illegally.”
Here’s what DHS told me:
“Stanley Desir is an illegal alien from Haiti who illegally entered the U.S. in July 2024 and was released into the country by the Biden Administration. ICE arrested Desir on September 4, 2025, and he was given a final order of removal on September 29.”
“Nicoll Mariana Del Rosa Guevara Romero is a criminal illegal alien from Peru who illegally entered the U.S. in May 2023 and was released into the country by the Biden administration. In November 2024, she was arrested for felony possession of forged documents and multiple traffic violations. ICE arrested Guevara Romero on September 29, and she will remain in custody pending further immigration proceedings.”
“Ramon Antonio Briceno Barrios is an illegal alien from Venezuela who illegally entered the U.S. in April 2024 and was released into the country under the Biden administration. ICE arrested Briceno Barrios on September 8, 2025, and he will remain in custody pending further immigration proceedings.”
“Luigi Adolfo Loaiza Cabrera is an illegal alien from Ecuador who illegally entered the U.S. in December 2023 and was released into the country under the Biden administration. ICE arrested Loaiza Cabrera on September 24, 2025, and he will remain in ICE custody pending further immigration proceedings.”
“Ruben Abelardo Ortiz-Lopez is a criminal illegal alien from Ecuador who illegally entered the U.S. in March 2024 and was released into the country under the Biden administration. He has previous arrests for assault and strangulation. ICE arrested Ortiz-Lopez on September 25, 2025, and he will remain in custody pending further immigration proceedings.”
Two weeks later, DHS sends me a follow-up message saying they had “removed” Briceno Barrios and Desir to their home countries.
[POLITICO was unable to find any record of the alleged prior arrests of Guevara Romero and Ortiz-Lopez in the New York court system.]
On Sept. 17, I receive a tip: Brad Lander would show up the next day at 3 p.m. Lander is a Democrat and the comptroller of New York City. He had already made an appearance at the courthouse in June when he tried to help a migrant ICE wanted to detain. The result: Lander was arrested. The incident made headlines.
Now, a source tells me, he and other New York officials are planning another visit to demand access to the detention facility on the 10th floor — the conditions of which a federal court had just ruled were a disaster. Lack of sanitation, detainees sleeping on the floor. Lander wants to see the situation for himself. Members of Congress have a right to visit federal detention camps, but New York city officials do not.
The next day I am standing on the opposite side of Broadway when I see a group of about 20 people pushing along the sidewalk toward the main entrance.
The group of local and state officials take the elevator to the 10th floor, try to wrench open the door to the detention area; a guard braces himself against it. The lawmakers pound their fists on the door, shout, ignore police orders to remain calm.
“We just want to make sure everything in there is OK,” one of the politicians says. “Open the door already!” shouts another. “We’re with you!” a legislator yells in Spanish through the closed door to the detainees.
The officials sit down on the floor with a sign in the middle: “New Yorkers against ICE.” A round of introductions. Tears, singing (“Somebody is hurting my brother”), chants (“Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here”). To me it all seems rehearsed, and I am not the only reporter who got the “secret” tip. The place teems with journalists. Police arrest the politicians — and promptly release them. I spot Marcela Mitaynes, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn in the New York Assembly, half an hour later in front of the building.
Moments earlier she had given a fiery speech, nearly in tears, vowing to fight for the rights of vulnerable migrants. I want to talk to her. But she no longer feels like speaking to reporters; she points to her two staffers, who she indicates would be happy to answer my questions and looks back down at her phone. She has already produced the images she wanted. At least Lander talks to me: “The courthouse is a place where the rule of law reigns. Of all places, this is where it’s happening. That must not be.”
Shortly afterward, the hallways of 26 Federal Plaza grow more tense. On Sept. 25, the husband of Monica Elizabeth Moreta Galarza, a woman from Ecuador, is arrested — yet another father separated from his family, as his two small children watch. Moreta Galarza begs the only unmasked ICE officer to free her husband, presses him, pleads with him. Then the man shoves her away; she falls to the floor. The images, of course, go around the world.
The DHS announces the next day that the officer has been relieved of duty. A small victory for critics. Three days later the man is back on duty.
On Sept. 30 there is a commotion on the 12th floor in front of the elevators: Police officers want to take an arrestee into the elevator; journalists are not to ride along. There is shoving; a photographer ends up on the floor. He lies there for 30 minutes; then paramedics who have rushed in put a cervical collar on him before transport.
DHS spokesperson McLaughlin issues a statement in which she claims that “officers were swarmed by agitators and members of the press, which obstructed operations” to arrest a person she described as “an illegal alien from Peru.” She noted that Federal Plaza “has been the target of multiple threats, including assaults on law enforcement.” McLaughlin went on to urge “the media and politicians to stop fanning the flames of division and stop demonization of law enforcement.”
Again and again, ICE officers target the wrong people. One morning in mid-September, they briefly grab a brown-skinned man by the arm. He tells them he is a U.S. citizen — and the grip on his arm makes him completely lose his temper. “Fuck you! Don’t touch me,” he yells at the ICE agents, “I am a fucking officer, too. Get a real job!”
I’m back on the 12th floor, Room 1237, Judge Nelson’s room. After weeks of confrontations and arrests, it is clear that the courthouse, once a migrant’s portal to a new life in America, has become a trap. Each migrant faces a dilemma: Is it better not to show up to avoid the chaos and the danger? Or is it better to try to still follow the rules — and risk getting arrested?
In early October, one man decides to appear by video at Nelson’s hearing. Why are you not here? the judge asks. “Because I’m afraid of being arrested.” “Look around the room! There are a lot of brave people here who all came,” she says. She provides a new in-person date, six days later. “If you don’t show up, I will issue a deportation order.”
On Oct. 10, Nelson’s room is packed again. In the hallway: ICE agents. Reporters with cameras drawn. Inside: people like a young man from Ecuador who wears Nike Air sneakers, fashionable short hair and jeans. He is an hour and a half late; even the court observers look shocked he would be so late to such an important appointment. He also had five days to report his new address and didn’t do it. Nelson isn’t amused.
“Why didn’t you do it in time?” “I couldn’t.” “Why?” “I didn’t know the address.” “You didn’t know your own address?! Why are you late?” “I didn’t know the floor.” “You’ve been here before.” “A lot has changed.” “It’s on your paper.” Silence. “You’re putting yourself in danger. And this is already the second time.”
The new address is now in the system, in New Jersey. The court in Newark will get in touch with a new, final date: “Maybe you’ll show up on time then.” The man’s expression doesn’t change; he is released.
When he stands up, I see the words on his blue sweatshirt: “New York — City of Dreams.”
The court observers jump up, run out of the room; they want to see what happens to him. It’s obvious: on their risk scale, this young man is way up there. He bites down on his lower lip. The lottery begins.
Thirty feet straight ahead, he walks, turns left, then right — that’s where the ICE officers are standing. But now no one is there. The man steps into the elevator, rides to the ground floor, and leaves the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. He is still a free man. For now.
Erica Orden contributed to this report. Photo edit by Katie Ellsworth.
