Family members cope with the hardship of having a loved one detained while facing the challenge of finding an attorney to represent the detained person as the clock ticks down on their deportation.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander outside the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza Tuesday, where they condemned ICE’s tactic of detaining people at mandated court appointments. (Ayman Siam/Office of the NYC Comptroller)

The woman’s husband was scheduled to appear for a routine, mandatory check-in at the 26 Federal Plaza courthouse at the end of May. 

She and her daughter, who asked not to be identified because they feared jeopardizing their ongoing immigration cases, did not accompany him. The woman said her husband, who is from Ecuador, had his first court hearing for an asylum application. The family has been living in the city’s shelter system. 

According to his wife, just after the judge dismissed his case, the man was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

His arrest is one of dozens in recent weeks at Manhattan’s three immigration courts, part of ICE’s tactic to carry out mass deportations under the Trump administration by targeting people showing up for their scheduled immigration hearings.

Now, as the woman copes with the hardship of having a loved one detained, she also faces the challenge of finding an attorney to represent her husband while the deportation clock ticks down.

“I feel helpless,” said the detainee’s spouse in Spanish. “He had his Social [Security Number], work permit, with all his papers in order. A man who likes to work, and ICE took him away.”

After inauguration, the Trump administration broadened the scope of an immigration policy known as “expedited removal,” enacting a nationwide expansion (something he’d also attempted during his first term).

Before, this policy only applied to people detained within 100 miles of an international border and to those who had been in the U.S. for less than two weeks. With the expansion, those who can’t prove they have been in the country for more than two years are subject to expedited deportation.

Soon after, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Make the Road New York (MRNY) sued the administration over the expansion. While the case remains ongoing in court, ICE is moving forward with arrests. NBC News reported that the the Justice Department instructed immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases, not allowing migrants the typical 10-day response time.

On Tuesday, City Comptroller Brad Lander—who is running in the current Democratic primary for mayor—was handcuffed and temporarily detained by masked ICE agents as he was escorting a man out of an immigration court hearing at 26 Federal Plaza, after the man’s case was dismissed.

That man, named Edgardo, is now in ICE detention, Lander told reporters after his own release.  

“As far as I know, he has no lawyer,” the comptroller said, according to video shared online by the news site Hell Gate. “He has been stripped of American due process rights by a government and a judge that owe him a credible fear hearing before they deport him.”

When immigration judges dismiss deportation cases, those people are left without much protection, allowing ICE agents to initiate an expedited removal.

“This isn’t the same as someone who’s on the street and ICE knows nothing about them,” Paige Austin, supervising litigation attorney at Make the Road, explained. “ICE knows all about them. They come to their court date and there’s an advance notice of who has court so ICE has their photo, they have their records, they have their documents from the border.”

However, the policy is difficult to understand for the affected families, who say that they’ve followed the rules since arriving in the country. 

“In terms of patterns, many of the individuals that we have seen who have been arrested by [Department of Homeland Security] are contributing members of their community, have been showing up to court hearings and complying with their legal obligations, and often have no criminal record at all,” said Melissa Chua, co-director of the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Immigrant Protection Unit.

ICE agents inside the courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza Tuesday. (Twitter/NYC Public Advocate’s Office)

Even before Trump took office this year and ramped up enforcement, many immigrants struggled to find or afford legal help (and unlike criminal court cases, representation isn’t guaranteed in immigration court).

Further complicating that access is the fact that after arrest, detainees are often moved to distant states like Texas or Louisiana. This is where the woman whose husband was arrested at the end of May was being held, after a short stay in Texas, when City Limits last heard from her on June 6.

The move makes it more difficult for organizations in New York to take his case, explained the wife, who said she has been going out everyday knocking on the doors of every organization and legal service suggested to her.

“I’ve even talked to private attorneys who tell me they can help me get him out on bail for $3,000,” the man’s wife said, saying she was considering this option, but didn’t have the means to pay for it. When City Limits last spoke to her early in June, she was still looking for representation for her husband, who, she says, has until June 30 to appeal his deportation.

When asked, City Hall did not respond to questions about what guidance or assistance the city is providing to family members of people detained after immigration hearings. A spokesperson for the mayor referred to an amicus brief filed by the city in the case Dylan Lopez Contreras, a high school student arrested in a Manhattan courthouse after attending an immigration hearing.

“The tactics employed in Dylan’s case—using his appearance at court for a routine immigration hearing as an opportunity to detain him—threatens to deter people from accessing the court system on which local governance depends,” the city’s head lawyer, Muriel Goode-Trufant, wrote in the filing.

In recent months, the city has been winding down many of the services it had previously offered to migrants in its care, citing declining numbers of new arrivals (though around 38,000 remained in the shelter system as of last month).  

In May, the mayor’s office announced the closure of the Asylum Application Help Center, a destination for migrants to file immigration paperwork and get assistance with their cases. It’s slated to shutter at the end of the month. 

The administration also restructured a de Blasio-era program, formerly known as ActionNYC, that funds immigration legal help, phasing out an aspect of the initiative which provided services in city institutions like hospitals, schools and libraries. 

“The demand for these resources exceeds the resources available—and that was true before the city announced it was closing these help centers,” said Rosa Santana, co-executive director of the Envision Freedom Fund, an organization that has helped pay bonds of people to get out of detention centers when that option is available.

However, “for most detained immigrants and their families, bond amounts are impossible to afford,” Santana explained, adding that last year the median bond in New York State was $10,000, double the national median.

American Red Cross Headquarters at 520 West 49th St. in Manhattan, where the city has been running its Asylum Application Help Center. It’s slated to close by the end of this month. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

The City Council is currently pushing for $109 million in the upcoming fiscal year 2026 budget for immigration legal services programs—up from last year’s allocation of $25 million, advocates say. That would include $40 million for the Immigrant Opportunity Initiative, which helps low-income immigrant New Yorkers apply for things like citizenship and permanent residency, as well as $10 million for the Rapid Response program, which aids people facing detention or deportation. 

At the state level, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said the most recent budget deal, passed in May, included $50 million for immigration legal services. On Wednesday, at least one advocacy group, Vera Institute of Justice, called for the legislature—which just wrapped up its work for 2025 this week—to reconvene for a special session to increase those funds.

“This immigration dragnet is an affront to due process that has ensnared thousands of people who are working, supporting their families, and long-time members of their communities,” Shayna Kessler, director of the organization’s Advancing Universal Representation initiative, said in a statement. “We are alarmed by this escalation.”

Immigration advocates in New York say that they started receiving calls about courthouse arrests and detentions after a heated meeting on May 21 where Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), urged ICE agents to arrest 3,000 people per day.

Days later, internal documents obtained by the Washington Post showed the federal government was instructing ICE to arrest people at courthouses.

For those with upcoming immigration court hearings, the attorneys consulted for this story said they could not give specific recommendations, as it depends on the specifics of an individual’s case.

People represented by an attorney can request an appearance virtually, suggested Chu, adding that parents worried about arrests can name a standby guardian to take care of their children should they be detained.

Austin added that people in detention can request a “credible fear” interview, a screening process to determine whether someone has a valid fear of persecution or torture if returned to their home country.
Earlier this month, she said MRNY was working on 50 cases involving people who were arrested following an immigration hearing in Manhattan; 35 were still detained at the time, while some had already been deported.

“You can only imagine that that’s probably a small fraction,” Austin said. “We’re getting, at this point, inundated with phone calls from people with future hearing dates, who are very scared.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Daniel@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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The post As ICE Pursues Courthouse Arrests, Immigrant Families Struggle to Find Legal Help appeared first on City Limits.

By JACK BROOK

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested upward of 80 people unlawfully in the country during a raid at a southwest Louisiana racetrack, the agency announced Tuesday.

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ICE said it raided the Delta Downs Racetrack, Hotel and Casino in Calcasieu Parish on Monday alongside other state and federal agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Border Patrol. The raid angered one racehorse industry group and comes at a time when the Trump administration is pursuing more arrests.

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and the main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has pushed ICE to aim for at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.

ICE said authorities had “received intelligence” that businesses operating at the racetrack’s stables employed “unauthorized workers” who were then targeted in the raid.

Of the dozens of workers detained during the raid, “at least two” had prior criminal records, according to the agency.

“These enforcement operations aim to disrupt illegal employment networks that threaten the integrity of our labor systems, put American jobs at risk and create pathways for exploitation within critical sectors of our economy,” said Steven Stavinoha, U.S. Customs and Border Protection director of field operations in New Orleans, in a written statement.

But some racing industry leaders were livid.

“To come in and take that many workers away and leave the horse racing operation stranded and without workers is unacceptable,” said Peter Ecabert, general counsel for the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, which represents 29,000 thoroughbred racehorse owners and trainers, including at Delta Downs.

“If they (ICE) were willing to come in and try and work with us, we are willing to make sure things are done in an orderly way,” Ecabert added. “But what they have done here leaves everyone in a bad situation.”

Groomers and other stable workers are essential and allow horses to receive round-the-clock skilled care, Ecabert said, noting that the work is grueling and it can be very difficult to find people willing to do the job.

David Strow, a spokesperson for the racetrack’s owner, Boyd Gaming Corporation, said that the company “complies fully” with federal labor laws and that “no Delta Downs team members were involved.”

“We will cooperate with law enforcement as requested,” he added in an emailed statement.

In the past few weeks, ICE has engaged in other large-scale raids across Louisiana. On May 27, the agency raided a federally funded flood-reduction project in New Orleans and reported arresting 15 Central American workers. And the agency said it arrested 10 Chinese nationals working at massage parlors in Baton Rouge during a June 11 raid.

Rachel Taber, an organizer with the Louisiana-based immigrant rights group Unión Migrante, criticized the raids as harmful and hypocritical.

“Our economy runs on immigrants,” Taber said. “And when we let ourselves be divided by racial hatred, our economy for everyone suffers.”

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Barrels of ink were spilled for interviews with white working-class voters after President Donald Trump first captured the White House in 2016 as the press rushed to report why this coveted constituency had embraced the Republican Party. But the shift among working-class Hispanics has been even more dramatic — and has received only a fraction of the attention.

In 2024, Trump won 55% of Hispanic voters earning $50,000 annually or less, an income cohort commonly defined as working class, defeating then-Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points , according to CNN exit polling. For the president, that’s 22 points better than the 33% he received from blue-collar Hispanics in 2020, while topping the 50% he garnered from working class voters across all demographics last November.

Democrats have been losing support among this cohort for years: Among Latino voters without a college degree, support for Democrats plunged from 69% in 2012 to just 53% in 2024, according to Catalist, a progressive organization that analyzes precinct-level voting results. Among Latino men, support for Democrats fell from 63% to 47% over the same period.

Democrats have largely themselves — and their faulty strategic choices — to blame, political analysts and operatives have told me.

“There are a lot of reasons why these voters have swung right over the last few cycles, but I think that a major one is that Democrats assumed that these voters were going to stick with their party on identity issues, while Republicans wooed them with cultural and economic issues,” said nonpartisan elections guru Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

Trump won 46% of the overall Hispanic vote nationwide, holding Harris to just 51%. That solid performance was up from an abysmal 32% in 2020 and an even worse 28% four years prior.

Here’s another way to view the dramatic move rightward by Hispanic voters in 2024: Seven of the 10 most Hispanic counties in the United States voted for Trump over Harris after backing former President Joe Biden in 2020. In these counties, all in Texas and mostly working class, Hispanics are an overwhelming majority, constituting 88% to 98% of the electorate.

Figuring out why blue-collar Hispanics abandoned the Democratic Party after decades of reliable support is the charge of the Working Class Project, an initiative established by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC. What the effort has learned about working class Hispanics, via extensive polling and focus groups, is eye-opening. This cohort has the same reasons for supporting Trump as blue-collar whites.

“They think Democrats are prioritizing what they see as niche and liberal social and cultural issues over real ideas to make life more affordable,” wrote Working Class Project spokesman Ian Sams in a Substack memorandum detailing the findings from focus groups with working-class Hispanics in McAllen, Texas, a border community in the once deep-blue Rio Grande Valley.

According to Sams, the sessions also found that blue collar Hispanics believe “Democrats were too soft on border security and immigration and cared more about letting people into the country illegally than helping people already here legally.”

In reading voters’ comments from the McAllen, Texas, focus groups, it’s clear Sams isn’t overstating Democrats’ problems with this growing voting bloc.

“With the past four years of Biden, they were pretty lenient and they were giving thousands of dollars to people, immigrants that couldn’t work,” an unnamed Hispanic woman said during a discussion about illegal immigration. “Since they’re getting amnesty because they come from a country that has a lot of violence, they’re letting them stay here but they’re supporting them with money from hardworking people.”

“I’ll still take a bad economy over the social war stuff about, like, trans, trying to shove stuff down our throats to make it okay,” added an unnamed Hispanic man, during a discussion about culture. “It’s like: ‘Hey, yeah sure bro, you can do whatever you want, you don’t have to be showing me 24/7.’”

Democrats can perhaps be forgiven for landing in this predicament. Historically, Hispanics tended to support Democrats because they backed comprehensive legislation linking border security and interior enforcement measures with a pathway to regularization, possibly citizenship, for the millions of illegal immigrants living in the US. Latinos typically opposed Republicans in part because the GOP demanded securing the border first, after which certain illegal immigrants might be regularized.

But the Hispanic electorate has evolved, Republican strategist and prominent Trump critic Mike Madrid explained to me last week. Madrid, who specializes in Hispanic messaging and turnout, said this voting bloc is more assimilated than earlier this century, is filled with more native-born Americans, and has therefore taken on the political character of any other ethnic or racial group that has spent decades (or longer) in the U.S.

It’s therefore quite natural, Madrid said, that working-class Hispanics have started behaving politically like blue-collar whites, which in 2024 meant voting Trump over Harris because of concerns about inflation, border security and various cultural issues.

“This has been happening, demographically, for the better part of a decade. It’s just people realizing it because, it was basically — you couldn’t ignore it anymore. Democrats have been ignoring it for a very long time,” said Madrid, author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. “Ten years ago, this was a more racially, ethnically focused group. Immigration was much more of a touchstone issue because more of us were immigrants.”

“There was this assumption during the Obama years that all nonwhite people vote a certain way. That’s not how this works. This is all very dynamic,” Madrid added, emphasizing that American-born Hispanics are not focused on immigration. They view themselves, he said, “as Americans first — because they are.”

It’s a good reminder that politics is never static. But that cuts both ways. The focus groups were conducted in May, weeks before the recent federal raids to round up illegal immigrants and the resulting unrest in Los Angeles County. Harsh immigration policy has hurt Republicans with Hispanics before, including during Trump’s first term.

In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney positioned himself as a border hawk to burnish his conservative credentials. The effort was costly. Romney received 27% of the Hispanic vote to Obama’s 71% in what was described as a consolidation, by Democrats, of this crucial minority.

Romney was criticized for being too hardline by no less than a certain New York businessman named Donald Trump, who told Newsmax in a November 2012 interview: “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited,” he said. “What they were is, they were kind.”

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

Officials in Oakdale are accepting applications for the vacant seat on the Oakdale City Council following the resignation of council member Susan Willenbring.

Willenbring, who had served on the council since January 2019, resigned June 6. No reason was cited in her resignation letter.

Oakdale City Council member Susan Willenbring (Courtesy of the City of Oakdale)

“I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunities and experiences I have had while serving on the council,” Willenbring wrote. “It has been a privilege to work alongside dedicated individuals committed to improving the quality of life in Oakdale.

The Oakdale City Council has declared a vacancy and will fill the vacancy by appointment until a special election is held; the appointee will serve the remainder of the current term. Willenbring’s term was slated to run until the end of 2027.

The deadline for residents to submit an application (including required supplemental questions for consideration) is 4 p.m. July 2.

For more information, go to www.oakdalemn.gov.