An ICE-cold lie: Bombshell court filing says agency falsified its authority to detain immigrants at Federal Plaza

amNewYork observed dozens of masked ICE agents on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza on June 17. With black ski masks and baseball caps obscuring their faces, they took confused and terrified immigrants into custody without warning.

Photo by Dean Moses

ICE allegedly fabricated its authority for more than a year to arrest individuals attending their legally mandated hearings at immigration court in Lower Manhattan, according to a new filing by the U.S Attorney’s Office.

In the filing, Jay Clayton U.S Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the New York Civil Liberties Union, which objects to immigration enforcement detaining respondents at locations like 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway, said the agency outright lied to prosecutors, immigration courts, and others about their right to make the now infamous arrests. In fact, this jurisdiction only applied to criminal courthouses.

“The undersigned were specifically informed by ICE that the 2025 ICE Guidance applied to immigration courthouse arrests,” Clayton wrote.

“We deeply regret that this error has come to light at this late stage, after the parties have expended significant resources and time to litigate this case and this Court has carefully considered Plaintiffs’ challenge to the 2025 ICE Guidance,” Clayton wrote in the filing, according to The American Prospect.

Director of Immigrants’ Rights Litigation Amy Belsher was quick to condemn what is being described as a bombshell admission, which also brings into question the legal veracity of those still in ICE detention. 

“For over a year, ICE has claimed that a 2025 memorandum authorized and justified their devastating policy of conducting mass arrests at immigration courts,” Belsher said. “The government is now admitting that this document – which the Court relied on to deny our clients relief — does not and never has authorized these courthouse arrests. It is yet another example of ICE’s brazen disregard for the lives of immigrants in this country.”

For nearly a year, amNewYork has documented the day-to-day life inside 26 Federal Plaza and the often violent way families are torn apart by masked and armed ICE agents as they leave their court appointments. Men and women have been forcibly dragged down corridors, children have been pulled from their parents’ arms, and some people were even injured, now seemingly all under false pretenses. 

Benjamin Remy, senior coordinating attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, recently told amNewYork that, at the height of ICE’s crackdown inside the courthouse over the summer, there were upwards of 30 detentions over the course of just several days. 

“We really saw more mass detention events. Entire courtrooms that would get emptied, and it would be like a processing line of people just getting grabbed one by one, shuffled into a stairwell,” Remy recalled. “That’s also when we saw the biggest spread in terms of the variety of federal agents; we saw agents from the ATF, from the FBI, from DSS, from the IRS, all of these agencies together.”

Former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who himself was infamously arrested in 26 Federal Plaza last June while advocating for immigrants at their court proceedings, swiftly took to social media to express his shock and horror over the revelation, demanding that ICE halt any further detainments inside the courts.

“This is a genuine bombshell, even by Trumpian standards. Courthouse arrests must stop immediately,” Lander wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “There needs to be a congressional investigation of this lie, and there needs to be civil rights actions on behalf of every immigrant who was illegally abducted, just trying to show up in court and do what they were supposed to do under the rule of law. It was time to abolish ICE a year ago; it surely is today.”